09/19/12 – Jeffrey Tucker – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, now, our first guest on the show today is Jeffrey Tucker from Lazifare Books.
That's LFB.org.
How's it going?
It is going very well, and I'm really glad to be here.
You are a famous man, a legend.
I am.
Yes, you are.
You might be thinking of the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine.
Or there's a wheelchair skater named Scott Horton who's got to be legendary.
I'm pretty sure you are the Scott Horton.
There's a pro BMX biker named Scott Horton who I saw on the Internet doing some awesome stuff.
Thank you.
You're very kind.
And you are the Jeff Tucker.
When I look on Facebook and there's an anarchist meme going around, it's you and your bow tie talking about, we must have anarchy because anything less would be uncivilized.
People can be very silly with those things, I tell you.
It's one of the interesting things about information.
Once it's out there, it's out there, and that's it.
And that's a blessing and a curse in some ways.
I'm not sure if that makes sense to you.
It's very strange how one of the things the modern state, it's probably maybe the strangest thing the modern state has done, is try to can and fence in and privatize information.
They have these central bureaus that assign who the owners are of things.
If you have an idea, then you run to the central bureau and say, hey, could you register this idea as mine?
Okay, sure.
How long do you want this idea?
Three years?
Well, give me 10, 20 years or something like that.
Okay, great.
So then they coerce everybody else into not using that idea and then permit you to use coercion against anybody who does use that idea, even though the idea is public and available and out there in the marketplace.
Anyway, my point is one of the things that's really cool about Facebook is it kind of disregards this insane system of intellectual property that the state has concocted over the last 100 or so years.
And so if there's an image out there, then everybody's free to kind of take your image and add whatever kind of thing under it you want.
And that comes with a certain degree of risk.
I mean, anybody can take my image and add some kind of bogus thing that I really object to or whatever, but most of the time it's all kind of more or less nice and it all works out.
It turns out markets work.
Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen one that I would guess you'd disapprove.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
So they're all just slightly embarrassing.
Yeah, I mean, they're in good fun, though, not bad fun.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
But, you know, and I think that one of the things that dazzles me really about even things like memes, you know, if you kind of have a system that's radically decentralized, like Facebook or like Twitter or like the whole of the Internet or the whole of the market economy, then it kind of extracts people's sense of creativity and combines all these things.
It's kind of different with all the different skills and different ways of looking at the world, and it combines all these things together to create new stuff that we never thought of before, you know?
And I don't know about you, but, you know, when I'm trolling through my Twitter feed or Facebook or just anything, I'm constantly delighted by the creativity of people and the new ways that people have of looking at things, the new ways that people have of doing things.
This is kind of, you know, we describe this trait to the market.
Really, it's something I think we can ascribe to the human person.
You know, we all have the capacity within us to adapt and do things new and better so that we can live out a life of progress and observing progress and observing change and observing adaptation and be constantly thrilled at the new.
I'm getting to a point here, and it relates to American foreign policy.
Our public institutions are exactly the opposite.
There's never anything really new or improved about them.
We just keep making the same stupid mistakes again and again and again, and it gets extremely boring.
This is what politics is like, endlessly repeating the same old stupid thing again and again.
We see it in foreign policy.
We see it in our judicial system.
We see it in our prison system.
We see it in our schools, and even though it's an idiotic way they deliver the mail, public institutions don't seem to have this dynamic, creative capacity for renewing the face of the earth, you know, that we see every day on display on our computer screens in the private sector.
You know what's funny?
It seems like, you know, that statement from a radical such as yourself actually could have come from the mouth of any American.
The only thing is they would have added, yeah, but what are you going to do?
You know, it's a necessary evil.
It's not like you can just have people driving without licenses, you know?
Yeah, but you know, it's funny because people are always asking, how can we improve the public school system?
How can we improve our prison system?
How can we reform our foreign policy?
How can we change our bureaucracies?
And if you understand this point, you begin to realize, you know what?
Monetary policy is another example.
We can't really expect improvement so long as the institutional structures are kind of constantly at war against improvement.
You know, that's the problem.
So yeah, if you want to get used to static, if you just want to repeat the same errors over and over again, if you like the way the TSA does its business and the way the post office works and the public schools manage themselves and the U.S. foreign aid works and the way the U.S. conducts its war or whatever, if you like that, then yeah, let's stick with the same system because you know what?
