All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And now to our first guest today, it's Lew Rockwell.
He is the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of the Austrian School Economists, which means the ones who actually know what they're talking about as opposed to everybody else, and also runs LewRockwell.com, the most widely read libertarian website in the world, which also includes its own built-in blog and podcast show and the extra blog, the political theater blog, all things Ron Paul, a tab open in my tabs all day and night, every day.
Welcome back to the show, Lew.
How are you doing?
Scott, great to be with you.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And you know what?
I can't even remember anymore why I wanted to have you on in the first place, but then I thought, well, that's all right, because I have lots of things to talk about with you, but specifically if you wanted with your most recent article, which is actually a speech that you gave back in the mid-1990s, it looks like, here, down with the presidency.
So I know that you're a Ron Paul supporter, and you want very badly for him to be the president, but then you want down with the presidency.
Aren't those incongruent ideas?
No, I think not at all, because after all, the modern American presidency, as Ron Paul is the first to point out, is in effect an elective dictatorship, and unlike anything that was designed in the original Constitution.
So Ron specifically says he doesn't want to run people's lives, he certainly doesn't want to run the world, he doesn't want to run businesses, he doesn't want to run neighborhoods and families and so forth, which is the ambition of everybody else who's been a president or running for president, more or less.
There have been a few decent presidents, but in this article, although it's written, as you say, long ago, in effect I could be saying we need a Ron Paul presidency if we're going to have a presidency, rather than what has come about.
It's where all the worst aspects of the federal government are.
It's politically okay to hate the Congress, we're all supposed to hate the Congress, and certainly the Congress is eminently hateable, but you're never supposed to hate the presidency, because of course that's supposed to be the focus of your patriotism.
That is the warfare state, the spying state, the police state, that's the presidency.
If you think of all the worst agencies, you know, the tax police, the EPA, all the various military killing squads, the whole gigantic apparatus of the federal government is in the presidency.
It's a huge monster, the biggest thing in governmental terms ever to exist in the history of the human race.
Congress is a little like the courts, it's just a little tiny piece.
If we had a huge chart of the government, as a tree, let's say, the Congress, I mean the presidency is a gigantic trunk, and the Congress and the courts, which serve the presidency, are just little tiny twigs.
So I think the presidency needs to be taken down.
After all, every single president has left the situation worse than he found it.
Every single one has made things worse.
Some, of course, made them much worse much faster.
Think of Lincoln and Wilson and Roosevelt and LBJ and Nixon and George W. Bush and Obama, and we can go down the list of all the bad guys who made them.
But even Jefferson was a much better guy before the presidency and after the presidency.
We all have free will.
It is possible to resist the lures of power, and I believe that Ron Paul is the man who can do that.
Others didn't.
Now we've had some decent presidents.
I always joke that my favorite is William Henry Harrison, who died right after he was inaugurated, so he didn't actually get to do any harm.
There have been some others who've said some great things and did some great things among bad things, but the presidency really, in my own view, the constitutional presidency is a mistake.
George Washington made things much worse, just like all the other presidents.
He even invaded Pennsylvania with the head of American troops to kill people who weren't paying the vicious liquor tax of the moment.
But the presidency before the Constitution, and there were six American presidents before the Constitution, nobody knows who they are.
That's the way it ought to be.
We shouldn't be focused on these guys.
The presidency, under the Articles of Confederation, is a much more libertarian, less dangerous system than the current one.
But the presidency, we should all just like the presidency.
Anything that hampers the presidency, diminishes the presidency in popular myth and legend and love and so forth, is a very good thing.
So we should all focus, and yes, absolutely, that is the worst part of the government.
That's the part that's taxing us, spying on us, running our lives, and has a totalitarian ambition.
They would like to turn, which is happening quickly, I might add, turn this country into a totalitarian state.
Well, and it really does seem, too, that you have the whole cult of personality around the presidency itself, kind of regardless of the president, and I guess it's true that they do switch off parties and whatever, but you think about the 1990s, back when you wrote this article, right around 1996, in fact, when this speech was given, Lou, you could have probably gotten a lot of conservatives to say, yeah, that's right, Lou Rockwell, the presidency is too powerful, and the government is too big, and we've got too many jack-booted thugs running around, like even G. Gordon Liddy said back then, that kind of thing.
