Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas and our guest today is Lou Rockwell.
He's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, proprietor of the most popular libertarian website on earth, lourockwell.com, and is the author of the book Speaking of Liberty.
Welcome back to the show, Lou.
Hi, Scott.
Great to be with you.
Great to have you on today and I was shocked this morning to see the headline that William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review magazine and for a long time considered the leader of the conservative movement in America, has died.
Just so happens, this happened just at the time that Justin Armando's book Reclaiming the American Right is being republished, Ron Paul's old right revolution is sweeping the country.
His new book, The Revolution, a manifesto, is about to be published.
Well, it just seems like a good time to kind of take stock of the American right, conservatism, what it was, what it is, where it's headed, and so forth.
Oh, also, I forgot to mention Murray Rothbard's book, The Betrayal of the American Right has just been republished as well.
So maybe we can start there.
Actually, the first book of his has never been published before.
Oh, I'm sorry, what?
It's never been published before.
Oh, it had never seen print before?
No.
I mean, it circulated the manuscript, but this is its first publication.
Oh, I see.
Okay, so there's three good footnotes for people who want to read about this stuff, but let's see if we can get them interested in who and what we're talking about so that they will go and do so.
The American right, what's now known as the American right, originally grew up in opposition to the New Deal and to American entry into World War II in the 1930s, right?
Yeah, I mean, this consistence, in some ways, of Murray Rothbard's categorization of the American right, he called them the old right, the people who had opposed, it was a very disparate group, who'd opposed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and his drive to war, called them the old right as versus the new right of Bill Buckley.
Libertarians would find much more in common with the old right, even though not all of them had views that we would find compatible, but they sure were opposed to Roosevelt's fascist economics, and the New Deal was based explicitly on Mussolini's economic program via the work of Giovanni Gentile, and it was a corporate state, and of course, vast centralization, the creation of the American welfare state, central planning, terrible things with the Federal Reserve, stealing the American people's gold, I mean, just a million different things that FDR did wrong, setting up really the first peacetime police state, and also, of course, he wanted to go to war on behalf of his pals in the Soviet Union, which his administration was very close to.
It's interesting that the Export-Import Bank, which was one of the first New Deal agencies established in 1933, was set up to subsidize trade with the Soviet Union.
I mean, this was FDR's goal from the beginning, and the people of the old right, whether we think of them as H.L.
Mencken, again, these people did not think of themselves as a movement, it was only Murray's looking back on them and sort of making them a movement.
Mencken, Garrett Gourette, Albert J. Knock, John T. Flynn, many, many great men and women, Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, people who were the foundation of the libertarian movement and the best of what we can think of as the old conservatism, and it was pretty much wiped out by Bill Buckley, since he just died and may his soul rest in peace.
I might just mention some good things about him first, before I get into the other aspects.
But I'm going to try not to copy what Buckley did to Murray Rothbard.
He wrote one of the most vicious attack obituaries I've ever seen, and Buckley specialized in attack obituaries.
He wrote quite a nasty one about Henry Hazlitt, for example, even though he'd been allegedly Harry Hazlitt's friend.
But he actually took delight in his obituary in Murray's dying of congestive heart failure.
I mean, it was quite an extraordinary thing to write an obituary like that, so I'm going to try not to go into that sort of thing.
And I might just say, first of all, that Buckley was extremely smart, extremely charming, really an extraordinary man, a great harpsichordist.
I mean, it was somebody who could have been probably a concert harpsichordist.
I mean, he was that good, and he was just a great Bach harpsichordist, I mean, just an extraordinary musician.
A man who had this tremendous musical knowledge, both of a theoretical and a literary and a practical sense, vastly well-read, enormously learned in so many areas, an extraordinary writer, a great sailor.
I mean, he sailed, you know, trans-oceanic sailing, a pretty good spy novelist.
He wrote a bunch of spy novels as well as his non-fiction books.
A TV star, a wonderful editor, just an extraordinary guy, too.
