All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Lou Rockwell.
He's the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
You can find their website at mises.org.
And he also runs the website lourockwell.com, which includes two great blogs, lourockwell.com/blog and lourockwell.com/political theater for his coverage of especially the 2012 presidential race.
Welcome to the show, Lou.
How are you doing, Scott?
Great to be with you.
So Ron Paul's running for president.
What's that got to do with peace on earth?
Well, let me just mention, I mentioned to somebody to be discussing politics.
I'm giving you my own views and certainly not speaking for the Mises Institute, which is a nonpolitical organization.
But Ron Paul is a real peace candidate.
Certainly the first, I mean, Gene McCarthy, I think, came closest before Ron to being a real peace candidate.
I don't really think George McGovern was a real peace candidate, although he did.
He did talk about peace.
But Ron Paul is the real deal.
I mean, he all his adult life, he's been a man of peace both personally and ideologically.
And he understands, like Murray Rothbard did, that the key issue is foreign policy and war.
Of course, the Fed is extremely important.
And sometimes I wonder whether they founded the Fed to fight World War One or whether they fight World War One to found the Fed.
I mean, I don't know the chicken and the egg point.
But so there's a million important issues about all the horrendous regulatory shackles on the free market, all the horrendous taxes.
I remember taxes, shorthand for wealth destruction.
So when they talk about taxes, that's what they're talking about.
So, you know, the welfare state, corporate welfare, bailing out the banks.
I mean, all the horrendous stuff they're doing.
But the absolute worst thing they do is war.
Not only because, of course, first and foremost, all the people, the innocent people murdered.
And just because somebody is in another country in the U.S. doesn't like them doesn't make them, of course, a guilty person.
So there's the blood and the destruction.
But there's also the increase in state power that comes about from wars.
Ludwig von Mises said even the winning country loses because its own government is vastly strengthened.
And so, therefore, the people and the economy, the society lose as the predatory state grows bigger and bigger as it feasts on blood.
That's what that's what happens in war.
So Ron Paul, all I mean, he's just he's the real deal.
He's an actual man of peace personally and a peace candidate.
His religion is of peace.
I mean, he really there's been I don't think there ever been anybody else out there running for president.
Again, Gene McCarthy came the closest and I think Gene McCarthy was a great guy, but he was no Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is sounding the clarion call exactly what we need to hear about how vicious these wars are, how destructive they are to our own liberties.
Again, I think this is always secondary.
The people were murdering is the main main point.
But he's right.
We can't have a free country while we're while we have an empire.
This is what some of the 18th century Americans said, too, because, of course, the an imperial government that feels perfectly free to bomb and murder people overseas is hardly going to hesitate to run your house, your school, your family, your business, your church, whatever else.
So by emphasizing the peace issue, Ron Paul shows what you know, what is in a very courageous thing.
What is the important issue?
But look what he's done.
I mean, when he first started talking about this stuff, he was really a lone voice outside of a few libertarians.
Today, he's brought along vast numbers of young people, vast numbers of actual Republicans, if you can believe it, to understand that war is not, you know, what was that slogan from the 60s?
War is not healthy for children and other rolling things or whatever.
So, I mean, it's bad in every sense.
And he has shown what one person can do.
I mean, he has vastly spread the message of peace, the urgent moral message that we have to have peace.
If we want civilization, Mises, of course, made the same point, Rothbard, many other great men.
If we want civilization, if we want prosperity, if we want freedom, we have to have peace because war is the enemy of everything decent and everything good.
Indeed.
Well, you know, one thing that I thought was actually really interesting was in Ron Paul's book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, which is a collection of speeches from, I believe it's the late 70s through a couple of years ago.
Yes, a wonderful collection.
And now it's been a little while since I read it, but I think I remember that in some of those earlier speeches in the 70s and maybe in the early 80s, he starts off a little bit right wing on a little hawkish on China and Russia and seemed, I think, skeptical of like the Nixonian opening with China and that kind of thing.
