All right, folks, welcome back to Antiwar Radio Chaos 92795.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide, KAOS959.com.
And by golly, I just feel like talking about the Ron Paul Revolution and can't figure who better to talk about the Ron Paul Revolution with than his good friend and the proprietor of the number one libertarian site in the entire world, LewRockwell.com.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Scott, great to be with you.
Just let me mention, when I talk about Ron Paul and electoral politics, I am not speaking as the president of the Mises Institute, which is a non-political, non-partisan educational organization having nothing to do with politics.
I'm just speaking as the editor of LewRockwell.com.
That's great to have you on, and what a week this is, huh, for the Ron Paul Revolution?
Well, just tremendous.
And I think only the beginning, by the way.
I don't think this is any kind of peak.
This is only one step on an upward staircase.
I'd say it's a good leap up two or three stairs even.
Well, yeah.
Running with the analogy there, I have a very visual imagination here.
So, yeah, and speaking of that, I have to say, I'm actually beginning to entertain fantasies of Ron Paul looking into the camera, giving a speech from his desk in the Oval Office, and seeing him as president in front of the blue curtain doing the press conference with the Washington press corps folks.
And it's starting to seem like something that I'm willing to entertain the possibility that he could actually get the nomination and then trounce Hillary Clinton a year from now.
I'm going to be publishing an article tomorrow by a young scientist, Catherine Muratori, who does an analysis of the polls.
And one of the things she points out is that even if we believe the latest poll, which shows Ron at 5%, the CNN poll nationally, and Giuliani at 21 or in others someplace in the middle, and then Ron's ahead of two or three others, that the Ron Paul supporters are unbelievably dedicated to Ron.
They will get out and vote.
And if you look at the number of registered Republicans who vote in a primary, it's only about 6% to 8% of them are in the last several elections, up to 8.9% actually the highest.
So that if you have, if all of Ron Paul, even at the present level, and his name ID increases, his support increases, whether it's in New Hampshire or South Carolina, Iowa, and other states.
But even if we were to look at things right now and hold the election today, given the fact that all the Ron Paul people would get out to vote, and a lot of the people who might say they were for Giuliani will not bother to get out and vote, she thinks that Ron would actually already win the New Hampshire primary.
Wow.
Yeah, or I think at least come in pretty close to the top.
And one thing they keep saying is important there in New Hampshire is I think it's 40% are undeclared independents.
And the worry is that they'll all go vote in the Democrat primary for Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton.
And then the hope is that, no, they'll all lean right this time.
Well, we didn't have to see, but I guess some of that is based on just how much of a race there is and how much Hillary looks like the sure winner of the primary.
But I think that there's more and more people examine Barack Obama and realize that his slight anti-war tinge is just baloney, that it's true that he verbally opposed the war while in the State Senate, not of course being able to vote on it.
But he voted for every single war spending bill.
He's one of Bush's willing executioners.
So the idea that this guy is anti-war is just nuts.
What's funny, yesterday I talked with Eric Boehlert from Media Matters for America.
They published a piece defending Barack Obama from Charles Kruthammer's accusation that he took the military option off the table for dealing with Iran.
And Media Matters pointed out that's just not true.
Barack Obama continues to maintain the violent, aggressive war option for Iran.
I also love the fact that when they say, nothing's off the table.
You know, instead of, of course, the government always speaks in euphemisms about its key activities, which are murder and theft, or as they call it, war and taxation.
But when they say that nothing's off the table, what they're actually saying is, we reserve the right to kill a lot of people.
We're going to just destroy their homes.
We're going to burn their children to death and their parents and destroy their cities and their businesses and just wreck a whole civilization.
Nothing is off the table.
And you know, I always think, what would ever happen if some foreign leader said, you know, nothing's off the table, we may shoot Mr. X.
You know, that would be considered unbelievable outrage.
And indeed, it wouldn't be a smart thing to do, and it wouldn't be a good thing to do.
But people in the U.S. feel absolutely free to threaten murder and mayhem at the drop of a hat, and of course, to engage in murder and mayhem at the drop of a hat.
And everybody else is just supposed to take it and like it.
You know, I've been really thinking about this a lot in the last week, how more than anyone else in this country, it's the people who make sure to go vote for the most right-wing judge.
Because they want law and order, dammit.
They want murderers and rapists and criminals and robbers to be locked up where they belong.
These are the law and order people who think that murderers, you know, these are the death penalty supporters for the crime of murder.
And yet they're willing to have it committed in their name, as you say, at the drop of a hat.