I mean, the sort of person that you just, it was a thrill to be in his company as a person.
I mean, really, the word charismatic is obviously very much overused, but he was just an extraordinary man.
Now, let me, and I think a seriously religious man, so that's very much to his credit, too.
But there's another side to him.
He was a brilliant student at Yale.
As an undergraduate, he wrote a book called God and Man at Yale, which I would look at in a revisionist way as a book that, in some sense, is the founding volume of the whole rotten PC campus movement that's come to dominate American education.
I mean, he called in this book for the destruction of academic freedom and for the imposition of political correctness on campus.
Now, what he was talking about was people who he felt were insufficiently anti-communist.
But nevertheless, the principles are exactly the same.
And in fact, some of the people, feminists and others who are involved in the present PC clampdown on free speech and free thought on campus actually look back on him as their founding father, and as well they should, because that was a terrible book.
On the other hand, a brilliant written book, I mean, very unusual for an undergraduate, even though he'd been in the Army first, but also as an undergraduate, by the way, joined Skull and Bones, the famous Yale fraternity, so connected with the establishment that George Bush, Sr. was a member of it, George Bush, Jr. was a member of it, John Kerry was a member.
I mean, it's a very influential establishment group.
There are people who say that he was recruited into the CIA from there as well.
Well, certainly Skull and Bones has always been Yale, like Yale itself, but Skull and Bones especially, a recruiting ground for the CIA.
I think that's correct that he was recruited from Skull and Bones, because a lot of CIA was direct supervisor within the CIA, but the famous James Jesus Angleton was also connected to Skull and Bones.
So Buckley's immediate supervisor in the CIA was E. Howard Hunt, a man who I think was involved in the Kennedy assassination, of course there's many programs in discussing Bill Buckley's life, but E. Howard Hunt, who later was involved in Watergate, and then towards the end of his life, made a tape for his son, St. John Hunt, where he talked about LBJ wanting Kennedy killed.
So you can look it up online, if anybody's interested.
Yeah, that was just about a year ago, right, his son put the tape out.
Very, very interesting.
But anyway, Buckley was in the CIA, he was in the CIA in Mexico, and his father, who was an oil man in Mexico, had Mexican connections, Buckley spoke beautiful Spanish, very fluent Spanish.
And he came out of the CIA, and he established National Review.
Now there are those suspicious types, like Murray Rothbard and like me, who think that the agency actually set up National Review, as it set up the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Dissent Magazine, and a lot of other anti-communist publications and movements in the 1950s were funded by the CIA.
The vast presence of American publishing on American campuses still does, of course, American newspapers and so forth.
So as the Church hearing showed in the 1970s, there are very few big-time newsmen who don't have a connection to the CIA.
That's why they all take the pro-war, pro-empire position.
So anyway, Buckley comes out of the CIA, and he establishes National Review.
He staffs it with CIA people like the brilliant Frank Meyer, ex-communist Frank Meyer, the brilliant Whitaker Chambers, ex-communist also, the brilliant James Burnham, probably the first neocon, at least arguably the first intellectual neocon, Wilmore Kendall, who'd been a professor at Yale and also been part of Buckley's recruitment into the CIA.
These are all connected to the CIA, all these people.
And National Review set out with the specific goal of purging the American right of all heretics that turned out to mean people like Randians, like Rothbardians, but it especially meant, because of this overlap with Murray, it especially meant anybody who had an old right position on foreign policy, anybody who was quote-unquote an isolationist, anybody who didn't think that there ought to be an American empire, an American warfare state, an American garrison state, a police state of the sort that we are so happy to live under today.
Well, and that really was the dividing line, wasn't it, that we have to accept a totalitarian bureaucracy in our shores for the duration to protect us from the Soviet Union, and if you don't agree with that, you are too kooky to be a conservative or any part of the right and immediately smeared right out of the movement.
That's right, and you should be shut up.
I mean, you shouldn't be allowed to speak, in fact.