But by 82 or 83 or something, you can tell he's completely over even believing in the Cold War, that he really is like a completely plumb line, anti-war.com style libertarian by the very early 80s.
Now, of course, the Cold War was all a trick and it was started by the U.S.
Harry S. Truman and his cohorts.
And it was all a trick.
I mean, the Russians, the Soviets were responsible, I guess, for the worst government ever in the history of the world, the Soviet Union.
But because it was always an economic basket case, they never had the wherewithal to have wars.
I mean, they couldn't.
They were able to fight World War II because of the vast amount of aid that the U.S. gave them.
But they were afraid of war because they knew that the war was the one thing that could overthrow them.
So they were not anywhere near as belligerent as the U.S.
And, of course, we can see since the end of the Cold War, who actually was the belligerent?
I mean, who actually, since the end of the Cold War, has been trying to rule the entire world and has started war after war after war?
It's, of course, the U.S.
Right.
That's what Chalmers Johnson says, is that he was a spear carrier for empire up until the end of the Cold War.
And then when NATO didn't disband, he went, well, wait a minute.
Like Pat Buchanan.
Hey, the promise was a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores for the duration of the emergency only.
Now, what is this?
And Chalmers Johnson said that then he went back and he restudied the history of the Cold War that he had supported all those decades, in fact, teaching as a professor at USC.
And he said, I was wrong.
That's it.
I was wrong.
It was all a trick.
Well, it was a trick.
And the Soviets didn't even want to take over Eastern Europe.
It wasn't until the U.S. started moving in belligerently against them that they then tragically and horribly staged communist coups in Western Europe.
And, of course, taking those countries behind the Iron Curtain.
But still, I mean, Stalin withdrew from Austria.
He withdrew from occupied Iran.
And he offered to withdraw from occupied Germany in the early 1950s, not because Stalin was a good guy, by the way.
He was one of the great monsters in the history of the human race.
But he was afraid of war, and he did not want war.
And especially after what Russia went through in World War II, where they suffered so many casualties and such economic destruction, which they could hardly afford.
So he offered to get out of East Germany and allow the reunification of Germany if the U.S. would agree that Germany would be neutral and would not be a member of NATO.
The U.S. refused.
So the fact that the East German people had to spend another 30 years under the boot of communism, that's Eisenhower and Truman and the U.S. Pentagon and CIA and so forth, they refused the hand of peace at the great cost to the people of East Germany.
So the U.S. has always been the belligerent power.
And, in fact, as Hans Hoppe points out, the most belligerent powers have always been at least somewhat classically liberal in their economies, because that gives them the economic wherewithal to do mischief with.
The Soviets, because they were barely surviving and, of course, didn't even trust their own soldiers with bullets, although I'm reminded that American soldiers are not trusted with bullets in this country either.
But they just couldn't get it together.
I'm sure they would have loved to rule the world.
They would have loved to have their boot on the throat of every human being on Earth.
They couldn't do it economically, and therefore they were not anywhere near as belligerent as the U.S.
The U.S. has been, certainly ever since World War II, the belligerent power on the face of the Earth.
Well, and this is kind of the paradox of the free society.
It seems like you start out free, you get rich and powerful enough, along comes the greed and the corruption to match that, as George Lucas wrote in the prologue to Star Wars, and then comes the empire and destruction.
The only thing standing between this and that, I guess, is ideas.
And the willingness of a society to have a Congress full of Ron Pauls who just won't abuse the power that they have.
Well, since there's only been one in more than 200 years, I'm not waiting for a Congress full of myself.
Yeah, which I guess means more empire until collapse.
The road we're headed down.
All right, well, hold it right there, everybody.
It's Lew Rockwell from LewRockwell.com and the Mises Institute.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Lew Rockwell from the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com.
And I got this awesome little Mozilla tab kit where I can have 100 tabs lined up on the right side there.
And I keep LewRockwell.com/blog and the new political theater blog, LewRockwell.com/political theater open all day, mostly because I'm a Ron Paul of the And I just love every little article and YouTube that I can find.
