07/04/12 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and I just got the sad news that Eric Garris's mom, not a Sesame, died this morning.
She was very old and very sick for a long time, so you know, it wasn't a surprise or anything but still sad.
So, you know, how about this next interview will be dedicated to her memory.
I know Anthony knew her well too.
It's Anthony Gregory, a writer for everything Libertarian, including this one from last year, but I think it was from this year too or something anyway.
It's at the Libertarian standard.
Should we celebrate the American Revolution?
Always controversial, Anthony Gregory.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
I just got...
I didn't know about Sesame until I just heard you say that.
That's terrible news.
It's very sad.
Yeah, well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
I know you probably knew her a lot better than I did.
Yeah, well, you know, for years I've heard you on the radio be the bearer of bad news.
Yeah, but it's usually not personal, you know?
It's not usually personal, but aside from that kind of thing, I'm doing okay.
It's the, you know, it's the day off.
It was hard this morning to get to find a place that was open for coffee.
Well, happy Independence Day.
I gotta tell you, I just, I ain't feeling it.
I mean, maybe I'm in a bad mood anyway.
It's been kind of a lousy week, but I just, I used to be so excited about the Declaration of Independence.
I used to print copies of the Declaration of Independence and go down to auditorium shores and pass them out to strangers who would all call me commie and stupid.
And what the hell does the Declaration of Independence have to do with the 4th of July, you stupid idiot, they would say.
And, but I loved it, man.
Thomas Jefferson and screw you, King will shoot you with our muskets and all of that cool stuff.
And now you're saying basically what I feel, which is who cares about that stupid?
Well, one thing I, my article about Independence Day and the revolution was kind of looking at it from a libertarian perspective.
Certainly, I think conservatives and liberals don't have much acclaim to Independence Day either, because conservatives who say they don't like taxes, but support the troops and the national security apparatus.
I mean, it was the troops, it was the warfare state taxes, not the welfare state taxes that the colonists revolted against.
So this idea of politics ends at the water's edge was not the founding tradition.
And liberals certainly believe in a state far more powerful than King George's.
But on the other hand, for years, you know, I think you and I both were accustomed to trying to reclaim Independence Day as our holiday that had been tarnished by the status.
But looking more at the American Revolution, I think that there's a very dark side to it.
And that it's kind of disingenuous for us to be all that excited about the revolution and the independence movement, because although many of the normal American colonists did genuinely come to believe in classical liberalism, did genuinely fight for their homes and their communities and families.
Like all wars, the American Revolution was a battle over territory.
It was a corrupt war.
It led to centralization of power, violations of liberties and peace.
And in the end, I don't know if it was good for liberty anyway.
Yeah.
Well, I like this.
You say we can find it hilarious that Obama Democrats celebrate Independence Day as a liberty of the old American sort has anything to do with their agenda.
That's the thing.
And you know what I appreciate Fourth of July for being day off, drink beer, cook outside fireworks day.
Hell yes, we ought to have those every Saturday, whatever it is, you know.
And that's what the Fourth of July really means to people now.
And if you and if you asked them about the Declaration of Independence, they really don't know anything about it anymore, do they?
They don't even know anything about those principles either.
Yes, that's true.
They don't.
I mean, at its best, the Declaration of Independence is a very revolutionary, seditious document where the rebels were saying the state does not have legitimate authority unless we say so.
And we'll put up with the state much longer than might be morally justified just because overthrowing a government is imprudent.
You don't just go overthrow a government for transient causes, but the litany of injustices inflicted upon us, the colonists, by you, the king, have become too great to bear.
And there's something admirable about this, but look at the laundry list of crimes against humanity and against constitutionalism perpetrated by this administration, by the Bush administration, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Fork.
I mean, we haven't had anything resembling a Jeffersonian in the best sense of the word administration since, what, Grover Cleveland, maybe?
And even he used the military against strikers.
I mean, even he was probably worse than King George, our most Jeffersonian president, putting aside Jefferson, who was not a Jeffersonian at all.
In fact, talk about that a little bit.
Tell us about the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.
Well, let's see.
He doubled the territory of the U.S. through the constitutionally dubious, in his own mind, Louisiana Purchase.
