05/09/07 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm your host Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And I'm going to go ahead and bring on our first guest today, Anthony Gregory.
Welcome to the show, Anthony.
Hi, Scott.
Good to be on your show, as it always is.
Yeah, good to have you here.
And for those who don't know Anthony Gregory, he works for the Independent Institute as a research analyst.
He writes for LouRockwell.com, the Future of Freedom Foundation, the Libertarian Enterprise, Liberty Magazine, Antiwar.com, Strike the Root, and probably a couple other places that I forgot to mention as well.
And it's all libertarian purity.
Great stuff.
And I wanted to talk with you, Anthony, about the armed robbery I walked in on yesterday and cops and criminals and police matters and anarcho-capitalism and all that kind of stuff, but it seems a bit self-indulgent to me.
So if it's okay with you, I thought maybe I could just get your expert opinion on Ron Paul's campaign, various issues associated with it.
Of course, being that this is associated with Antiwar.com, we're not endorsing anybody.
This is simply analysis.
The Ron Paul candidacy, I think, is blowing up on the internet.
It's catching a lot of attention since the debate last week.
So I'd like to ask you all about that, but if it's all right with you, I'd like to go ahead and play some clips from that debate last week and give people in the Chaos Radio audience who did not hear the debate a chance to hear some of the answers that Ron Paul gave to Chris Matthews.
Is that all right with you, Anthony?
Sure.
I should also note that, like you guys at Antiwar, I'm not in any position to endorse, and I wouldn't endorse, but I'm very happy to talk about any developments where the ideas that I hope so dear come through in a public forum.
All right.
So here's some clips from the first GOP presidential debate.
Congressman Paul, you voted against the war.
Why are all your fellow Republicans up here wrong?
That's a very good question, and you might ask the question, why are 70% of the American people now wanting us out of there, and why did the Republicans do so poorly last year?
So I would suggest that we should look at foreign policy.
I'm suggesting very strongly that we should have a foreign policy of non-intervention, the traditional American foreign policy and a Republican foreign policy.
Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War.
Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.
How did we win the election in the year 2000?
We talked about a humble foreign policy, no nation building, don't police the world.
That is a conservative, it's a Republican, it's a pro-American, it follows the founding fathers, and besides, it follows the Constitution.
I tried very hard to solve this problem before we went to war by saying, declare war if you want to go to war, go to war, fight it and win it, but don't get into it for political reasons or to enforce U.N. resolutions or pretend the Iraqis were a national threat to us.
Let's go ahead and stop it right there, Ron Paul's first answer.
I actually kind of resent the fact that the first question they asked him is why everybody else got it wrong.
What the hell kind of question was that?
But I think he did a pretty good job of answering it.
Anthony?
Sure.
I mean, the thing to remember is that Ron Paul is running as a Republican on kind of this program of reviving the old right spirit of Robert Taft, you know, Mr. Republican, in the old days.
You know, way back a long time ago, in the 1990s, the Republicans used to talk about more, you know, more restrained foreign policy, constitutional limits on executive power abroad and at home, and they were, you know, skeptical of Clinton's interventions in the Balkans, at least the better Republicans were.
And there is truth to this idea that for much of the 20th century, the Democrats were so much worse or such big warmongers that the Republicans were, in comparison, better, but, you know, he is kind of, you know, working within the Republican framework, so it was a very good answer given that.
I think it's actually, I think it overstates it to say the Republicans were ever the party of peace.
They weren't.
But it would definitely be, or it would probably be even more problematic to say the Democrats were the party of peace.
And so it is interesting to see that there are still people, there's still some interest within the Republicans for restraint, and of course Ron Paul represents the more libertarian tradition within the conservative movement better than anyone else did, and certainly the non-interventionist tradition.
What about the idea that Ron Paul is bestowing legitimacy on a Republican party that has none with his presence?
Well, I think that there's some validity to that critique.
You know me, I've been pretty hard on the Republicans ever since you've known me.
I mean, the Republicans are horrible, and I think that, you know, within these one-minute answers, he can't really go into all the nuance.