Never going to improve until we turn it over to the agents of real change, which are billions of people working out things in their own economic interest and creative adaptive ways in the market economy.
So yeah.
I mean, maybe people are happy with public institutions.
Well, they're not.
I mean, that's the thing.
In fact, I wanted to focus on education there for a second when you talked about, you know, you kind of went through the list of the things the government tries to do, the services they claim they're here for that they're no good at.
I just saw a trailer for a movie about these heroic housewives who got together to take over the local school district and do something about it.
And finally, these kids are going to actually, you know, learn the difference between a vowel and a consonant or whatever it is.
And I just thought, like, wow, it's still even after all this time and even after all these options are available for us to see, especially by way of the Internet, that kind of thing, it's still just completely, oh, and it was based on a true story too.
Yeah, I know this type.
People just can't imagine, though, that like, well, wait a minute, why are we even sending our kids to this thing?
It looks like a prison anyway with the cinder blocks and all this.
You know, it still can't occur to them that maybe they need to just keep their kids home and teach them themselves.
Well, you know, and I think part of the problem is the market is so hobbled.
Homeschooling is kind of a difficult thing for people.
It requires a lot of sacrifice and a lot of, I mean, it's a gigantic decision.
Education is one of the terrible things that, like, every conscientious parent has to deal with because the market is so screwed up, you know?
I mean, you get taxed like crazy.
The public institutions, the public institutions, you get kind of squeamish back because you think they're unusable, so you have to pay yet again for a private service, but then the private service is strangely modeled on the public service, and you're wondering, why am I doing this?
And then you're thinking about homeschooling, but, wow, that means you're going to have to be reduced from two incomes to one, you know?
And, I mean, it just gives all these terrible, terrible choices, and any time a public sector is involved in any aspect of life, that's what it does.
I mean, it kind of limits us to a series of choices between bad, you know, kind of options, and that's just terrible.
I feel awful for every parent who faces this truncated and hobbled education market.
I mean, a free market, you know, it just wouldn't be a problem.
It would be as much of a problem to shop for education as it is to shop for shoes, okay?
So I feel like a problem.
You know, well, okay, well, do I go to this store, that store, which model do I get?
Which shoe lasts longer?
Do I really want to pay that much or this much?
Do I, boy, that high-heeled shoe looks great, but my, it doesn't fit with the hem length of these pants, and so on.
These are the kind of first-world problems we have in shopping for shoes.
Some of us, I guess.
Yeah, well, they're not, well, okay, not that I wear high heels.
No, I mean, for guys, it's a totally different set of problems.
But the point is that these are kind of relatively trivial problems, you know, like too much choice, and that's not really a problem at all.
But when the government gets involved in anything, we just seem to have a choice between bad.
In the private sector, we have a choice between good.
And that's true in education, and I think it's true in foreign policy.
You know, I marvel at your mental and intellectual discipline in so many ways that you've dedicated yourself so consistently to this one sector and know it so well.
But it must frustrate you over time to see the same errors again and again and again, and errors with brutal consequences.
Yeah, well, you know, when I was a lot younger, I started off, a lot of my interest in politics started off of being kind of a conspiracy nut type.
And the more I learn about it, the more I learn that I really know a lot more about this stuff than a lot of people working there and carrying this stuff out.
And then a lot of times, I look especially like a congress, and I think, you know, somebody who's been listening to my show for a couple of weeks knows more than these people.
Someone who casually reads antiwar.com, you know, maybe on Sunday afternoons they try to catch up a little bit or something, know more than the vast majority, anyway, of the people inside Washington, D.C.
Obviously, they're real experts and CIA analysts and whatever who know what they're talking about from time to time or whatever.
But I hear, you know, out of the mouths of babes, that kind of thing.
I hear people with a lot of power saying really stupid things where I just, yeah, it bothers the hell out of me, man, to think that that's who's in charge up there, really, is a bunch of just numbskulls.
Yeah, that's very interesting.
And does it ever occur to you how separate, in a strange way, sort of exogenous to real-life American foreign policy is?
I mean, over the last ten years, we've seen an astonishing globalization of networks between real people.
I mean, even with things like Google Translate that's beginning to overcome language barriers and we're overcoming national barriers, we're discovering commonalities between ourselves and so many people in the world.
We work together on a geographically noncontiguous basis.
I mean, the nation-state is kind of in our real lives.
It's kind of being blown up.
I mean, the borders are just being erased.
And it's inspiring.