Because part of it is, you know, I don't want to excuse people like this, but they're all taught from the earliest days in the government schools that the government is exempt from the moral law.
I mean, if we think about what are the many ways to sort of put libertarianism in a nutshell, but one way to do it is to say government is not exempt from the moral law.
It's not actually all the things that are immoral for us as private citizens or as groups of private citizens.
It's also a moral for the government, just because somebody in a uniform or lives in Washington, D.C., out of the taxpayer, doesn't mean that they can do things that are immoral and they're excused.
But of course everybody's taught that indeed they can be excused, that they are above the law, that they're above the natural law, that nothing applies to them.
There are no restrictions.
And whatever the government decides to do for our own good or for the good of the world or for national security or whatever excuse they're using is to be not only excused but applauded.
Yeah, I remember learning that as a very young child, the difference between killing someone and being in a war.
Because being in a war is great, like World War II.
Well, that's right.
And that's not actually killing at all.
Why, it's just really being sweet to them or something.
No, of course it's just, it's actually insane and it requires, you know, it's why libertarianism is such a liberating philosophy.
Because once you see through the fog generation machine of the government and understand that, you know, this key point that they're not above the moral law, then you see everything differently, you see everything differently in terms of history or current events or what they're doing to the economy or, you know, Guantanamo or a million and one other things.
The scales fall from your eyes, you read every newspaper differently, any TV program you see, certainly any politician you listen to.
And, you know, you also realize that Ron Paul is a very different, even though he serves in the Congress, is a very, very different kind of man from those others.
I mean, he's the only person I've ever encountered in politics, and I've encountered a lot of them, who's not an egomaniac.
And I thought it was very, very moving when he said on Jay Leno the other night that, they were talking about the success of the campaign, and he, you know, he said that the messenger has defects, but the message does not have defects, and that this message of freedom.
And, of course, it helps, and I think this is one of the reasons that he appeals to people.
He is not a crazed, I mean, most of the, most politicians, you know, they go into office to wage, to rule.
They want to, what St. Augustine called the libido dominandi, the lust to rule, the lust to dominate, which he thought was sinful.
And that, you know, most of us have enough trouble running our own lives and trying to deal with our families and neighbors and so forth.
So you're not actually interested in running the house next door or the town next door or the country next door.
But, of course, there are people who are interested in that, and they go into politics.
But there have been a few exceptions to that rule, and thank goodness we've got one right now who's, I would say, a shining light compared to the rest of them, and I think people see that.
And that understanding that government is just people and that they're really bound by the same moral laws as the rest of us, that's really the source of his consistency.
It's interesting to me to read, and particularly in the mainstream media, where they think it's just wild and inconsistent and hard to define when they say, well, he's against the war, but he's also for a gold standard, and that kind of thing.
Whereas, you know, for me, I just grew up understanding the link between, you know, war and central banking, I guess, so to me it just makes perfect sense.
But these are things, you know, counterfeiting money and waging aggressive wars, these are both things that are crimes for an individual to do, and so, therefore, they're crimes for the government to do.
That's why Ron Paul's opposed to them both, right?
No, of course, that's exactly right.
I sometimes have wondered myself in the setting up at the Federal Reserve in 1913, right before the war, did they set up the Federal Reserve to make war, or did they make war to be able to print the money?
I don't know, I mean, I guess they both go together for the government and the special interests affiliated with it, and this is...
Re-read your Carol Quigley, Lou, they created the banks so they could have the war.
But it's certainly true that, you know, this is the heart of the government, and if we look back historically at the defenders of the gold standard, you see that one of the points they made is that it restricted wars.
And, in fact, this has always been why, you know, why, if we look at the history of the development of English liberty and this sort of thing, people wanted to restrict the king from being able to declare war on his own, that's the reason they wanted to restrict him financially, and also why he shouldn't be allowed to just debase the currency.
Now, on your blog today, you linked to Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.
Yes.
And you took a look at that, and he brought up something about the gold standard, and this is...
I believe this was sort of the implied premise of one of Jay Leno's questions, and this is something that I see Ron Paul getting all the time, or at least people referring to this, when he's not there to straighten him out.
And that is the idea that somehow returning to a gold standard, which I'm not certain is actually his position, but that to do so would actually be very disruptive, that we haven't had that in a long time, and there's not enough gold, and this is the kind of thing that could hurt the economy or something.
It's some crazy idea out of left field or right field somewhere.
Can you straighten us out on that?
Well, certainly, Ron would refer to it as going forward to a gold standard.