But by 1998, the problem was Bill Clinton, the president, and his peccadilloes, and what he had done wrong, more than anything, wasn't burning the Branch Davidians to death with the Delta Force, it was he had disrespected the office of the presidency, and it really is like the president and his family, at any given time, are conceived of, even in the popular imagination, not just in the media, but in the popular imagination, if there's such a thing, as our kind of royalty.
In fact, I remember reading or learning in school somewhere that the British are kind of better off with a queen, because our chief executive is also our head of state, and it endows him with all this respect that he didn't necessarily earn, but he becomes the chief of all our personalities, and not just the chief executive officer of these agencies, that kind of thing.
Sure, he immediately becomes, according to the polls, the most admired person in the world, and everybody is supposed to kowtow to him, we're not supposed to think there's anything wrong with him saying to us, don't use so much energy, don't use so much gasoline, don't use so much fuel, and so forth, and yet he has two Air Force Ones, which cost $179,000 an hour to run, and that's according to the government, which always, of course, underestimates all their prices, the cost of doing anything, $179,000 an hour.
So he has a vast apparatus, he lives in mansions, he has vast numbers of servants, and whenever he travels, he's like a Roman emperor, he has snipers and food tasters, and his own medical hospital, and thousands of officials, and they close down the entire city of Los Angeles, or Buenos Aires, or whatever, whenever the god king is on the move.
So, yeah, this is...
You really can't overstate it, can you?
You try to rock well, but you just can't do it.
No, it's alarming, and it's disgusting, and it's rotten, and of course, when...
You know, I'm not under the impression that the president actually personally runs the government, right?
He's like a symbol for the oligarchy of government, and when that symbol becomes a problem, George W. Bush, or whatever, the Republicans, they switch it to the other side, but everything goes on as the same before, because the same interest groups, the same permanent government, the same CIA, and all the spies, and killers, killer forces that the government has at its disposal, those all continue.
So the president represents the presidency, but the actual evil is not so much the guy, although he typically is evil, he wouldn't be in that job otherwise, but it's the presidency, the executive branch of the United States government is the biggest threat to us and to the whole world.
You know, I actually made a bumper sticker years ago that said, impeach the presidency, and it's not on the website anymore, and I asked Rick, hey, what happened?
He said, you know, we never sold a single one, and so we just ended up taking it down.
People don't even know what impeach means.
All right.
We'll be back with Lew Rockwell after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Talking with Lew Rockwell, chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
That's mises.org.
You have no idea how many tens of millions of pages of free published things are available at that website that you can learn with your brain.mises.org.
Also, lewrockwell.com, where all the greatest libertarians complain.lewrockwell.com.
Also, the political theater blog, and the plain old blog, too.
And I have my brand new copy of Red and Blue and Broke All Over, Restoring America's Free Economy by my good friend Charles Goyette, former partner in this Anti-War Radio project.
And right here on the back, it has an endorsement from Lew Rockwell.
No big surprise there, knowing what Charles has to say.
And now, I wanted to play this short clip for you, Lew.
Actually, well, it's about a minute, but I won't make you listen for that long.
But I want you to hear this.
I see that he's an honest and trustworthy man whose message of liberty is winning the hearts and minds of millions.
It's my honor today to introduce this man who's changed my life.
Please help me in welcoming him, Dr. Congressman and Presidential Candidate, Ron Paul.
All right, that's 4,000-something people cheering, standing room only in a giant auditorium with a mezzanine section and all these things.
I don't know, man.
It's really blown me away, Lew.
What do you make of this Ron Paul revolution?
Oh, it's so thrilling.
And Ron, in fact, did very well at a similar gathering at the University of Michigan four years ago, where he first heard the phrase, End the Fed, and chanted from the audience.
And that gave him the idea for the title.
Right, that's when they lit their Federal Reserve notes on fire, right, and started chanting.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
And so that was a great moment.
And, of course, this is very, very exciting.
Man, I wish he would win some states and get this thing on the road.