Buckley always advocated suppression of the civil liberties of anybody who, in his view, took a quote-unquote pro-communist position, which would include not wanting world war, and of course the line you just quoted about a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores comes out of the famous, at least to people like you and me, article from Commonweal magazine, Catholic magazine, in 1948, where Buckley did advocate that, and strange to say, once communism fell apart, after the U.S. stopped supporting it, some of us might think, in a number of ways, after the Soviet Union all collapsed, and it would have been an economic basket case always, for the reasons that would be Mises' first outline in 1920, that it could never be the threat of the sort that they painted it, because socialism is such a poverty-producing, chaotic disaster.
The god of Mantelli actually wanted to suppress people, so he wanted to kick everybody out and purge the right wing and make it into what has since become the red state fascist movement.
And, by the way, even though Buckley said that all this totalitarian bureaucracy and police state and so forth would be necessary to fight the Cold War, he also said, as you noted, it wouldn't be necessary after the Cold War.
But of course, after the Cold War, Buckley argued for keeping the whole thing in existence to fight the Iraqis or whatever, you know, I mean, there's always some excuse.
Now it's Islamic fundamentalism, and it's very interesting, by the way, if you look back at the literature of the right, the National Review, or all the rest of these publications, and you substitute the words Islamic fundamentalism for Soviet Union, or communism, or my favorite formulation, sometimes J. Edgar Hoover would use it, a godless, atheistic communism, it's exactly the same rhetoric.
I mean, exactly the same rhetoric is now used about, you know, the Islamic threat that was used about the communist threat, and in both cases, of course, ridiculously overblown, but very useful for the American state and for global hegemony by the American state and the various economic interest groups affiliated with it.
And Bill Buckley played a very, very important role, and for a long time he was not only the controller of the American right, but he was like the star, I mean, he had a firing line of famous TV shows, published book after book of bestsellers, he ran for office once, and very charming, he was an extremely charming guy, an aristocrat, and he ran for mayor of New York against the very liberal John Lindsay, and here he was talking about domestic policy.
And Buckley, at least in the early days, was pretty sound on domestic policy.
Now, I would argue that that was all a trick in order to fool the right wing, because if you would come out with, you know, sort of a McCain agenda back in the 1950s, it wouldn't have worked.
So they combined sort of an old right view of domestic policy with a totalitarian right view of foreign policy.
Yeah, but never insisted that they really get the libertarian domestic policy.
No, no, and in fact they were very happy to bring a bunch of Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, a bunch of ex-communists who were still Marxists, and also people who were Trotskyites, like Irving Kristol, bring them into the conservative movement.
All they cared about was that you hated the guts of the Soviet Union and wanted to destroy it.
I mean, that was the only issue that counted, it didn't matter that you were a socialist domestically.
Right, and see, it's important here for people who don't really know the history of the Soviet Union and so forth, that the reason that these guys were such cold warriors, even though they were communists, it's because they were Trotskyites and so hated Stalin, who had betrayed Trotsky and stabbed him in the ear with an ice pick.
That's right, although I guess Stalin would say that Trotsky betrayed him, right?
But anyway, certainly Stalin was not a good guy to get angry at you, and he did eventually assassinate Trotsky.
Although Trotsky was trying to overthrow Stalin, so I must say my own view is a plague on both their houses.
Yeah, but that's why this conservative establishment, Yale, skull and bones, blue blood aristocrat recruited all of these Trotskyites to write for National Review, is because unlike the old right, they were committed cold warriors.
That's right, and they also were all on the CIA payroll at one point or another, too.
I mean, Irving Kristol was on the CIA payroll in the 1950s in the Congress of Cultural Freedom and Dissent Magazine, as I mentioned, so there's a very, very unfortunate red ribbon that runs through American affairs since the late 1940s, when it was set up, of the Central Intelligence Agency and the intellectuals who were on its payroll or in its orbit, either doing its work directly or certainly part of the ambit, and it's why Ron Paul talks about the CIA as an unconstitutional agency, first of all, and it certainly is a very dangerous operation.