He thinks that there were flaws with the previous gold standards, as indeed there were, that thanks to the work of Mises and Rothbard and Haslett and the other great Austrian economists, we know much more today about the proper structure of a monetary system than people did in those days.
And so he's focused on a commodity money, and he mainly is interested in something that can't be printed up at will by the government.
And would this be disruptive?
Well, it would certainly be disruptive to the people who are ripping us off.
I mean, all the people who are the big banks, the military industrial complex, the government itself, they all do very well from the system.
The rest of us don't do well.
So, I mean, it would be disruptive to some people, but it would be the basis of a lasting prosperity and freedom for the rest of us.
Okay.
Now, when someone goes to community college or they read Secrets of the Temple, the Washington Post book on the Fed by William Greerter, that kind of thing, you get the idea that inflation actually is good for the middle class because they get to buy houses and borrow in dollars and pay back in dimes, and that it's really the rich who suffer from the artificially low interest rates and their savings not making a lot of money.
And balance, that's really a good thing, that if we had sound money, that basically there would be extremely high interest rates and only the very richest people would be able to own any property.
Well, of course, when we had sound money, the interest rates were very low.
In 1864, right towards the end of the Civil War, the Confederacy floated its last loan in London, and they had to pay the unbelievable high interest rate of 6%, because, of course, people figured, well, they're not going to be here.
They may not be here much longer.
So, I mean, companies were able to sell 100-year bonds at 1 and 2% interest rates in the days of the gold standard.
So, that's just, Greider is a commie, of course, and he gets a lot of stuff wrong, and that's part of it.
But it's an amazing thing.
In effect, these people are, Kurtz and the rest of them, are paying a backhanded tribute to Ron, that he's made monetary policy a successful campaign issue, which it's never supposed to be discussed.
We're supposed to think of the Federal Reserve, if we think of it at all, as both too complicated and too boring to be interested in, whereas on the other end, it's actually not boring, and by the way, we're being ripped off.
There's nothing more interesting than that.
Last night, interestingly enough, when Ron was walking through the National Airport, this well-dressed man with a British accent came up to me and said, Ron Paul, I just want to congratulate you on the fact that you've been able to make the Federal Reserve and monetary policy a campaign issue.
He said, I think it's just thrilling.
He said, by the way, I'm an economist at the IMF, and I agree with you.
The IMF should be abolished as a good guy within the IMF.
When he spoke to the University of Michigan after the Dearborn debate, 2,000 students came out to hear him, 2,000 undergraduates, and kids from that campus told me they can't remember a politician ever getting that kind of a turnout.
And they were applauding him on the war and on civil liberties and free markets and the kinds of things he talks about.
When he started talking about monetary policy, some of these kids started chanting, and then the whole crowd picked up the chant, Gold, gold, gold, bunch of undergraduates from the University of Michigan calling for a gold standard.
And some of them were lighting dollar bills as a way of sort of saying, take that, buddy, to the Federal Reserve.
And one of the things, if I think back to my days in the libertarian movement in the old days or the libertarian party, Murray Rothbard always used to make the point that too many libertarians didn't want to read anything.
They didn't want to actually learn about history and about economics.
They didn't want to have a club or an equivalent of a rotary for them.
But these Ron Paul kids, I see them as just tremendously interested in learning about real history, about real economics, about libertarian philosophy.
It's really extraordinary.
I mean, he's creating, even aside from electoral questions, he's creating an extraordinary libertarian movement of a sort that maybe it's never existed in this country.
Maybe it hasn't existed since, I don't know, the local focos or the hardcore Jeffersonians and so forth of a very long time ago.
But one of the key things is monetary policy.
I know an American who's a pollster, and he lives in Europe, and he does polling, political polling for right-wing political parties, the Christian Democrats in Germany and the Tories in Britain and so forth, I mean, the big parties.
And he said that he understood that the elites in America were worried about Ron Paul because of his opposition to the war.
But he said the elites in Europe are worried about him because he's actually succeeded in making central banking an issue to actually get people to start to think about central banking, which, of course, you don't have to think about it long or know much about it to realize it's an unbelievable disaster for everybody except, of course, the guys running the counterfeiting machine.
Well, a couple of points I want to say here is, first of all, in Secrets of the Temple by William Greerter, I remember slapping my forehead like Bull Shannon on night court when he gets to the part about how ever since 1913, if you combine all the criticism the Federal Reserve has ever suffered and put it all together, it has amounted to exactly nothing.