In the old days when the slogan, Don't trust anybody over 30.
Now I'm coming to think maybe that's right.
Maybe we should only allow people under 30 to vote.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
Ron would be the president.
So I don't know.
I mean, I think that, first of all, there are two parts to the revolution.
First is the educational thing.
If you look at that group at Michigan State University, you see he's already won that revolution.
I mean, he's already won young people, not only in this country, but all around the world.
Young people all around.
He could be president of the world if it were just young people voting.
So that's already happened.
But he's talking about the principles of liberty, about Austrian economics, about American history, and all related subjects, about war and peace, most important of all.
He's already won it.
So for the future, the future is very bright because these are the young people who eventually are going to be becoming greater and greater positions of influence in the future.
So that's great.
As to the Republican Party and these primaries and these caucuses, I have to say that I...
How shall I put this?
I don't entirely trust the Republican Party.
You don't.
So I think there have been some shenanigans going on with some of these things.
And I know that's considered...
You're supposed to be a horrible conspiracy theorist, and how dare you have those crazy, wacky ideas.
But we do know that the people in government and around government are willing to, say, kill a million people in Iraq without...
It doesn't phase them.
They're willing to assassinate and jail, torture.
They're all happy to do that.
So are we supposed to think it's actually beyond them morally to steal an election?
So I don't think they can steal elections massively.
I think it's not possible for them to, you know, give Romney 90%, 10% to everybody else.
They can't do that sort of thing.
They can push it a few percentage points.
You know, I think there has been some funny business.
Nevertheless, Ron, I think, is doing very well in terms of delegates because he's got the people who are...
I'll compare him.
This is strange to compare it.
The Ron Paul people are the Communist Party members.
In the old days, when they were in meetings, there was unions they were trying to take over, other political groups.
They were the ones who were willing to stay to the very end, do all the drudge work, and therefore could take over.
So the Ron Paul kids, especially, are exactly the same.
They're the ones who run for precinct delegate.
They're the ones who attend all the meetings.
They fill in all the forms and dot all the I's and do everything.
So already, I think, Ron is getting far more delegates than you might think from just the number of votes in the official primary or caucus.
So I think he's going to have a significant number of delegates at the convention.
What happens beyond that, you know, I don't know.
I myself tend not to put my trust in politics.
I tend not to think that...
I sort of make an exception for Ron, but I really tend to dislike politics, although I'm interested in it.
It's like a train wreck I'm passing, right?
You might slow down and look at it.
So I'm interested in it.
In fact, I used to be in politics myself before I went straight.
The movement goes on.
The revolution goes on, regardless of what happens in politics.
But I think Ron is going to be, because he's already an extremely important political figure in American history, I think it's going to be much more so.
There's going to be some fireworks at the convention, I tend to think, and I think it's going to be fun to watch all that.
So, of course, I have my fingers crossed, but I don't know what's ahead.
Well, yeah, I think you're really onto something there about what a world historical figure he is making himself.
Like, just right now, in front of our eyes, he's always been sort of our folk hero, giving speeches to small rooms full of devoted Rothbardians or whatever.
But now, millions and millions of people, and as you said, it's not just him that's going down in history.
It's this intellectual revolution.
It's the re-rise of the Jeffersonian, classical liberal, libertarian tradition in America.
Finally.
And even better, thanks to Austrian economics, because Ron Paul, even though he's not a credentialed economist, he is an economist.
I mean, he's very widely and deeply read in economics, whether it's Keynes, or especially, of course, the Austrians, his Marx, and so forth.
He's read it all.
But he really is an expert in Mises and Rothbard and Hazlitt and Hayek and Senholtz and all the great men.
And, of course, in libertarian books, too.
So, I mean, he's a great intellectual, as well as everything else, which also sets him apart from, you know, whatever one might say about Mitt Romney.
That's not what one would say, or Scantorum or the rest of them.
So, and Gingrich pretends to be one, but he's not.
He's just a shill for the warfare state and the police state, and, of course, personally corrupt and a creep.
So, Ron is very, very different.
Jefferson was a real intellectual.
Ron Paul was a real intellectual.
And that's another reason why this movement is going to continue.
