All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm happy to welcome Anthony Gregory back to the show.
The plumb line, the litmus test for libertarianism, keeping them honest there, uh, he's at the independent Institute, the future freedom foundation, lourockwell.com.
And, uh, speaking of that lourockwell.com today is featuring at the very top of the page.
His piece in a relationship and it's complicated, which is the new introduction to the excellent, extremely important wall street banks and American foreign policy by Murray Rothbard.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you, Scott?
It's been, it's been a long time, hasn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's great to have you back on the show here.
Hey, listen, what's so important about wall street banks and American foreign policy?
Well, this is one of Rothbard's, uh, great works and it's a, it's a short book.
Um, I think that everyone should read it.
And they can all read the whole thing online for free in this space of, you know, 45 minutes during their lunch break at lourockwell.com, right?
That's true.
They can find it online and now there's a new, uh, printing available for Mises.
And I was, uh, honored enough to write the introduction, which is what you, um, read, read today.
The, the, um, the gist is, you know, you, you face this all the time, Scott, where we libertarians are often accused of being blind to the big businesses, the predatory nature, or the way that the corporations do not have a level flight playing field with the rest of us.
But in fact, they manipulate things.
They have, they own the politicians and they run the show and we're, we're often considered dupes for, um, you know, the, the, the big firms, wall street and so forth.
I'm sure you've heard this, right?
Well, sure.
We just want to deregulate so that the rich white men can be free to do whatever they want with the rest of us.
Right, right.
Now the, now the deal is the best, the best leftist critiques of, uh, the history of us government and the wall street go into the connection.
They show that we don't have a real free market.
We haven't ever had a real free market for a very long time.
It's been very far from a free market.
And in fact, big businesses often, uh, more often than not, if, if not almost always in bed with the state.
But what Rothbard does is he goes much further.
He really goes into the detail.
He, it's not just this oversimplified idea of, Oh, big businesses use government either to steal resources or to, uh, get out of the way so they can have the supposed laissez-faire free reign to abuse the people.
Uh, Rothbard shows the intimate connection between the big banks in particular and the war machine going back to the late 19th century.
And he shows how all of these, and the irony here, well, we don't consider it ironic for us as part of the course, but what a lot of people don't realize is the more so-called progressive that a president is, the more he is celebrated for standing up to big business.
In fact, it's often because he's expanding the government the most.
And in fact, it's usually business behind all of it.
And we look at the history of us policy, especially war policy and the worst president, the most corrupt corporatist, uh, shills for big business and biggest supporters for the profits of wall street were always the most progressive interventionist, uh, president.
And, uh, this comes across very clear, but Rothbard is very, he's, he has a very keen theory about the interaction between big business and war and the state, but he also goes into the detail.
He, he really, uh, as I point out in my introduction, a lot of people are going to be uncomfortable with his book because you've got some people who are conspiracy types who think everything is one very simple conspiracy.
And there are a couple of, of tight-knit elitist groups and they run everything.
And of course, Rothbard shows that it's not nearly that simple, but on the other hand, you have mainstream opinion, which tends to think that if you talk about the fed having nefarious connections with a war machine at all, you must be some kind of kook, right?
You must, you must think that aliens are, are controlling us or that we never landed on the moon.
Um, but Rothbard, uh, of course makes the mainstreamers, if anything, more comfortable than anyone else.
So it's an astounding piece of work and I was the quite honored to write the new intro.
Well, I have to tell you, you know, um, I, uh, for a long time enjoyed reading, uh, a lot of, uh, John Birch society stuff.
I didn't have the internet, you know, back in the 1990s and they always had really great footnotes if I didn't agree with their opinion, which is of course a very conservative one.
Um, but, uh, they always were bringing up a very interesting books about the history of the 20th century and who zoomed who, when they lied about this war and that one, especially.
And of course, it's always very interesting to hear, uh, anti-imperial anti-war critiques from a conservative point of view, because we're not usually used to that.
And, uh, so that was kind of, uh, I, I learned a lot of revisionist history that way when I was young and it wasn't until like, I guess, 2003 or something, I read wall street banks and American foreign policy by Murray Rothbard, who I'd been reading.
But, uh, when I read this, I thought, wow, great.
This is really in a sense, the conspiracy theory history of the 20th century, the, the revisionist history of the 20th century.
Only it's not written by a John Bircher.
It's written by Murray Rothbard, who's the best of the best of them.
And who's good on, as you say, has a superior theory of human action, of economics, of a real class war, as opposed to the Marxist version of it.
And, uh, there's no all powerful Illuminati cult in charge.
It's the Morgans and the Rockefellers and their, you know, institutional, uh, uh, situations basically is all it is.