And that basically they're within the walls of the Federal Reserve, they do not feel that pressure at all, and they do not care.
All of us are basically just howling at the moon.
And yet that was written before the Ron Paul campaign of 2007-2008, I think.
It's going to be a different story from here on out.
But now to the more important point, which is you say that inflation actually is really harmful for the government to create this money out of nothing.
And I know that Dr. Paul on the campaign trail keeps telling people that it's the working class and the poor and the retired who suffer the most from the government counterfeiting money.
How's that?
Well, basically there are two things that inflation does, which is an increase in the money supply by the Federal Reserve that operates through the banking system in our own country.
They don't just actually print out notes and spend them, they do it through the banking system in order to enrich and to empower the big banks.
But here are the two things wrong with inflation.
One, it causes prices to go up.
We know about that, but it involves a redistribution of wealth.
Because as prices are going up, the people who get the newly printed, newly created money first, which tend to be the big guys in society, big corporations, the big banks, military industrial complex, and the government itself, they are able to spend this money before it's lost its value.
Like the Citigroup bailout they were talking about in the news?
Well, yes, that's exactly the sort of thing that's going on.
But the people who get the money at the end of the chain, the new money, which tends to be the poor, working class people, retired people, the more vulnerable people in society, when they get it, the prices have gone up.
So that money created like this actually affects a redistribution from the poorest and most vulnerable members of society to the richest people connected to the state.
So it's unbelievably immoral, and this is one of the reasons they inflate, because it does do that.
I mean, they benefit from it.
Then there's the other point that the great Austrian economists have shown.
That's been known for some time, but it took Mises and Rothbard and others to show that when inflation takes place through a banking system and a central bank like the Federal Reserve, it lowers interest rates below what they would otherwise be.
It lowers them below the market rate, leading to businessmen making investments that they think are economically justified.
But when the end of the bubble comes, it turned out not to have been economically justified.
We can think of all the housing industry, for example, right now.
And so inflation also brings about recessions and depressions and also artificial booms like we saw in the housing market.
And just tremendous disruption, tremendous suffering and destruction of wealth.
So the Federal Reserve is like a – you know, they should be – Bernanke should go around in a devil suit or something.
I mean, this is a very bad institution.
It's an evil institution, morally evil.
Iran would point out it's unconstitutional.
There's obviously no justification for it in the Constitution.
It's economically destructive and empowers the government.
I mean, this is why, for example, when Bush decides he wants another X hundred billion dollars for his aggression in Iraq, there's no controversy over this.
They just pass it and they spend it.
Because if he had to actually raise taxes to get this money, there wouldn't be a war in Iraq.
If he had to actually borrow it, there wouldn't be a war.
It's only because he can print it that he's able to finance this monstrosity.
Yeah, he can actually cut taxes while he's waging a war overseas.
Yeah, even though, of course, the deficits he's running mean either more inflation or higher taxes in the future.
So he's actually – he pretends he's cutting taxes.
He's really not cutting taxes.
He's insuring vastly higher taxes and other extractions from everybody's paycheck and bank account through inflation.
So, of course, he's a monster, Bush, in economic terms, in war terms, in every other terms I can think of.
Okay, now, Lew, I know you're friends with Ron Paul and you guys are very conversant in monetary policy and this and that, and I think you're probably qualified to answer this question.
If he was the president, what would the bill that he sent to Congress say?
What would he do about this?
Well, you know, of course, I can't actually speak for him.
I know that – I mean, there's some – but we can certainly talk in the abstract.
I mean, there are some things that a president can do on his own.
He can repeal executive orders.
He is the commander in chief.
He can order the troops home.
I mean, there's all kinds of things he can do on his own.
In terms of the Federal Reserve, I think the federal – it would require legislation, but it seems to me if Ron Paul – if and when Ron Paul is elected, you will see the central bank immediately adjusting itself to his wishes.
There was a great moment earlier in the history of the Fed when Arthur Burns, who was the monster who enabled Nixon's vast inflation, and after the stink of that, they sort of got him out of the country and they appointed him ambassador to Germany when he left the Fed to – as a reward, but also something that got him out of the United States because he was such a controversial figure.
So he's holding his first press conference at the airport in Bonn, and some smart German reporter said, how could you have inflated the way you did?
How could you have done what you did to the dollar and the whole economies of the whole West through the inflation that you enabled?
And Burns said, he said, look, the chairman of the Fed has to do what the president wants, otherwise we'd lose our independence.
But anyway, the Fed definitely watches the election returns.