It's going to get broader and deeper and is really our hope for the future.
And our future is not to be found in Tampa.
It's much beyond Tampa.
Yeah.
Well, and do you think, well, what are the prospects for peace with all this?
I mean, he keeps saying that it's going to end.
He's running for president.
He says, I know you're not going to listen to me, but still, you're going to go broke and you're not going to be able to afford your troops there anymore.
Are we really in danger of our troops having to hitchhike home from Afghanistan somehow?
I hope so.
I'd love to see it.
I'd love to see them go broke and have to hitch a ride.
But that means all the rest of us have to go broke, too, right?
Well, you know, you can't actually hope for this, even though I'm making a joke, because, of course, it's trouble.
On the other hand, you can have inevitable trouble.
It's a little bit like a guy who's been an alcoholic for 20 years and then he wants to get off it.
That's great.
But there are inevitable consequences that you can't undo what's happened.
So that's the same with the economic situation.
So, yes, the empire is going down.
I hope to goodness they don't murder a whole lot of Persians and Syrians as part of this great anti-Muslim war that the U.S. is waging.
I hope that's not going to happen.
At least, he's done a lot of evil stuff.
At least Obama, as Ron Paul always points out, has not yet bombed Iran.
So, of course, he's put on horrific anti-civilian sanctions and all that sort of thing.
But at least he hasn't bombed them.
So, I guess, you know, I'd like to think that the U.S. power elite is not as insane as it might seem to be.
I mean, this is actually bad for the whole world if they're not only committing murder, bombing men and women and children and destroying a great civilization and destroying cities and so forth, but you're, you know, we're going to have $10 a gallon of gasoline.
Now, there are people who would like that from an economic and others from an ideological standpoint.
They'd like to have that.
The Greens, for example, would love to see gasoline at $100 a gallon.
You know, nobody but the very rich who are the Greens, by the way, could drive.
And there are people who think it's a great way to hit all the Arabs that you have a high gasoline price.
But it would really be...
It's bad.
It's bad for the whole world.
It's bad for international trade.
It's bad for just comedy among nations and so forth and for the U.S. and Israel, of course, to be launching these vicious threats like day after day as well as, of course, murdering Iranian scientists and blowing up stuff in Iran and so forth and threatening to...
Because the U.S. and Israel, of course, are an existential threat to Iran, not the other way around, despite the propaganda.
So, you know, I must say I'm very worried.
I'm worried about what's happening in Syria.
And if you look at the PNAC plan, the Project for a New American Century, the sort of the neocon blueprint for what they wanted to do after they had a...
They said they needed a second Pearl Harbor.
So, they got that.
Rebuilding America's defenses.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, this is...
They also want to get Saudi Arabia and take control, more control of Egypt and, you know, the whole Arab world, make them all explicit colonies of the U.S. and Israel.
So, that's not...
It's not morally a good thing.
It's that...
Well, it's way out of reach, too.
You know, it doesn't make any sense.
And the same presidency that can't do anything, sure as hell can't run the entire former British Raj in a way that can even be in anyone's interest, even Lockheed's interest or the banker's interest.
At some point, this whole thing, as we're talking about, gets to the point where they're just going to go broke.
And again, I guess, this is one of the things that you were highlighting about Dr. Paul, too, is that he really has changed the conversation in the country about peace.
Because TV has made it pretty much...
You know, they have sealed the narrative from Vietnam that stinky hippies don't like war.
Everybody else knows that's perfectly great and that killing is fine and there's a wearing green exception to thou shalt not kill in the Bible.
And as long as you're working for Uncle Sam, like during World War II, it's just great to join the military and you'll get to go to college and it's perfectly acceptable in our entire society.
And he has really done more than anybody to undo that because he's a Republican from Texas and a Christian and square in the sense of, you know, his manner and his family and that kind of thing.
He's not from the left in that personal sense at all.
And he's saying, no, you don't have to be for this empire at all.
He's given people permission to go ahead and break from what they thought was the consensus they weren't allowed out of.
This is one of the most important things, maybe the most important thing Ron Paul has done.
He's raised the subject.
For a very long time, it was highly politically incorrect to discuss war and peace.