It's just a real history.
And, you know, you mentioned, um, especially about, um, you know, of course it's in the title there, it's all especially about banking and how, you know, not free market is.
And of course, if you go back and look at the very beginning of American, you know, this government's history, you know, for the last 200 something years, since the days of the revolution, really, we've been fighting over the money.
And, um, since the very beginning of the American government, we had Alexander Hamilton create the central bank and all of that.
So this has never been a free market enterprise in America.
It's always been a fight.
Even when it was the Jacksonians, it was the pet state banks and whatever.
There's always massive intervention in the banking industry by the government always has been.
And so of course, they're always first and foremost, the controllers and power brokers behind the state.
That's right.
And, you know, all of these people who, you know, I have some respect for folks like Chomsky, for example, but people who read that kind of stuff, or they, they think that they understand how we've all been sold a bill of goods, uh, by corporate American, especially the big banks.
Um, as well as those who think they understand that government is corrupt.
Rothbard cuts through everything.
And this is really one of his great works when it comes to just shattering what, what people have constructed as this artificial spectrum between left and right, destroying everyone's sense of who's good and who's bad.
I mean, I I'm sure you've heard this Scott a hundred times.
People who basically think that the conflict of the 20th century was between people like FDR and Teddy Roosevelt and people like Morgan and Rockefeller.
I mean, this of course is what we're taught in school, isn't it?
Yeah, of course.
The Roosevelt's were traitors to their class.
Thank goodness.
And came down from the heavens to take the side of the little guy with political power and, and the people were able to use the democracy to finally check the power of the financial oligarchs.
Everybody knows that.
That's right.
And you know what I think is one of the best examples of where the myth couldn't be further from the truth.
Rothbard goes into it in his, in his book.
And it's very important in the election of 1912, we had Woodrow Wilson versus the incumbent Robert Taft, or I'm sorry, not Robert Taft, William Howard Taft, who many people think, uh, the progressive view is Taft had abandoned the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt and become a conservative big business type.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We got to hold it there, man.
We're up against this break.
Sorry, we'll get back.
Cause this is a good one too.
1912 it's Anthony Gregory, wall street banks and American foreign policy.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And, uh, right now I'm talking with Anthony Gregory.
He's got a new piece.
It's a running at the very top of lourockwell.com today called in a relationship and it's complicated and it's, uh, the new introduction to the excellent monograph wall street banks and American foreign policy by Murray Rothbard written in, uh, what?
1985, somewhere around there.
Uh, yeah, something around there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, uh, you end by saying we, we need a, a good Rothbardian update, uh, you know, to catch us up, but, uh, this really is, um, it's priceless to, uh, steal the name of one of your footnotes in this thing.
Yeah, that's right.
Um, I tried to kind of give an idea, point to in, in my introduction, I tried to point to what it might look like, uh, to, to continue the analysis.
But I certainly only scratched the surface.
It would, if, if only Rothbard were still with us, he could, they could do it.
I don't know who else I'm sure someone could do something approaching, uh, the type of job, but, uh, the stellar flow of that, of that work, wall street banks, American foreign policy is something to behold.
Hmm.
Yeah, it really is good.
One of the things, uh, it's, it's also written by Rothbard and in his writing.
So it has its own, uh, awesome quality to it.
I think you quote in here, uh, one of the ways he phrases, uh, how America got into world war two was that this was a ceasefire, some kind of compromise between the Morgans and the Rockefellers that the Morgans could have their war in Europe, if the Rockefellers could have their war in the Pacific.
And this is how America got into world war two.
Well, yeah, there's a, it is important to, uh, you know, one thing that often happens when people talk about the influence between, uh, business, uh, banks and, and government is they think it's all or nothing.
And they think, well, if this is all true, it must mean these businesses are for this war and, and, and, and so forth are all of big business or for all the But really these are competing and at times overlapping, uh, interests.
And in the end, they all share one interest in common, which is power and the status quo, roughly speaking, as, as maintained by the state and the empire.
But in, in some of these wars, you know, world war two being a big example, some interests favored some of the one theater and the other interests favor the other theater.
And, um, as I pointed out in some of these recent wars in the Iraq war, the establishment wasn't as pro war as, as it has been in the past.
Uh, that's one, one thing that made the Iraq war kind of special was that although obviously the, in the end, the establishment sides with the empire, and if the heads of the empire won a war, then that's what happens, right?
But, uh, it wasn't, it wasn't quite the same kind of war.
It was a temporary, uh, takeover of the war machine by the neocons as, as antiwar.com has talked about quite some bit.
But what we see is with the, with a neocon having less influence, it doesn't mean that the, the empire is any better.