So they would be anxious – not that this would persuade Ron Paul not to get rid of them, but I think they would immediately start behaving themselves so that we'd have time to work on legislation to abolish the Fed, but I think you would see them immediately stopping the inflating.
Well, now, he talks about allowing gold and silver to compete as currencies, but gold and silver trade on the market now.
What would be the difference there?
Well, by repealing the legal tender laws, by repealing the laws that force people to accept the currency of the United States and payment for their debts so that if people are free to make contracts in gold and silver, or for that matter in molybdenum, as they ought to be, then he feels this would be a very good initial step.
I see.
Yeah, he's talked about cutting the sales taxes and the capital gains taxes.
Oh, and there also should be – because it's money, there shouldn't be any taxes on it.
So no sales tax on gold or silver and no capital gains taxes or whatever.
So you and I could go into business and mint gold or silver coins and put whatever picture we want on it and just trade that as legal tender?
Sure.
Well, no, trade that as without having legal tender enforced against us, so it would just be a matter of voluntary contract.
I see.
Because legal tender laws are an invasion of voluntary contract.
Right, and that's where it says on your paper dollar, this is legal tender.
That means if you win a judgment in court, the judge will say, listen, you have to accept his dollars, basically.
Yeah, well, for example, I mean, there have been times in history and there have been specific court cases about this when there might be restrictions on when maybe gold specie is much harder to get a hold of because of war and that sort of thing.
And people have tried to make others accept continental notes or greenbacks or whatever instead of gold.
And people didn't want to do it, but they were forced by the government to accept the government's currency.
So that – you know, Ron Paul thinks that ought to be changed.
People should be free to make contracts in whatever they choose to make contracts in.
Now, another thing that's come up in this campaign a few times, Lew, is I guess the fear on the part of a lot of people, maybe the false hope on the part of some others, that Ron Paul would attempt to do away with the welfare state on the federal level.
And I guess he's cautioned that that's not really his intention.
What he really is campaigning against here is the foreign policy and in fact says that he is the only guy with the plan to save the federal welfare state as it is.
What's your take on that overall, I guess?
Well, I think he feels, you know, you just can't take on too much at once and that a lot of people have become dependent on these programs.
And while they – certainly from an economic standpoint, a political standpoint, a moral standpoint, one should look to end them.
But in the meantime, for a transition period, that the way to actually be able to keep people who depend on Social Security, for example, to keep getting checks and also to allow young people to opt out of Social Security, they shouldn't have to pay those taxes in return for agreeing that they wouldn't get the payments in the future.
And not only young people, anybody who'd want to opt out like that, that in order to pay for that, in order to pay for keeping the older people on, that, yes, he would end the empire and that would easily provide enough money to get rid of the income tax and to enable a transition period for people who are dependent on food stamps or Social Security payments or other things.
Then they also feel this is the first part of spending to attack because the vast majority of the American people don't have a stake in it.
It's only a small minority of the military industrial complex and the merchants of death who have a stake in it.
And you could get a political majority much more easily to bring the troops home from the 140 countries that they're stationed in and the bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missiles and all the rest of the weapons of war and destruction.
And there's hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved there.
The military budget is much bigger than they allowed, than were officially told.
I know Bob Higgs, Professor Robert Higgs, calculated about $750 billion in the last fiscal year.
And I think that's right because there's all kinds of military spending that takes place outside of the so-called Defense Department.
It takes place in the Energy Department for the manufacture of atom bombs, for example.
NASA has a lot of military aspects to it, and of course there's the VA and all those things, too.
But the actual war-making facility is spread out over a number of different departments.
So there's just a huge amount of money to be saved every year by not waging war.
And by the way, that is hilarious.
They don't include the costs of war in the military budget.
The costs of the Afghan and the Iraqi wars are in a separate category.
They're not part of the Defense Department budget.
And as somebody was pointing out and explaining that this was exactly right this morning on MSNBC, on Morning Joe, their economic reporter was talking about inflation, and she said that the Fed, of course, insists that you can't really calculate an intelligent inflation rate unless you leave out energy and food.
So if you leave out energy and food, she said, really, the inflation isn't too bad.
Well, it strikes me as there's the government, right?
Nothing but lying monsters.
I remember back in the 80s when the Reagan administration purchased housing out of the consumer price index on the grounds that it was going up too fast.
Well, anyway, there's problems with all these index numbers.
There's problems with things like the CPI and all the government statistics.
But they make them even less meaningful by just arbitrary things.
They take food and energy out of the inflation, calculating the inflation rate.
Well, I guess...