And, you know, Lew, I was thinking when I saw the debate, the most recent debate in Iowa, where Ron ever so gently, completely thrashed Rick Santorum on the Iran issue and whether or not we needed to start a war with them.
And I thought, wow, we have at worst, at least another U.S.
At worst, at least another year of this Ron Paul arguing with the Rick Santorum's in the world about whether we need more wars or not.
And this is the very best thing.
This is like a straight shot of vitamin C for the ill American political culture.
Well, you know, over the years, I've been proud of Ron Paul, proud to know Ron Paul for many, many, many different reasons.
But I thought that I thought his courage and his eloquence in that exchange with Santorum was just astounding.
I mean, the fact that this is, of course, a very difficult issue to discuss politically, because we're supposed to murder everybody in Iran because allegedly they're threatening Israel, although Israel's got 300 atomic weapons and every other kind of chemical and biological weapon.
And Iran's got maybe we'll have one.
I mean, obviously, if Iran wants a nuclear weapon, it's only to protect themselves from being attacked by the U.S. or Israel or whomever, not because they want to attack.
In fact, Iran's not a belligerent power historically.
Maybe ancient Persia was, but not in many centuries.
And the fact that he got up there, told the truth, told the truth that, you know, Santorum tried to say that, well, the Iranians have been horrible ever since 1979 when Khomeini came in.
Well, as Ron pointed out, the trouble started in 1953 when the U.S. and British and the British MI6 and the CIA went in and overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and installed the oil-friendly Shah, who would run Iran for the benefit of the oil companies and for the benefit of the American empire very, very brutally.
I mean, he was a monster.
And I remember just one thing about the Shah, that when he put on—he had a very, very inflationary monetary policy, and like Nixon, he put on price and wage controls.
So the penalty for raising your prices without government permission, as all this money is going into the system and forcing you to as a businessman, was to be taken out in public and have the soles of your feet beaten off.
So there's just bone there, therefore, of course, crippling you for life.
This didn't happen, of course, to the big businessmen connected to the government, but the small and medium-sized businessmen.
Well, you know, that kind of conduct doesn't exactly endear you to the people.
And it was a great moment, as a libertarian, it was a great moment when the Shah was overthrown because it was all done peacefully.
What happened was people withdrew their consent.
And when people withdrew their consent, the whole system just collapsed like a house of cards.
And he had to go overseas with all his millions and his family and so forth.
And Khomeini came in, and nobody wants to hear this, but aside from his religious views, Khomeini was a far more free market and less tyrannical guy than the Shah.
I mean, he stopped the inflation and he got rid of a lot of regulations on the market.
That unfortunately has been undone by Ahmadinejad and company, and he's a big Keynesian Ahmadinejad, so he's definitely a bad guy, but economically and in internal terms.
But there's a reason that people, it wasn't only the fact that they felt he was a legitimate religious figure, they believed in his political program, Khomeini, and that, and also stopping the torture, not having secret police knocking on your door in the middle of the night and so forth.
So there were some real reforms for a while.
Again, a lot of them have been undone because, of course, because of all the external hate and pressure on Iran, it strengthens the government.
And when the government gets strengthened, what do they do?
They put their boot on the neck of the people, just like every government, like the American government, the Israeli government, and the other government.
So that's another reason not to have all these anti-civilian, anti-free trade sanctions that are designed to strengthen the government and cause more trouble.
They're not actually, no government ever gives up in response to sanctions, never ever happened.
It will never happen, because sanctions strengthen the government.
So that is what it's designed to do.
It's why U.S. policy wants to make trouble, and they do not want the government surrendering.
They want a war.
And so they're going to keep gearing up for another monstrous, murderous, mass-murdering expedition, this time against Iran.
And I hope to goodness it doesn't happen.
Were Ron Paul to be elected, of course it wouldn't happen.
Well, and you know, the thing about the Iran issue is, you know, it's nuclear technology.
So it's very murky, and people just automatically defer to the experts, or whatever the unanimous opinion is.
And it's virtually unanimous in the political culture in America that it's a terrible nuclear threat.