I mean, not only what it does in overthrowing other governments and assassinating people overseas and constantly spreading lies, I mean, that's, of course, what they do.
I mean, they lie, they cheat, they kill, and they steal.
Of course, if it's for the government, it's patriotic, but these agencies, of course, aren't, as the good guys among the framers would have pointed out, you can't have an empire overseas and a limited government at home.
Invariably a government that feels comfortable in running the world is hardly going to not try to run your business, your town, your family, your life.
And so the CIA, of course, since all states are focused on controlling their own people first, CIA has been a very useful agency for the American government in making sure that academic life, that scholarly publishing, scholarly journals, any group that's concerned with foreign policy is influenced and follows the line of the empire.
Now what's kind of strange here is that the old right, when we talk about the old right, they were really liberals in the Ron Paul sense, in the classical liberal libertarian sense, and not really conservatives at all.
The right wasn't necessarily a synonym for conservatism, right?
Well, of course, it's a terrible word.
I mean, you know, how did that get voiced on it?
Every bit as much bad as the fact that we lost the word liberal that was taken over by progressives and other statists, and used to mean its exact opposite in the way the state typically corrupts language.
But another example of this is the word conservative, a European word that has to do with people who wanted to conserve the ancient regime, the old order, aristocratic privilege and the state aristocratic privilege, in terms of government policies that would benefit the large traditional landowners as versus the commercial class and that sort of thing.
You know, it really, again, is something that Bill Buckley is responsible for, although the person who did it for him was Russell Kirk.
Russell Kirk was an intellectual, again, part of the national security ambit that went around National Review, and he wrote a book about conservatism.
This book had a huge influence, and Kirk, you know, they set out to make the title of people who were originally anti-state, conservative.
It's a terrible word.
I mean, none of us are conservatives.
In fact, Buckley, at one of his better, Buckley actually had some libertarian tendencies.
He wrote a book called Up From Liberalism, that's his best book from a libertarian standpoint, and actually had Murray Rothbard as a research assistant on it, and in fact, he called himself a libertarian.
He once said, and again, you don't know whether he's saying these things to tell the truth or whether he's sort of making trouble, because he had that tendency, but he once said that we, meaning, I guess, conservatives, aren't really conservatives, we're radicals for capitalism, which later became, you know, the Brian Doherty book title, but that's true.
We are radicals for capitalism.
That is what we are.
Well, and that's why we have such trouble, right, is because we have this left-right political spectrum with progressive statists on the left and conservative statists on the right, and there is no classical liberal libertarian right-wing opposition.
Well, it's interesting, because it all goes back to the way they sat the members of the French Assembly, the French National Assembly was elected under Louis XVI during the beginning of the French Revolution, and on the right were seated the proponents of throne and altar, I mean, this is the old regime, and on the left were seated people who were both classical liberals and communist types.
So things have been very mixed up, and of course the whole left-right thing, it is a problem, and the actual continuum ought to be seen as going from, some people would argue, from totalitarianism on one side to anarchy on the other side.
Others would say that anarchy is sort of in the center, and that you go towards statism of a certain sort on the left, and towards statism of another sort on the right.
But I guess we're stuck with the left and right categories, and just as I guess we're stuck with the word conservative and what's happened to the word liberal.
I think the strategy needs to be, then, we need to replace the moderates on the spectrum, that's the thing.
We need to make...
Well, we need the moderates, they're on the right.
Because the moderates are all the extremists, right?
A liberal Republican like John McCain, a conservative Democrat like Hillary Clinton, they're the worst of the worst.
We need libertarianism to be the middle, where we take the best of the left and the right instead of the worst.
Well, that's exactly right.
Now how do we do that?
Well, we're certainly...
You and I are both very moderate guys.
I like to think so.
I sure don't favor a lot of state action.