That's our government.
Yeah, well, and I guess also an intuitive businessman can keep track of what the real inflation rate is in his own way in order to try to stay on top of things.
I guess that's really what you have to do.
If you're making your economic calculations and you're going by the government numbers, you're going to end up steered the wrong way, right?
Yeah, well, you know, it's actually impossible to know what's actually going on.
I mean, the smart businessman entrepreneurs can have a great feel for the economy and what the future holds and what products people might want to buy.
But this is all distorted by inflation.
It's why actually, as Mises points out, if the government were to allow the government to take X amount of money out of the economy, it's infinitely better from an economic standpoint than it would be in taxation rather than inflation because taxation can be accounted for by the businessman exactly.
You can't know what the inflation rate is, nor certainly can you know what the inflation rate's going to be tomorrow or next month or next year.
So it's actually impossible because it's not just a mathematical question.
It is possible to look, although they keep finagling all these figures.
They've recently abolished M3, for example.
So these days it's slightly tough to figure out, even just in a mathematical sense, how much the so-called money supply is going up in a percentage term.
But that doesn't actually tell you what the economic consequences are because everything depends on people's subjective evaluations.
So sometimes if we look at, say, the great German inflation, which is the classic example, for a very long time prices were not going up as fast as the money supply was being increased.
Then, towards the end, prices were going up much, much faster than the money was being printed.
And what happened was people lost faith in the money and they wanted to get rid of it.
Well, that's what happened in the 70s, right?
That was what happened in the 70s, too, is I was paying the costs of the 60s, all the economic turmoil of the 70s.
Sure, that's right.
And there was also a period which I think we may be approaching again in the 1970s before Paul Volcker was brought in to head the Federal Reserve when you actually had merchants in Europe refusing to take dollars because the whole thing was so volatile they didn't want them.
They were insisting on Franks or Deutsche Marks or whatever.
And when we see with the plummeting value of the dollar, which is also a might as well be a campaign tool for Ron Paul, we can see with our own eyes on a chart and, of course, when we go in the grocery store what the Federal Reserve has done to the value of the dollar.
And I think all of us can know that the ground is shifting under our feet a little bit in terms of economic security and that we need some serious changes, some serious reform, and things cannot go on with people like Bush and Cheney or Giuliani or Thompson or Hillary or Obama or Edwards, those sorts of typical power mad monsters who dominate Washington, D.C., we can't continue like that.
Otherwise, we're headed into a very, very serious economic troubles of maybe the sort that we haven't seen since the 1930s.
Okay, now I have a riddle for you here, Lew, and I don't know the answer to it.
I hope you can help me out.
Why the hate at redstate.org and at Free Republic?
I mean, you look at Ron Paul in a snapshot.
The guy is Mr. Smith goes to Washington in every way.
He grew up on a farm, track star, baseball star, a medic in the military, delivered 4,000 babies from his practice on the Gulf Coast to Texas, went to Congress, doesn't accept welfare, wouldn't even let the government help pay for his daughter's college loans and so forth, returns a portion of his budget from his yearly congressional office budget back to the Treasury every year.
It seems like, you know, okay, there's a disagreement on foreign policy.
There's something that needs to be gotten straight here or something, but instead it's this virulent hatred of Ron Paul from the people who seem to me ought to be his core of support, conservative, gun-owning Christians in America.
Well, I think part of the reason there's some of the reasons that people hate Ron Paul, some of these people hate Ron Paul, is that he can't be bought.
I remember when I was working for him in Washington one night late in the office, Reagan called him.
And Reagan never lobbied, by the way, to cut government spending.
It was just I don't want to shatter anybody's illusion.
It was always just the reverse.
He was putting unbelievable pressure on Ron to vote for some horrible new bomber.
Now I can't remember whether it was a B-1 or a B-2, but some horrible weapon of aggression.
Ron wouldn't do it.
And they all eventually learned that his arm is untwistable.
But if you can't be blackmailed and you can't be pressured to do the wrong thing, that's a very scary thing to the elites who are used to running things.
Then as to the gun-toting Christians, it seems to me there are two key doctrines are murdering Muslims and the police state.
You know, they want to pazer and jail and knock over their head with a nightstick, anybody who they feel is a bad person.
So they might be cancer patients smoking a marijuana cigarette, some other threat to society of that sort.
So actually they believe in government death squads and they believe in government of the police state.
So that versus Ron Paul doesn't believe in either one of those things.
That bothers them.
And the third thing is he's able to rouse the public.