And I'm sure, you know, if you look at Ron Paul's writing, he would go more into the nuance, and he understands very well how this is really a bipartisan interventionist policy and has been for a while.
But on the other hand, there are, I don't think he's actually, as afraid of it and as wary of it as there was before, I don't think that his answer was as, really actually did much damage.
I don't think it convinced many people, oh yeah, Republicans are anti-war, as much as it convinced conservatives and people who are already Republicans to kind of rethink things.
And also, it might have convinced some leftists, not that Republicans are a salvation, I don't think they'll ever think that, but that there's something more to what's going on than left and right.
It's not that the left believes this and the right believes that.
There's actually, you know, if you remember in the Democratic debate, though I disagree with more of his policies, especially domestically, Gravel was pretty good too in a lot of his answers as far as the warfare state goes.
So I think that ultimately though it might confuse some people on the road, this campaign is having the good effect of making people rethink the political spectrum.
And it's not just that the Republicans want to cut taxes and wage war, it's that there's something compatible about small government and running the world.
And it's not as though the Democrats want to raise taxes but leave everyone else in the world alone, because they surely don't want to do that.
So I think in the long term, it's not as problematic as I might have thought previously, in terms of giving too much credence to the Republican Party.
I think it would take a couple hundred Ron Pauls at this point for the Republicans to salvage themselves.
You watch the debate and, you know, there's eight or nine other guys on stage, all basically saying that we need to stay the course except we need to do it right.
I mean, all of them were trying to distance themselves from the president while still supporting the troops, which really means, of course, supporting the war.
So I'm not really afraid of Ron Paul doing this too much with people respecting the Republicans more than they deserve.
And now on that realignment that you and I always talk about where, well, through the confusion, as you say, comes a little bit of clarity.
Wow, each party has one guy who's really opposed to the current situation and all the rest of them support the status quo, that kind of thing.
If you Google Ron Paul and Mike Gravel's name already, there's dozens and dozens of sites saying, you know, we'd like to see a unity ticket of these two guys running together and all kinds of things like that.
And I'm actually reminded of something that I read of Justin Raimondo's back when I first started reading Antiwar.com.
Well, again, anyway, in 2003, I guess, or maybe 2002, where he said, you know, there are a lot of young people in this country who do not like the Republicans, do not like the warfare state, do not like the destruction of their Bill of Rights that they grew up believing they were going to have throughout their life.
But they're not Marxists.
They don't wear sandals.
They don't all want to be, you know, left-wing, commie, you know, anarcho-leftist, Che Guevara shirt-wearing folks.
They're not.
And, you know, these young people, and I guess I could have predicted it, but never to this extent.
These young people are really into Ron Paul.
I mean, he just absolutely, from what I can tell by researching the Internet in the past few days, in the few minutes that he got at that Republican debate, he just floored them.
Well, about young people, what it seemed to me in my years in college, 9-11 happened while I was in college, so I got to see a lot at Berkeley, so I got to see a lot of, kind of a decent cross-section of, you know, politically thinking young people.
And I noticed that there's this, yeah, young people aren't as socialist in a lot of ways as the generation before.
They don't believe in the central state.
They don't believe Social Security is going to be their salvation.
They believe, I mean, not as much as you and I do, but they believe that the market can do good, that though it's imperfect in their eyes and they don't understand why it has these problems, that it really is the source of wealth more than the government.
And the irony is it's true to me that, if anything, my generation, your generation, whatever, were more pro-war than our parents' generation, because they didn't have something like Vietnam syndrome in their memory to realize how bad it could be.
They were, if anything, kind of more right-wing in a lot of ways, so not on all social levels or social issues.
But now it's kind of backlash because of the war.
Right.
Now, I mean, now they have a distrust of the U.S. military and empire.
And I've got to say, a lot of people, a lot of the establishment realists, they don't like the Iraq war because it's discredited the U.S. empire, which I think is probably the only good thing we could say about the war, because as horrifying and terrible as this war has been, the death count, you know, foreigners included, of course, has not been quite as high as past foreign wars.