Something must be done.
The only question is what and how soon.
And it takes somebody like Ron Paul to not only be right on the issue as far as what should or shouldn't be done, but who has the wherewithal to say, look, here's what the National Intelligence Estimate says.
Here's the reality of politics in the region.
Here's what I told you would happen if you invaded Iraq, etc., etc., etc.
He really knows this stuff as good as the smartest think tank expert, or whatever, as far as his depth of knowledge about the issues.
So they can't beat him in an argument.
He gets an argument about Iran with anyone.
He's going to win because he's right, and because he knows it.
Now, of course, it's true that Iran, under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has the perfect right to have nuclear power plants and to enrich uranium to run the nuclear power plants.
We're supposed to think this is an evil act.
Every country does it.
Israel does it, and so forth.
As to the bomb, of course, I mentioned Israel's got 300 of them.
Turkey may have some.
Certainly, Pakistan has them.
Countries like Turkey apparently have them ready to assemble, kind of a thing.
That apparently is true of a number of countries in Europe and in Asia, too.
China's got them, and of course, the U.S. is over there with all its atomic weapons.
So the incentives are for the Iranian government to develop it.
I hope they don't, because I think these are inherently immoral weapons that are designed to kill civilians.
I mean, as bad as all wars are bad, but the sort of least bad kind of a war is what Mises called in the 19th century a war of the soldiers, where it's just one army against the other army, and they're not killing the civilians.
That is what has developed, as Hans Hoppe points out, under monarchical wars.
You even could have people go out and watch the battles.
I mean, that happened in the first battle of the American Civil War.
People actually, because they didn't have to be afraid that the military was going to come and kill them all.
That, of course, changed during the Civil War, which became an anti-civilian war, and as Hans demonstrates, it's a function of democracy that we think everybody in the other country is part of the regime and therefore can be killed, and they think the same about us.
So this is one of the bad effects of democracy, and if there's a war against Iran, just like there were perhaps a million civilians killed in the war in Iraq, we don't know how many people have been killed in the war on Afghanistan.
What about the war in Yemen and Ethiopia and, you know, all the rest of these things?
Who knows?
Secret wars, open wars that the U.S. is waging around the world.
Sometimes I would love to have, if anybody's got the data, by the way, I would love to report on at least an educated guess, how many civilians has the U.S. government killed in its history of depredations and killings?
How many millions of people?
Since 1791?
Yeah, I mean, since certainly the war of 1812, which was an aggressive war, an attempt to conquer Canada, despite the propaganda we hear, that was the purpose of that war.
In fact, in the Revolutionary War, the revolutionary side tried to conquer Canada, too.
So that was a theme for a while.
But yeah, the war against Mexico, the war against the South, the war against Spain, the war against Germany and Austria and so forth, how many people have been killed?
Well, it's got to be a few third Reichs worth.
Well, it certainly is, no question.
It's a lot of innocent people have been killed.
And we're supposed to think this is great.
Conservatives think this is, you know, like the heart of America.
This is the greatest thing.
This is patriotism, you know.
And of course, it's actually, I'm afraid that's why I'm not a patriot, why I'm not a nationalist, certainly, why I'm not a chauvinist.
It's, you know, the sort of basic libertarian insight that just because somebody's in a government suit doesn't mean that they have a different set of morals applying to them.
If it's wrong for you or me to go and shoot the people next door because we don't like their politics, it's wrong for the government to do it too, just because somebody's in a suit with little pieces of metal on their chest doesn't make them into, doesn't mean they have the right to kill, doesn't make them all, you know, 007 James Bond.
So the government, the things we can't do, we can't kidnap, they can't draft, we can't steal, they can't tax, we can't kill, they can't make war.
And it's the same rules that apply to government as to us or ought to apply to government.
It's not above the law, although that is why government exists, so it can be above the law and it can loot us and live off of us.
That's the purpose of the parasite called government.
Hey, Dick Cheney was bragging about torturing people on TV this morning.