Uh, maybe, or, or you could say maybe some things about it are less scary in the immediacy, but it, it, it, it is important to note that a lot of people who talk about things like the trilateral commission, the council of foreign relations, even just the fed, uh, it's almost as though everything's one simple conspiracy, or even if it's not simple, every, everyone's run by the same, you know, maybe it's the royal family or something, but it doesn't quite work that way.
It's not that these groups push events around and cause there to be the ruling class.
It's that the presence of a state and a big, powerful state with massive control over the economy and global affairs cannot help, but attract those who have wealth and privilege to seek to, to maintain their privilege and to expand upon it.
Well, listen, that's why the U S constitution was ratified in the first place.
I remember reading when the internet was brand new to me anyway, in 1997 or something, I found a page called miscellaneous Jefferson, and it was just, you know, no punctuation or paragraph breaks or anything, just all this Jefferson all crammed together here.
And, uh, one of the things I found in there was a letter to James Madison where he says, you know, I, uh, had a confrontation with Alexander Hamilton on the steps of the Capitol in Philadelphia today, and boy, did he make me angry.
And, you know, the problem with that guy is that he went off to Britain and he got the idea in his head that what we need is this, uh, you know, massive state and inner, you know, government intervention in money in order that, uh, the people who are already the richest can, you know, interweave themselves with the state.
And he thinks that that's necessary for the preservation of the state and for the preservation of the people who are already the ruling class.
And so, but what I think is it shouldn't be like that and on and on and on.
And I mean, this was the debate they had that Jefferson actually, you know, resigned over as secretary of state, uh, because Hamilton Washington let Hamilton and the Congress get away with it.
Well, yeah, that's, that's right.
Um, so it's from the very beginning, there's nothing conspiracy theory about it.
This is the history of America.
I mean, they used to, I learned the phrase when I was a little kid, it's not worth a continental.
Well, what's a continental?
Oh, that's the kind of dollars that they use to pay for the American revolution.
And by the time it was over, they were worth nothing.
And the people who'd invested in them got nothing.
And why was it like that?
Cause they printed so many of them, you know, I learned that before I was 12, probably one thing particularly important in Rothbard's analysis is that since Rothbard sees the state itself as the criminal organization that it is, it allows for a, I think a much better analysis.
If you, if you, if you look at history, uh, particularly the history of the American empire, trying to see it as being something controlled by one private interest or another, despite the best efforts of well-intentioned politicians who sometimes end up being duped or become in the thralls of war, they get carried away, or maybe they're just pushovers.
If you really have that view of the public sector, the way that all too many leftists influenced by the Marks can do, then I don't think that the history of war makes as much sense.
And in fact, one thing that's important to recognize is that these wars are bad for the people.
The average person in America suffers from these wars.
These wars do not make the country richer on balance.
And that's another misconception that people who swallow collectivist economics, they think that these wars might be bad, but that we, we do them.
We, we do them because we want money and we want markets open, but that's not how it works at all.
There's the state and the state's friends.
And they wage these wars.
They kill the people.
They force open markets.
They close down markets.
They keep prices up.
They push prices down.
They're the ones manipulating things.
And it doesn't help the average person.
It impoverishes the average person abroad and here at home.
And you need to start looking, well, not you, but people need to start looking at the state for what it is.
You know, Marx talked about the state as being something of a, of an engine to protect the corporate interest and profit.
And there's a kernel of truth there.
But the problem is Marx thought that, you know, one problem with Marx was he thought that, well, we should, the proletarians should take control of the state and then enact this dictatorship and then get rid of classes and then we'll have freedom and the state will wither away.
But that's beyond naive.
Of course, it's beyond dangerous.
Whenever people have tried to act on it, it's led to millions of deaths.
The problem is the state will always be in control by the people with power.
By definition, the state is categorically the ruling class.
You can't put the state on the side of the, of the small against the big.
The state is as big as it gets.
Well, and this goes back to what you were saying about, you know, the progressive movement as being kind of the engine behind corporatism.
Of course, these are the people who are born against oligarchy and who, you know, believe that they're always supporting the regulatory state to protect themselves from the very people who you're saying are really behind the whole thing.
Yeah.
And yeah, Obama is not just some, you know, do-gooder that's been distracted or because of Republican politics or because of the Pentagon's influence has become swept away by events.
He is a premeditated killer, just like all the other imperialists in modern American history.
And there's nothing you can do about this.
This is what the state is.
This is what the empire is.
It's pure violence.
It's murder.
It's looting.
And Rothbard showed that better than anyone.
All right, everybody, that's Anthony Gregory.
Read him at LewRockwell.com today and check out Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy by Murray Rothbard there, too.