And what I mean to say this in trying to find a silver lining is, as terrible as the war is, it seems that Americans have turned on this war, it took less, or maybe it's because information is so much more freely flowing now, we have the internet.
You know, 50, 60, 70 years ago, I think, you know, people say that World War II was shorter than this war, and sure, but on the other hand, these were much bigger wars the U.S. used to be in, and now Americans are weary of the war after, you know, several thousand American deaths, or tens of thousands of casualties, and a few hundred thousand deaths, depending on how you measure it abroad.
And so, it does seem like there's a more consistently skeptical of government mentality among younger people, and I could see why Ron Paul would appeal to them more than, he certainly comes off as less of an obvious liar and crook.
I mean, I actually don't agree with him on every single issue, but it's clear that he has principles and he believes in them, which is, you know, more than you could say about 99% of these guys.
Right, and that's what I'm reading, even on these left-wing blogs.
They're saying, hey man, this guy Ron Paul, you might disagree with him about economic issues or this or that, but there's no mistaking that he is 100% genuine in his beliefs, that his beliefs are in favor of liberty, not opposed to it, and that, you know, he's better than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
They both say all options are on the table for Iran.
You'll never hear Ron Paul talking like that.
Yeah, Ron Paul doesn't, he's never said anything that I'm aware of, and I'm, I would, if I were a betting man, I'd bet on it too, that would, that approaches this belligerence that you get from any of the Democrats, except, you know, Greville and Kostinich and a couple people in Congress.
Most of these people say, yeah, sure, if it comes down to it, we'll nuke Iran.
That's basically what they're saying, and it's terrible.
Democrats and Republicans have slightly different rhetoric, but more than ever, it's clear they don't, they're all, they all believe in the status quo and the U.S. continuing to try to run the world, and it seems like, you know, the progressive blogs, some of them, they're praising Ron Paul and counterpunch, you know, Alexander Coburn, who is probably by one of my favorite lefties on journalists, and it's not the same phrase, I actually like a lot of leftie journalists, but there's a great outfit and a great journal, and they, you know, he pointed out that Greville and Paul were the only ones who seemed to get it, or they represented the strains in both the mainstream left and right that get it.
Whereas, you know, you look at the mainstream media, like the Washington Post had this editorial, where they said, there are too many candidates, and the two they singled out were Greville and Paul, the two that actually were saying things outside of this limited scope of acceptable opinion, but people need to hear this, and that's what excited me most about the debate, was it was, you know, this was a major party debate, and people were actually exposed to the idea, for once, that maybe the U.S. shouldn't run the whole world, maybe the U.S. shouldn't police the world, maybe it's hard to have the small government, the conservative claim they want, if the U.S. government is big enough to rule the entire planet.
No, you don't say.
Yeah.
I have to tell you, too, I think I kind of enjoyed that Washington Post article, where they singled out Greville and Paul.
It's so transparent, what they were trying to do there, you know, and saying, oh, you know, there's too many candidates, let's single out the two that the average Joe can, you know, actually is rallying around, and narrow it down as though, you know, Duncan Hunter or Tom Tancredo stand better in the polls and have more grassroots support than Ron Paul.
Give me a break.
And I just, I kind of like that, because it shows just, you know, the Washington Post personified just squirming there, because the Internet is making them less and less relevant.
They want to control our debate, and they can't anymore.
And, you know, I have to say, you think of, like, Chris Matthews or, well, any of these people who run these stations.
Of course, ABC News was trying to keep Ron Paul out of their poll, to no avail.
They were besieged.
But I think that what their mindset is, you know, assuming they're just, you know, not outright deliberately, you know, knowing in their own heart that what they're doing is wrong, assuming that they're trying to justify this thing to themselves.
What they're saying is, hey, look, we know that you need $100 million to win for president, and Ron Paul's never going to be able to raise that, because Ron Paul doesn't promise billions and billions and billions of dollars' worth of favors in return.
So nobody will give him that kind of money to run for president, so he doesn't stand a chance, so why would we even pay any attention to him at all?