You know, all the whole establishment, whether it's the Christian right types or the neocons or the Federal Reserve or Milwaukee and Citibank and the whole bunch of them, HUD, the whole bunch of them, they want people to be bored and calm and not get excited about what the state is doing to them and the state and its friends.
Ron Paul is able to get people excited to stir their passion, to make them think that there is hope, that things can be changed, that we don't have to accept this mess of potage that we're handed on the plate, that we are able to say, no, I'm not going to take it anymore.
So that's very scary to the elites.
It's scary to their adjuncts and the Christian right.
It's scary to all the bad people in society.
But I think there are many more good people in society and they're hearing the message.
And again, it's a scary thing for the bad guys.
But what a hardening thing for those of us who think there needs to be some serious reform.
Well, it's funny, though, because I think you've written about this before in your article about the reality of red state fascism.
It's been a while since I read it, but I think you kind of bring up the point of these guys at least could have been mistaken for our allies in the 1990s and maybe in Hillary Clinton years ahead could be mistaken for our allies.
Again, there are the kinds of people who were angry about the Waco massacre and not just hated Bill Clinton, but hated the government during the days of Bill Clinton.
And something's happened to them.
I guess it's the slaughter of Arabs thing, you're right, and the police state.
But on the police state level, at least in the 90s, they I think would have been on our side and said, well, you know, if we're going to have a police state, it should only be at the local level, at least.
Well, you know, I think that actually may not be true.
I think in the 90s, first of all, they were all pro-Waco.
I mean, they all agree with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and all those people that law enforcement, quote, unquote, was in the right.
And anybody who was worried about the Waco massacre and hated what took place there, I don't think they are today wanting a police state.
I hope that's right.
And maybe they could be persuaded into war.
War is a very seductive thing for these people.
But, no, I think it's a fascist impulse.
And if we look at what is fascism, it's not just a left-wing smear term.
It's an actual political philosophy that contains elements of conservatism and elements of leftism, too.
And, of course, it's militarism and it's belligerent nationalism and it's suppression of civil liberties and aggressive war and the glorification of the nation-state and demonization of the other.
You know, that can be Jews.
These days it's, you know, Muslims and Arabs.
And it's a very, very unfortunate tendency in the human heart.
And so I think these people really are fascists.
And while I don't think communism was ever a danger in this country, fascism is something different, but I think the fascist moment may have passed.
I think the fact that we live, of course, under the biggest, richest, most powerful government in the history of the world by many magnitudes, and therefore the biggest bureaucracy ever to exist, the most sclerotic, multilayered, hierarchical disaster, far bigger than anything else.
So they can't do anything right.
They can't build themselves a good-looking monument in D.C.
They can't, you know, have a pretend rescue in Katrina.
They can't murder people in Iraq and get away with it.
They can't do anything.
So the total disaster of the Bush administration and its foreign policy and its domestic policy has taken the wind out of their sails.
And now with Ron Paul, I think I would say that freedom has got a real chance again.
Wow.
Well, I sure appreciate that optimism.
I like to think so.
I saw in the headlines this morning that Pat Robertson has endorsed Rudy Giuliani, which goes back to reinforcing your police-state-slaughter-Arabs thesis there.
Well, you know, he's an advocate of murder.
I mean, I remember when he called for murdering Chavez, the president of Venezuela.
Now, I'm not a particular fan of Mr. Chavez's domestic policies, but I mean, he was an alleged Christian minister, and he's calling for the U.S. government to have this man killed.
What is his sin?
Of course, having socialist policies domestically inside Venezuela, since they don't mind that, it's for not kowtowing to the empire, for opposing the empire, for giving the raspberry to the emperor.
For this, he was supposed to have his throat slit, according to the Reverend Robertson.
So Robertson is just a monster, and he's not at all surprised that he's for the fascist Giuliani.
He's a fascist himself.
But I don't think the Christian right has the power that they had.
I think the disaster of the war and the Bush administration has again taken the wind out of their sails.
And I also think there are a lot of people in the Christian right who are amenable.
I'm talking about rank-and-file people, not the leaders.
The leaders are all monsters.
But there are a lot of rank-and-file people who have been fooled, have been fooled about what Christianity actually is, have been fooled into thinking that Bush was their guy and that kind of thing.
And certainly these people are susceptible to rethinking, and they're going to find Ron Paul, in fact already do find Ron Paul, a very, very attractive alternative.
And now one last thing, if I can keep you here just another couple minutes.
The so-called war on terrorism, I think, a fear that a lot of these people have, the ones who aren't just hell-bent on killing all the Arabs and so forth.