He more or less formed the Marines to send them to the Barbary Coast to stop these tributes being exacted, which didn't even work in the long run.
He had this terrible embargo against British and French goods, where he actually used military authority to impede trade and to search people's cargo.
He tried to get Congress to suspend habeas corpus in 1807 to deal with the Ehrenberg conspiracy, and Congress wouldn't oblige.
The Senate liked his idea, but the House wouldn't oblige.
To his credit, he didn't go ahead and suspend it anyway, but he who had actually said during the constitutional convention that there was no reason ever to suspend habeas did find a reason to do so once he was president.
He did some good things.
He cut taxes, but he was arguably more tyrannical than the king had been, if you look at the embargo, especially.
As I mentioned in the article, all of the first few founding father presidents were worse than the king.
They were certainly closer than the king.
The U.S. government that arose during the war and became consolidated after the war was a more costly, expensive, intrusive government than what the colonists had suffered.
The British government only extracted about 1% of the wealth of the colonies through taxes, and maybe 2% for the South, which suffered the brunt.
But this was miniscule compared to the government that soon grew in this land of the free.
So there's that.
Also, the Declaration of Independence, though even radicals like Sam Konkin and even I have some residual respect for some of it.
First of all, Jefferson originally wanted to blame the British for slavery, which was voted down by the Southern constitutional type.
I see there's a break.
All right, well, we'll get back to that, the revisions of the Declaration, here in a second.
It's Anthony Gregory from Lew Rockwell and the Independent Institute and everything else.
All right, y'all, welcome back to The Thing here.
I'm Scott Warren.
I'm talking with my buddy Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute and LewRockwell.com and StrikeTheRoot.com.
This one that we're talking about, should we, that is libertarians, celebrate the American Revolution?
That's at the libertarian standard.
Who else are you writing for these days?
Oh, of course, the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, your advisor or something or other there.
What else?
Through the Independent Institute, I've been doing a weekly column for the Huffington Post.
Oh, right, that's right.
I've seen a few of those.
I should keep up with that.
Yeah, it's some of the most libertarian stuff on the site.
That's great.
That's really great.
I get a little vicarious thrill knowing a bunch of Huffington Posters are stumbling across your writings there and getting smacked right upside the brain with it.
On the last one, I talked a little about Fast and Furious, but then I went after Gonzalez and Janet Reno and Meese and John Mitchell and Palmer and Robert Kennedy.
And I just said all, Hey, okay, so maybe those are all horrible people, right?
But you have to respect the office.
We fought the British so that you could respect the office of the Attorney General.
All right.
Anyway, so wait a minute.
Let's go back to attacking Thomas Jefferson here.
How much of his foreign policy regarding the embargo on British goods and all of that had to do with leading to the actual War of 1812, Madison's War, his sidekick?
Um, you know what?
I don't know.
I don't think that the diplomatic continuity was like this inexorable cascade toward war or anything.
But I know that there were trade interests involved behind the war.
That's a really good question.
And I'm embarrassed that I don't have a better answer.
It's been a while since I've thought enough about the War of 1812.
I know that this is the 200 years.
You see, my problem is I think there was continuity there, but I don't have a footnote for you.
I don't remember anymore.
It's been a long time since I came to that conclusion.
Whatever it was based on is kind of gone.
Yeah, it seems vaguely to make sense, but I don't know.
I should definitely know that, and I will look into that.
All right.
Well, then you owe us a real answer here on the show soon.
Okay.
How about that?
No, yeah, no, of course.
I want to know.
And not only do I want to know now, I want to know the issue well enough where it's justified to have me on to talk about it.
So thanks.
That's probably, you know, obviously there was a general continuity in the quasi-Jeffersonian expansionism.
I mean, we Libertarians always like to say the party of Jefferson was the more libertarian party compared to the Whigs or the Federalists or the Republicans or whoever they were against for the first half of this country, right?
But the thing is, the Democrats were always at least as bad on slavery, if not worse, and they were kind of worse on war up until the Civil War.
I mean, all of the big wars in American history, there weren't that many of them, but the big ones before Lincoln were Democrat wars, just like after Lincoln.
I guess the Spanish-American War, but really the Democrats- Shut up.
I think Barack Obama's listening.
We don't want to give him any ideas.