But here's the thing, and I know Hans Hermann Hoppe would be mad at me, but at the end of the day, what really counts is not dollars.
At the end of the day, what counts is votes.
And if masses of American people want Ron Paul to be their Republican nominee, then they're going to get it.
If they turn out and show up and demand it, it doesn't matter how rich or poor they are.
Well, sure.
You know, I've been having trouble getting too excited about the prospect of making even a huge debt, because I think the system really is rigged.
I don't want to sound too cynical, but I think Emma Goldman said that if voting could change anything, they'd outlaw it.
And, of course, if the masses really rose up and wanted something like this, wanted peace and freedom, we would get it, or the government would have to back down.
But I don't think it's going to just happen in one election cycle where America goes from empire.
I mean, it could.
History is filled with miraculous events.
But I think it's really going to take educating the public as to the problems of empire.
And there was a huge victory for that effort with this debate, I thought.
And it is being reflected in his support, but I don't think that, you know, I hate sounding so pessimistic.
Yeah, well, I didn't mean to sound too optimistic, either.
The fact that all of the mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives who run the media, I mean, it's not right-wing, wacko, far-right people or far-left people.
It's really just, you know, there's this moderate centrist tyranny in America, the center, where, you know, the furthest right you'll go is saying, yeah, maybe we should have civil unions, but no gay marriage.
And then on the left you'll hear, well, I'm not sure about gay marriage, but we should definitely have civil unions.
I mean, that was like just one issue where Kerry and Bush represented the left and right, supposedly.
Just issue after issue, there's really not that much difference.
Yeah, it's just like the Futurama, where it's the presidential election of the year 3000, and it's John Robertson versus Robert Johnson.
And he says, your 3% tax cut was irresponsible.
And he goes, my 3% tax cut was not irresponsible.
And that's their debate.
They're exact clones of each other, of course, in impeachment.
Well, the thing is with Chris Matthews and all these guys is they really are kind of in the center, though they pretend that they're, I mean, you look at Hannity and Colmes.
I know this is on the Fox News channel, which is kind of on the right, but they're not really that different either.
The liberals and the conservatives, they do disagree, but when all of these supposed leftist media decries the war, they all swallow the war intelligence and the lies and they all help drag this country into war and they basically all maintain the status quo and we should stay the course.
It's just they're attacking Bush's management of it because, you know, the Democrats love waiting in war, too.
And if they take, I mean, look at Hillary Clinton just, you know, brought up this measure to revoke or to nullify the authorization to go to war with Iraq.
But it's not as though she'll actually, you know, recant her decision to vote for war and it's not as though she's actually calling to pull the troops out.
So it's really just, you know, finger pointing without any constructive ideas of moving on or changing policy.
And so, you know, Matthew, if you watched the debate, when they asked Ron Paul questions, it sounded like they were mocking him in the background.
You'd hear them make these statements like, oh, God, there he goes.
And they just don't like anything outside of the, you know, the officially accepted opinion.
Yeah, and you're right, it is the centrists who are not the moderates, but the extremists, the people who are, you know, only moderately for using force in this or that given situation are on the far left and the far right.
Now, there are totalitarians and extremists on the far left and the far right, but the center is nothing but people who agree that government ought to do anything and everything.
Oh, sure, yeah.
The moderates or the centrists, I know you well.
The people you supposedly the problem with America is too much bipartisan.
We've got the far left and the far right and there's no cooperation.
I think this is almost the opposite is true.
Yeah.
You've got a lot of people.
It's not like, you know, it's not like Giuliani believes in free market.
It's not like Hillary believes in peace or civil liberties.
They all believe in roughly the same agenda.
They all believe in the $3 trillion, you know, Leviathan trying to run the world and, you know, micromanage everyone's lives.
They just disagree on, you know, should this budget increase by 8% or 6% a year?
Should we spend 20,000 more troops or 25,000 more troops?
Should we focus on crystal meth or cocaine busts this year?
Yeah, this year.
Hey, let's play some more clips of Ron Paul for the good people here.
OK.
One of our prize guests here today, Governor Schwarzenegger, looking this man in the eye, answer this question.