And we're learning things we didn't know before just because of the exposure and the opportunities for communication that are so broad and ubiquitous in our time and growing.
And yet, American foreign policy seems to be all based on a kind of a, what, a 19th-century model or even worse, a 20th-century model, you know, where our security, you know, is everything.
It's really ghastly.
It's like the borders and the nation-state model is kind of put, you know, in a time when we should be free as birds because of digital innovations and globalization.
We should be free.
Instead, we're all kind of in cages.
And all the world's states have this desire to maintain these cages around us.
You know that it's more difficult now than it's probably ever been to travel, to move, to migrate, to send stuff over a border, to get across a border.
I mean, in a way, I mean, because the states are in control of these things we call borders and these things we call, you know, governments and geographic territories, because they're in charge, they've taken us back and back and back and back, even at times when the world controlled by the private sector, you know, which is largely digital media, a digital world, has become ever more progressive and ever more globalized and universalized and freer.
You know, and those two things are happening at once.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, this goes something that Stefan Molyneux was saying on the Liberty Chat show last night, was that people just have no excuse.
I mean, it's true.
In fact, he made the case for this electronic Berlin Wall where the mainstream media refuses to show a single dead body.
In a dozen years, they won't show a single dead body from the wars.
I mean, come on.
On the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to think that maybe something is at the address antiwar.com and maybe I should look and see what it's about.
You know what I mean?
I wonder if there is a Raimondo, whether he might have a point.
That's not, you know, it's all right there and it's free.
It's, you know, it's everywhere.
If you look for it, if you care at all, it's right there.
So what is the excuse?
The American people, and this is kind of my thing too, the more I go on with this, Jeff, is that I have trouble.
I used to always try a lot harder to separate the government from the people.
But, you know, I mean, how many years in a row can the American people by their supermajorities give their consent to this kind of thing or at least give an ignorance is bliss kind of attitude to it while it goes on before it is their damn fault, you know?
That's a very interesting point.
I can see why you would get discouraged.
But, you know, the thing is that the bourgeoisie are mainly interested in the coupons they just got in the mail for the hamburger pizza available over at Papa John's.
I mean, that's the main thing.
And in a way, this is the most wonderful thing about, I think, Americans, that they really are just interested in their own well-being.
It's kind of a problem, I mean, because most, I think you're right, most Americans are clueless about the extent of the American empire and its sheer brutality.
But, you know, what are they going to do with that information if they have it?
I mean, this is part of the problem.
You know?
Now, the ignorance that...
All the headlines last week were hilarious, really, about, look, all these swarthy people all over the world are rioting against America.
All right?
So you look at that headline and the average American's thinking, poof, why do these people hate my cheeseburger pizza?
You know, why do they hate me so much?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, part of that is the beauty, right, of living in North America, that we don't have to deal with the old world's problems.
We can, you know, get our horses in our carriage and move out halfway across the continent and find a nice little house on the prairie and who cares?
Obviously, there's going to be a war in Crimea.
It just doesn't have to be any of my business.
And yet, the thing is, is our government uses that very same attitude of, you know, ignorance to get away with bloody murder.
I mean, just because Americans don't care about Somalia doesn't mean that Barack Obama isn't killing Somalis, because he is.
You know, so at that point, then they have some kind of responsibility.
I feel like, you know, I wouldn't assign it to someone else.
I feel like I have some kind of responsibility to at least point out that, you know, it doesn't have to be this way and it is going on and it's wrong.
It's interesting.
I don't know how often you get a chance to go to dinner parties and how often you talk about these kind of things, but I've tried this experiment variously.
You know, you go to a dinner party and just, somewhere in the course of the conversation, say something about, wow, that was a really dreadful thing that the U.S. just shot up a wedding party in Afghanistan, you know, last Tuesday, killing, you know, 13 people, or whatever the latest atrocity is.
I mean, people's jaws drop on the floor.
And a lot of times they don't believe you.
People just don't know.
They just don't know.
They're completely unaware.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny because that's really my point, really, is that, you know, the number one determining factor about how free we are in this society is how active our empire is overseas, really.
And you're never going to get rid of the NDAA and the Patriot Act and the warrantless wiretapping and all these things as long as they can claim, hey, we're at war, we're at war, we're at war.
And so really all I want is to not have to be worried that my government is moving to a totalitarian system and I'll be able to live my life in relative, you know, peace and liberty, like in the deal, and then that's it.