What a sickening, you know, that fascist Nazi creep is now making a whole bunch of money while praising the wars he helped bring about.
He's denouncing the fact that Syria wasn't, Syrians were all massacred back in 2007 or whatever it was he was advocating this.
He's just a, you know, he's like a vampire.
I mean, he's like a, it's good that these people kind of look like what they are.
I mean, he looks like a thug.
He looks like a mafia leader.
I don't want to demean the mafia.
I mean, he's far worse than the mafia.
So yeah, he's raking in the dough.
Isn't that great?
Well, and now to wrap this up here real quick, back to Ron Paul.
And we still have a year of this going on.
Obviously, they tried to ignore him and that really backfired on them.
They still have a year of at least having to pretend to treat this man with respect as he explains, you know, his positions on foreign policy.
And I think most importantly, or very importantly, how we got into this war on terrorism, the blowback effect.
Chalmers Johnson popularized it among activists like you and I.
But Ron Paul's the one who taught, you know, the culture, that term blowback, who taught that we have almost, you know, 900 something bases in 130 countries and whatever.
This, we occupied Saudi Arabia and supported Israel before September 11th, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.
This kind of issue, this kind of argument, they're going to have to deal with.
They can no longer ignore after 10 years because Ron Paul's running for president.
So how important do you think that's going to be?
How much impact do you think that's going to have on the minds of the American people who've been so deluded with this?
They hate us because of their Islamic extremism nonsense.
I think that Ron Paul is like a world historic figure.
I don't know how, you know, the election will come out, but the effect he is having in people's minds and hearts is, I think, country changing.
I mean, he asked the question, he asked many unaskable questions, one of which is, how would we feel if some foreign country were over here telling us what to do and occupying us with their troops?
We wouldn't like it.
And yet people, without sort of thinking, think that other people should like it, should like having foreigners, armed foreigners, telling them what to do.
So Ron is, you know, I remember another incident when they said, well, you know, how would you get the troops out?
You say you want to get the troops out.
He said, well, they march them in, they can march them out.
I mean, he has such a great facility for explaining things in ways that just click into people's brains and can change them.
He's changed millions of people, and all around the world, by the way.
He's got fans and followers all over the world.
And so he's having a huge effect.
And it shows, again, what one man can do with the correct principles.
He can change history.
So I think Ron Paul is changing history.
And I think that maybe we won't see it in our lifetime.
Maybe we'll see it much sooner than we think.
But he's just having such a huge effect for good, for the cause of good, for peace, for free markets, for sound money, for all the causes that are associated with human prosperity and human flourishing.
Well, and it should be mentioned, too, especially by the likes of you and me, a great personal sacrifice.
I mean, this has got to be really hard work, being Ron Paul, sitting in the Congress as he is, and running for president at his age.
I mean, he could be sitting on the porch sipping iced tea, and he's not.
He's out here still working as hard as he possibly can on behalf of human liberty.
Well, he's not the sort of, he's not a sit-on-the-porch kind of guy.
He's a great athlete.
He probably might have even been a professional athlete if he hadn't had knee injuries in college.
He was always a champion athlete.
To this day, he bikes, you know, 25 miles a day.
He swims for hours in the pool.
He's an amazing guy, and he's always working.
His mind is always working.
He's always, you wouldn't believe, he's so well-read.
He's got to be by far the best, maybe since Jefferson, the most well-read guy in public life ever.
I mean, he's a serious scholar.
He knows everything about economics and history and law and, of course, medicine and, of course, great champion of drug peace, Beziris' drug war.
So he's such an unusual man.
He's just extraordinary, and we're very, very lucky to be living in what Juan Williams calls the age of Ron Paul.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show, as always, Lou.
I really appreciate it.
Scott, thank you very much.
All right, everybody, that's Lou Rockwell, chairman of Ludwig von Mises Institute and keeper of lourockwell.com.
Tons of great essays there every single day.lourockwell.com/blog, where all those writers blog, and lourockwell.com/political theater, where Lou keeps track of the 2012 election cycle for you.