I'm going to go down the line, starting with Governor Romney.
Should we change our Constitution, which we believe is divinely inspired?
Yeah, listen here.
Listen to Chris Matthews say, oh, God, under his breath and mock Ron Paul's answer.
Great patient senator from Florida and Arnold Schwarzenegger to stand here some night.
Congressman.
I'm a no because I am a strong supporter of the original intent.
Oh, God.
OK, Congressman Paul, Pete from Rochester Hills, Michigan, wants to ask you this.
If you were president, would you work to phase out the IRS?
Immediately.
That's what they call a softball.
And you can only do that if you change our ideas about what the role of government ought to be.
If you think the government has to take care of us from cradle to grave and if you think our government should police the world and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a foreign policy that we cannot manage, you can't get rid of the IRS.
But if you want to lower taxes and if you want the government to quit printing the money to come up with shortfall and cause all the inflation, you have to change policy.
Dr. Paul, how do you reconcile this moral leadership kind of role of conservatism with the very libertarian strain of conservatism, the Barry Goldwater conservatism that you represent?
How do you put together what he just said and what you believe in a unified national purpose?
Well, you do it by understanding what the goal of government ought to be.
If the goal of government is to be the policeman of the world, you lose liberty.
And if the goal is to promote liberty, you can unify all segments.
The freedom message brings us together.
It doesn't divide us.
I believe that when we overdo our military aggressiveness, what it does is it actually weakens our national defense.
I mean, we stood up to the Soviets.
They had 40,000 nuclear weapons.
Now we're fretting day in and day nine about third world countries that have no army, navy or air force and we're getting ready to go to war.
But the moral principle is that of defending liberty and minimizing the scope of government.
I'm sorry, we have to go on.
Congressman Paul, Bob Hussey from Minnesota writes that perhaps the most important skill a good president must have is the ability to make good, sound decisions, often in a crisis situation.
Please cite an example when you had to make a decision in crisis.
I wonder if he's referring to a political decision like running for office or something like that.
I guess in medicine I made a lot of critical decisions.
I mean, you're called upon all the time to make critical life-saving decisions.
But I can't think of any one particular event where I made a critical decision that affected a lot of other people.
But I think all our decisions we make in politics are critical.
My major decision, political decision, which was a constitutional decision, was to urge for five years that this country not go to war in Iraq.
We have to go down the line again.
It's always fun to ask these questions down the line.
We have Mrs. Reagan here.
The camera will not focus on her, but I will tell you it will now focus on you.
Mrs. Reagan wants to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Will that progress under your administration?
Dr. Paul, yes or no on federal funding?
The issues like this are not authorized under the Constitution.
The trouble with issues like this is in Washington we either prohibit it or subsidize it.
And the markets should deal with it and the states should deal with it.
Okay, that's a no.
Okay, let's start with an enjoyable down the line, okay?
I want each candidate to mention a tax he'd like to cut in addition to the Bush tax cuts, keeping them in effect.
Well, in my first week I already got rid of the income tax.
So my second week I would get rid of the inflation tax.
It's a tax that nobody talks about.
We live way beyond our means with a foreign policy we can't afford and an entitlement system that we have encouraged.
We print money for it.
The value of the money goes down and poor people pay higher prices.
That is a tax.
There's a transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to Wall Street.
Wall Street's doing quite well, but the inflation tax is eating away at the middle class of this country.
We need to get rid of the inflation tax with sound money.
Congressman Paul, Carrie from Connecticut asks, do you trust the mainstream media?
Some of them, but I trust the Internet a lot more and I trust the freedom of expression and that's why we should never interfere with the Internet.
That's why I've never voted to regulate the Internet even when there's the temptation to put bad things on the Internet.
Regulation of bad and good on the Internet should be done differently.
But no, there's every reason to believe that we have enough freedom in this country to have freedom of expression and that's what is important.
And whether or not we trust the mainstream or not, I think you pick and choose.
There are some friends and some aren't so friendly.
Thank you, doctor.
It's time.
Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?
I am known for sticking to principle and not flip-flopping.