But I think a lot of people have been convinced that they need to fear this Islamofascist caliphate.
And if not that, at least, you know, Osama bin Laden and the terrorist people who want to come here and kill us.
And I think a lot of them are under the impression that Ron Paul, just as president, wouldn't do a damn thing to fight al Qaeda.
And I wonder what your understanding on that issue is.
Well, because he believes in an actual defense.
There's no money spent on defense.
It is all offense.
So he believes in an actual defense.
And if anybody were to try to attack America, of course, he believes in stopping that.
But that's, you know, as he's pointed out, that's not why we were attacked, that we were attacked as a result of blowback, as a result of our meddling and installing governments, installing dictators, installing various ripoff schemes and so forth in the Arab world for more than 50 years.
So noticing that Switzerland doesn't get attacked and Sweden doesn't get attacked and Finland doesn't get attacked.
These countries, you know, were not being attacked because we're free, because women have short skirts, or all the rest of the baloney that the neo-coms, you know, because we're an empire.
Now, there are obviously two wrongs.
Don't make a right.
I mean, you can't murder innocent people in the name, despite the fact that the U.S. government has oppressed you.
You know, it's obviously not legitimate.
Trying to murder Americans in return for that, you know, that has to be stopped and prevented, and Ron Paul would stop that.
But he would also stop sticking a stick in the hornet's nest.
And that would go a long way toward helping, too.
So we stopped meddling in the Middle East.
We would get our troops out of there.
And we would no longer be a lightning rod.
And, by the way, all this nonsense about a caliphate, this is the same sort of stuff we used to hear about communism, right?
When you take all these, you can take the word of LAMO fascism and change it to communist, and all this propaganda, nothing exactly the stuff I used to see in the 1950s and 60s.
Although the exact same argument, the idea that a couple of guys in a cave are somehow going to come over here and threaten America, I mean, that they want to abolish our freedom, they want to abolish the First Amendment or whatever, that's just insane.
They want us out of their countries.
And regardless of what they are, and anybody who would go out who would kill civilians or kill people in general is a monster.
So if we could bring these people to justice who committed crimes against us, we absolutely shouldn't.
That's what Ron Paul wanted to do.
Instead of invading an innocent country like Iraq, or for that matter invading and occupying Afghanistan versus just going after the people who had actually committed these crimes.
So, you know, I think that we would not, there would not be a terrorist threat.
If we weren't meddling in other people's affairs, if we weren't the world empire.
But if there were a terrorist effect either as a hangover in previous things or because of some other, if there were actually somebody who read David Horowitz and Bill Kristol and Krauthammer and all these people and thought, well, hey, that's right and I'm the opposite of all this and I really have those views and so wanted to attack America because there are too many bars here, there are too many bars here or some crazy thing like that.
Well, of course, Ron Paul would be for defending against that and he would act, he would actually have a defense and it's a very strange idea these days.
He said everything is off and all the American weapons are designed to strike over countries.
They're not, there is no defense of the United States.
Ron Paul would change that.
Yeah, well, and we saw that on 9-11 too.
I remember seeing in the news the reporter said, well, it's 1130 in the morning and I just saw my first fighter plane over Washington, D.C.
Well, you know, the government couldn't even protect its own military headquarters, could they, after trillions of dollars and how many millions of troops and the government, they can't do anything.
I will say that they're capable of dropping bombs on people, but they're not able to effectively occupy Iraq, so they can't actually even do the things they claim to be able to do it.
As with their domestic socialist policies, everything tends to result in the opposite of what they claim is their intent and they make a mess of everything they touch.
Yeah, they can target the house, but they always got the wrong house when they blow it up.
And they blow up the old lady in there who has nothing to do with anything.
All right, hey, I really appreciate your time today.
Everybody, Lew Rockwell, he's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is the proprietor of LewRockwell.com, the number one libertarian website in the whole world.
And, Lew, if I have one complaint, it's that your blog is so up to date on Ron Paul News all day, every day.
I never get any work done because all I want to do is hit refresh on the LewRockwell.com blog.
Well, that's great.
Keep reading and let me mention, when I talk about Ron Paul and electoral politics, I am not speaking as the president of the Mises Institute, which is a nonpolitical, nonpartisan educational organization.
I mean, nothing to do with politics.
I'm just speaking as the editor of LewRockwell.com.
Well, and I think I'll probably copy and paste that at the beginning of this interview, too, for you.
Great.
All right, thanks very much, Lew.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