That's all I'm fighting for in the first place.
You know what I mean?
But how am I supposed to have confidence that I'm going to be able to live to be an old man, you know, without living in some kind of real Orwellian nightmare before I get a chance, you know?
Your attitude reminds me, as I look back, and I'm dating myself here, but, you know, I have the vaguest memory of a time when the Soviets were in Afghanistan and that this was used very much as a kind of war propaganda device for the U.S. government, you know.
And the stories they would tell about how the Soviets would drop, you know, toys, exploding toys out of airplanes.
You know, kids would pick them up and they'd get bombed.
I maybe don't.
Do you know about that?
You know about that little piece of war propaganda?
No, I actually had not heard that one, but of course.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a common claim.
It was very riveting in a way.
And the Americans really did that.
Yeah.
And that's the thing.
The cluster bomb units are little yellow pieces of plastic.
Yeah.
I guess that's what war propaganda does.
Look at what your own military does and describe that to the enemy, right?
But I remember thinking at the time, I thought, you know, and this was during the Cold War, and this was the time when, you know, it's a mannequin world where we were good, they were evil, we were free, they were unfree, we were humane, they were brutal, we were God, they were the devil, right?
So that's the way the world kind of complicated.
That's the way we were encouraged to think about the world.
So I would hear all this war propaganda about the Soviets in Afghanistan and think, my God, how can Russian citizens put up with the fact that their own government is doing this?
Why isn't there a revolution?
And I remember the neoconservatives at the time would actually say something like this, say things like this.
The Russian people are culpable because they are responsible for putting up with a government that is so brutal and so horrible and so ghastly and so destructive and terroristic and expansionist.
If they really objected, they would figure out a way to overthrow the Soviets.
That's what they said.
And a lot of us, kind of at a distance, thought there was a certain point there.
And yet, here we are today in Afghanistan of all places and the news filled with the ghastly things the U.S. is doing.
What are we doing about it?
What are we doing about it?
In those days, we held the Russian people culpable for things that their government probably wasn't doing anyway, but I'm sure they were doing some terrible things.
We held them culpable.
Well, to what extent are we culpable?
I think you ask a profound question.
That was the logic that they used for starving the Iraqis to death in the 1990s after they had to admit in 1997 that he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction.
They said, well, Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton, the President himself, both announced that we'll never lift the sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is there.
The purpose of the sanctions is to make the people of Iraq so miserable that they will just risk everything to rise up and overthrow him so they can get back on our good side.
And even though George H.W. Bush had encouraged them all to rise up after Operation Yellow Ribbon in 1991 and promised to back them up, and when he didn't back them up, they were all massacred.
100,000 Kurds and Shia were massacred trying to overthrow Saddam, and that was when they had all the momentum of the war at their back.
And so they knew, Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton knew good and well that it was impossible, even if everybody read them, Roger Dodger, over and out, perfectly clear, this is our mission, we have to overthrow him now.
They couldn't.
But that was the excuse that the Americans used to starve them into making them do it.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I'm really not a collectivist, and it's a good thing, because if so, everybody between San Diego and Bangor is in a world of trouble.
You know?
You really make a good point.
It is interesting to hear governments talk about how other governments ought to be overthrown by their own people, but they would never apply that to themselves.
Yeah.
All right, well, the bad news is we've got to go, because I've got two more guests.
Next coming up is Phil Giraldi on that same Arab Revolution, Muslim, anti-American turn to the Arab Spring going on here.
You know, Scott, I wanted to tell you about my new can opener.
Oh, yeah, please do.
It's exciting.
It offers good lessons for the future, but we're just going to save that for next time.
So, thank you for having me.
Yeah, I'm sorry that we didn't get to the can opener, but that is, well, I'll tell you what.
I mean, there's no rules on the show, so really we can go over a little bit, or we can use that as a good excuse to do this again soon.
Either way.
We'll use it for next time, and I'll add to that can opener one other fabulous kitchen innovation that illustrates how and why we should just dramatically take a turnabout on U.S. foreign policy.
So, we'll get to that next time.
That sounds great.
It's been great to talk to you.
I don't know why it's taken so long for me to finally do this thing, but thanks very much.
I really appreciate it.
It's really great to be here.
Let's talk soon.
All right, everybody.
That's Jeffrey Tucker, formerly of the Mises Institute, now at Lazifare Books.
That's lfb.org.
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