I voted to impeach him.
So hard on the White House.
How will you be different in any way from President George W. Bush?
I certainly would continue on my earlier theme that foreign policy needs to be changed.
Mr. Republican, Robert Taft, we have a statute of him in Washington.
He advocated the same foreign policy that I advocate.
I would work very hard to protect the privacy of American citizens being very, very cautious about warrantless searches.
And I would guarantee that I would never abuse habeas corpus.
All right, so there you go, Anthony.
I'm sorry, I was only going to play one or two of those at a time and then talk about them.
But I just had so much fun listening to that.
I figured I'd go ahead and let it play for the people who didn't get a chance to hear his answers in the debate.
Well, there's one more answer that he gave that I thought was really good that wasn't there.
And I've seen compilations of his answers online that didn't have it either.
It was on the national ID card.
Oh, right, right.
Ron Paul came out very strongly against it, saying he'd never support a national ID card.
In a free country, it's not supposed to be like your papers, please.
And the great thing about it was pretty much all the Republicans had, in one way or another, defended the idea of a national ID card, what they called a tamper-proof card, because the same government that can't protect it, that can't put out a fire on its own, the Pentagon for several hours is going to have a tamper-proof card for all of us.
But then, after Ron Paul came out strongly against it, they all started changing their tune, saying, oh, I didn't believe that there should be any national ID card for citizens, just for illegal aliens.
And this doesn't even make sense, because how's the government?
First of all, there's not going to be a national ID card just for people who aren't theoretically supposed to be in the nation.
It just doesn't make sense.
What are they going to do?
How are they going to locate all these people?
If they can locate them, what's the purpose of giving them a card?
They're really just dishonest.
They do want a national ID card.
They were basically on their way with a real ID act, which they pretty much all supported.
But, no, and all of those other answers, I especially like Paul's answer.
Wait, wait, on the national ID, I want to stay on that for a second.
Basically, he was at the end of the line, and they all endorsed it.
And then he said, no, we should never have a national ID.
Well, he never talks like that.
We should never have a national ID.
That's not how to have freedom, et cetera.
And then all the other guys basically, on their next question, said, you know, one-word answer, two-word answer to the next question, and then said, oh, on that national ID card thing, I never said anything about national ID.
That's not what I meant.
And so it was very clumsy backtracking and quite comical.
And it's something that it wasn't just the national ID, but sort of all through that debate, you could tell that some of the, you know, John McCain and Giuliani are, you know, too far beyond help.
But I think you could tell that some of the other candidates were realizing that, hey, this guy Ron Paul is really showing us up with his actually principled answers.
And they all were sort of, you know, belatedly trying to copy him and sound like him through the debate, especially toward the end.
Yeah.
And they were, they realized they overstepped it because they figured if they all agreed on the national ID card, then they wouldn't lose any support from anyone in the Republican Party who actually still does want to live in a semi-free country.
So he really got them.
That was one of my favorite moments.
But I also liked the clips he played.
I really liked his discussion of inflation and how you can't have, you can't have low taxes in a small government, an empire.
And I liked that he kept stressing this at the debate, at the Republican debate, how he kept going back to foreign policy.
There are so many issues on which he could have found more excuses to talk about them that would have appealed to conservatives because he's such a champion of free market, gun rights.
He's just much better in terms of all of the liberties that conservatives are supposed to believe in than pretty much anyone that he was debating.
But he kept going back to the war and to foreign policy because really, if we don't fundamentally see some changes in US policy abroad, then the hope for freedom at home is doomed.
And the conservatives used to know this and be honest about it back when the conservative movement started in the beginning of the Cold War.
And then they started all becoming cheerleaders for the Cold War that, of course, the Democrats and Truman started.
Then they became even bigger Cold Warriors than the Democrats.
And they admitted, yeah, free enterprise, we can't really have that until the communists are gone.
Well, the Soviet Union folded and we still didn't have free enterprise.