You know, politics stops at the water's edge and the rotten slogan of an earlier time.
No, it doesn't.
I mean, but, you know, and we're not supposed to discuss foreign policy because it's the core or the core of the state, the core of the empire.
So this is why Ron Paul has been demonized because he dared to raise the question of war and peace and ask questions like, how would we feel if this were happening to us?
That's one of the questions you're not allowed to ask in American politics.
It's okay for us to do it to them.
It's okay for us to occupy Afghanistan and disc their religion and tell them what to do and shoot them and send drones over to kill their children and so forth.
They're supposed to like it.
But we're never supposed to ask how would we feel if that were happening to us because of course we wouldn't like it.
And you might see young Americans taking up arms as a matter of fact if some alien country were occupying us, alien religion, alien ethnicity, alien history, alien language, and so forth.
But we're supposed to think it's all great.
In fact, the Afghanis, the Iraqis, all subject people are supposed to love being dominated by strangers like that.
Well, of course, they don't and we wouldn't.
In fact, Iran has raised these issues and of course, as you point out, the economic disaster of the empire, it's very good.
Like all empires, it's very good for certain interest groups but it's very bad for the average Joe or Jane.
So Iran's raising this and he's changed a lot of minds and I'm one of the most one of the most heartening things of the entire Ron Paul campaign was when the Pew Foundation did the best amount of polling among young people, political polling and one of the things they found out was what was the one issue that attracted young people to Ron Paul.
If you hear or listen to The National Review or whatever, it's pot smoking.
I have nothing against pot smoking but that's not what attracts them to Ron Paul.
What attracts them to Ron Paul is the war that young people have been turned on to this issue that they are seeing through this government generated smokescreen and their understanding how important this is, why it's immoral and impractical and a financial disaster and all the other things we can say about war.
The fact that Ron Paul's raised the issue changed people's minds and the opposition knew just by raising the issue it's trouble for them.
So the only thing they can do is try to suppress it.
You know, absolutely.
In 2008 they were able to say well we ignore him because he's just so far outside.
He's not serious as Glenn Greenwald would say.
He's not serious.
We don't listen to him or whatever.
This time around it's more and more obvious that yeah, they freeze him out because he's good on war and because he's good on the Fed and they're not.
And I'm not, I think that he's really making them look bad.
The shadow that he casts as, you know, people know Ron Paul well enough now that they go well here's this kind old guy.
Nothing he says seems that crazy but maybe he's just too good on a couple of issues where our entire state apparatus and our entire political establishment and our entire media establishment they all have a consensus that is wrong that he's trying to overturn and it's just it's almost impossible to ignore now I think for millions of people.
And of course also we're helped by the fact that it's a tissue of lies.
I mean they have no truth on their side in addition to morality and economics and other things.
So the fact that Ron Paul can you know, he can overturn it because it's all based on lies and he has the truth on his side and this is very frightening to them.
So it's why he continues to be demonized to be ignored to be produced in what happens but still he's touching so many hearts and minds changing hearts and minds and again not only in this country kids follow him all over the world and older people too.
So I think you know he's just he's just the greatest figure we've ever had of this sort.
He certainly is the best man in ideological terms from a libertarian standpoint ever to be politically prominent.
Well you know it just so happens that domestic policy but rotten on foreign policy for example.
Right, right.
Well it just so happens that the best way for people to get to know him really is to read what he's written hundreds and hundreds of articles at lourockwell.com and at antiwar.com by Ron Paul and people ought to go and take a look because like he said Newt Gingrich gets up there and says oh profoundly fundamentally blah blah blah and pretends he's smart but who out of all these guys has written thousands of articles before?
Dr. Paul.
And they're awesome.
So there you go lourockwell.com antiwar.com/Paul and we're way over time I've kept you way over time but I really appreciate your time Lou.
God thank you.
Talk to you again soon.
Everybody that is the great Lou Rockwell from lourockwell.com the Mises Institute at mises.org he's the author of Speaking of Liberty and the Left the Right and the State and his most recent piece at lourockwell.com is called Down with the Presidency a great speech from 1996 and we'll be right back in one minute.