True, Jefferson.
Yeah, but you know, Jefferson and all those guys wanted to, they thought it was basically the destiny of the U.S. to conquer the entire Western Hemisphere.
In fact, Jefferson, even Jefferson himself, if he saw where the U.S. was now, he might, he might, far from thinking the U.S. has been too warmongering, though maybe he'd think that in regard to the other hemisphere, he would say in the West, maybe we haven't gone far enough.
We didn't conquer all of Mexico and all of Latin America and Cuba.
He thought we'd certainly have Cuba and Canada.
You know, these expansionists, they wanted Canada, and the first major military operation in the American Revolution was the invasion of Canada.
And then in the War of 1812, Americans invaded Canada again.
They just couldn't get through the heads that the Canadians didn't really want to be part of America.
Yeah, you know, I just read a great article because it was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of that war, and this article had some Canadian, an American says to the Canadian that, yeah, the War of 1812, I don't really know very much about that one, and the Canadian says, yeah, that's because you guys lost, because that was the whole thing.
It was an aggressive invasion of Canada that was defeated and repelled.
And in fact, in no small part because the American soldiers mutinied and refused to invade in at least a couple of different circumstances.
Yeah, the War of 1812 was totally bunk.
I don't know, I guess it's just because the British were the enemy that there's this residual belief that it was a just war, even among our circle, some of our circle.
But it was not a just war.
It was even less of a just war than the Revolution.
One thing I note is that in the American Revolution, it's, you know, you get a bad reputation among Libertarians for taking like the Howard Zinn position on this, but I can't help but think that it does matter when you have a very large percentage of your population enslaved, and they're not really getting much out of the Revolution.
And many of them are defecting or use the war as an opportunity to flee.
I mean, that was the way that the American Revolution was good for slaves, was that many slaves became free in the chaos of the war.
And the American Revolutionary spirit did, of course, cement the abolitionism.
Americans does get credit for having the first anti-slavery societies, though the U.S. did cling on to chattel slavery longer than almost anyone else did.
But the slaves weren't really in on it.
Many of them defected.
The British offered freedom to slaves that would defect, just like happened a little bit in the Civil War.
But and also the American Indians, many of them sided with Brits, understandably, because ever since the Proclamation of 1763, the British were seen as a buffer between the ethnic cleansing of the colonists and the Indians.
So the problem with going into any of this is sometimes even the leftists of the leftists have a point about some of this stuff.
Well, and it's problematic that so many libertarians kind of have a right-wing background.
And so they just, you know, are repelled by anything that smacks of, you know, Lisa Simpson-esque, you know, boohoo political correctness, you know, even though actually once they become libertarians, they really need to reassess the history of some of these things on libertarian premises.
You know what I mean?
I mean, in fact, you mentioned Howard Zinn.
He has the right-hand man of, I think, General Taylor and, you know, in charge of, as soon as Texas joined the Union, the moment Texas joined the Union, picking a fight with Mexico, and he's got the right-hand Smithers, kept a diary and told the whole real story.
And there it is.
It's just, and it's just horrifying.
There's no question who the bad guys are.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Often, though, the bad guys are everybody.
Well, yeah, there's that, too.
I didn't necessarily mean that Santa Ana and, you know, whoever took up after him were the good guys.
But yeah.
Is it still Santa Ana?
I forget now, Texas history.
I'm so stupid.
The Mexican War, though, was, you know, I could see some, I could see why some of, there'd be some understanding of how the, who were originally American were invited in to Texas, and then they got used to being there.
And I think that Texas versus Mexico is a lot less of a, I take much less of a politically correct view on that than the whole United States versus Mexico under Polk.
I don't always side with the smaller political unit, but it's not a bad place to start your analysis.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's been too long since I studied Texas history, because, of course, just the way they teach it is, well, you know, they were trying to, you know, violate property rights and all this stuff, take people's guns.
But then, you know, the revisionist view of that is the Mexican government is trying to outlaw slavery.
And that's what the Texans were fighting for, is their right to keep slaves.
I don't really know enough, because I'm an idiot.
And we're out of time for this discussion.
But anyway, I feel very unpatriotic.
Thanks, Anthony.
Anthony Gregory, everybody.