Chris Matthews, basically, I forget whose question it was before him, but someone basically was saying, yeah, we need to be like Ronald Reagan, which is, never mind that Reagan invented the drug war and left us four trillion dollars in debt and all these other things, but we'll have all this wonderful freedom at home while we wage perpetual war overseas.
And Chris Matthews says, OK, Ron Paul, how are you going to accomplish what he just said?
How are you going to wage perpetual war overseas and have freedom here?
And Ron Paul's answer was, I'm not.
And you're not either.
And as long as we have perpetual war, you are going to lose your freedom.
And is that in doubt?
Does anybody doubt now the aphorism that war is the health of the state?
Does anybody doubt that?
Can we not all see the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the new national intelligence director, the Military Commissions Act, revisions to Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act, the detention of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, and his torture by the U.S. Navy?
I think it's pretty obvious that even when the war is 5000 miles away from here, that we lose our freedom.
And Ron Paul made that point very clear.
Well, sure.
And, you know, the federal government is about 50 or more percent bigger than it was when Bush took power.
And, you know, a lot of it is, you know, some of it's just because Republicans, like Democrats, like to expand the government regardless.
It seems to have been the trend for, you know, 50 years.
But the war, after 9-11, the huge explosion of warfare state power is really the big explanation.
And it explains even why a lot of this domestic stuff that supposedly has nothing to do with war.
You know, when they pass big agricultural bills now, they say it's for national security.
You know, they'll pass these huge entitlement programs.
And the Republicans have been going along with Bush's agenda for just big government in all directions.
Because he is, after all, the commander in chief.
We are at war.
We have to support whatever the president wants.
And the fog of war is accompanied by huge expansion of government power and size.
It's very hard to find counterexamples in our own country's history.
And, yeah, no, no, it's totally incompatible.
When these Republicans are saying they want to keep up this war or even wage it more rigorously than Bush had, and then they also say they want Americans to have more of their own money.
They either don't understand the most basic elements of economics, which they should, supposedly, because conservatives supposedly understand economics, or they're lying.
Really, you have to take your pick.
Do you think that these guys are all idiots, or are they all lying?
Yeah, and which is worse?
Well, we don't even know.
It depends on the circumstance.
Sometimes, I think maybe Bush does believe some of this crazy stuff he says, whereas Clinton, I don't think he believed any of it.
But Clinton might have been less bad because he didn't believe in it.
So, we don't know.
So, yeah, take your pick.
Do you want to pick the candidate that seems like he's a liar, or the one who seems like he's just an idiot?
In the last minute or so here, because we're almost at the time while here, Anthony, I want to get back to the actual, not so much the substance of the message, but the message itself.
As we were talking about before, the kind of wildfire that's been set online, at least, if not on television, about these rogue candidates, Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, as well.
Do you think that the groundswell from the net roots, as they call them, will be enough to propel these guys along, at least into the primary season?
And do you think that the educational opportunity provided to the American people by these guys will leave a lasting imprint on the population of this country?
That's obviously a tall order for a presidential campaign.
Well, I think it just depends.
I still don't know how many of these people out there who have been talking about peace, especially on the left, and how many of these people on the right who have been talking about freedom, the small government, we still don't know how many of them really mean it.
The question is, do these right-wingers really want freedom more, or do they want the war more?
And do these left-wingers really want peace more, or do they want this huge government that promises to do everything for them?
And depending on whether people want the government to be their savior or whether they understand the government's the greatest threat to our lives, our liberty, and our peace, we'll see where the support ultimately falls.
And in the short term, I'm not all that optimistic.
I think a lot of these people who have been criticizing the war are going to end up pulling the lever for a Democrat who promises just ever more war.
A lot of the people who have been saying, Bush has been overspending, are going to end up pulling the lever for someone who is even a bigger spender than Bush.
So in the short term, I'm not that optimistic, but I think that maybe we will see this have an impact in the future, but we won't be able to tell.
I don't want to make a prediction beyond that.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
Thanks very much for yours.
Anthony Gregory, everybody, from the Independent Institute, lurockwell.com, the Future Freedom Foundation, and a bunch of other places as well.
Thank you.
Take care, bro.
All right, folks, this is Antiwar Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.