Well, now here's another part of the riddle, is you represent, Lou, the Mises Institute and lourockwell.com, a certain kind of strain of libertarianism they call paleolibertarianism, which I think, well, from my discussions with Anthony Gregory about this, because he's great at breaking all these categories down into all their little pieces, all it means is pure anti-statism.
But it seems to also have a thing about it where there's a cultural conservatism that goes with it.
You guys tend to be anti-abortion, for example, and it seems like the most radical libertarians are personally, culturally conservative type people, whereas the more personally radical libertarians tend to want to compromise with the state more.
You get that same reading?
It's very funny.
I must say, I haven't used the word paleolibertarian in a long time because I think it sort of served its purpose.
I just call myself a libertarian.
But the whole point of that movement was to say, you know, if people are religious or if they're culturally conservative, they can be libertarian.
It's tough to remember.
And in fact, there's still, of course, a part of libertarianism that says, no, you can't.
It's not enough to be against the drug war.
You have to be a personal user of drugs.
It's not enough to think that the state shouldn't be interfering in reproductive questions.
You have to actually be for abortion.
So that you can't be religious, you actually have to be an atheist, or otherwise you can't be a libertarian.
That you have to be a feminist.
That you have to be in favor of a sort of, again, unfortunate category, but sort of left-wing cultural positions in order to be a libertarian.
All I wanted to say was, no, you don't.
Or if I can quote Obama, yes, we can.
Yes, we can be libertarians and be religious.
Yes, we can be libertarians and have the sorts of cultural views that most people have had in most societies throughout all of human history.
But it was a bad, I think not only wrong factually, but it was a bad strategy to try to shut out all non-atheists.
I mean, it's just, in fact, insane.
So I think that's changed.
I think we've, Ron Paul has helped change that, of course.
As Murray always said, libertarianism is a political philosophy.
What it tells us is that the end goal of politics is human liberty.
That's all it is, however.
Obviously, I think, extremely important.
But it doesn't tell us about other areas of life.
It actually doesn't tell you about what painters to like, what music to like.
We're not Randianism, because Rand had a total worldview.
You had to hate socialism.
You also had to hate Mozart.
That's not libertarianism.
You can like Mozart.
You don't have to like Mozart.
It's a separate issue.
But there are, again, still those who would say that, no, you have to be a cultural leftist.
You have to buy into the entire left-wing cultural agenda in order to be a libertarian.
I think that's, I think it's wrong, I think it's exclusivist, I think we need to be Big Ten people.
Well, and it's funny, too, because if you're pushing for a libertarian society, then, well, you know, just like Thomas Jefferson said, it doesn't matter to me whether my neighbor has one god or ten, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
That's your article on LewRockwell.com today, is all the arguments about race and religion and everything else, they all come down to state power.
You say that the right-wing, I guess the red-state fascist, the Jacksonian kick-butt foreign policy types in America just can't imagine that there would be a mosque in their neighborhood, but that the people who run that mosque wouldn't be kicking down their door to cut their head off and convert their children.
They just can't imagine worshipping in peace next to each other.
No, it's a terrible thing, and actually the only issue in politics is what should the state do, what should the state not do.
That is the only issue, but both certain types of libertarians, and certainly all conservatives, want to always have you not think about that.
You know, the Republicans would like to have you think about the abortion issue in terms of what the government should be doing, have you think about flag-burning, have you think about armies of, what does McCain call them, radical Islamic fundamentalists, I guess this is versus the conservative fundamentalists or whatever, but no, excuse me, call them the radical Islamic extremists, this is versus, I guess, the non-radical extremists.
There's vast armies of Muslims, you know, just waiting to come in and split everybody's throat, whereas of course, if you look at things from the Muslim standpoint, it's actually Christians who have been going over splitting their throats for the most part.
Not that there haven't been plenty of bad things done by Muslims, but there have been plenty of bad things done by Christians, and of course Christians have been much more active in Muslim countries than the reverse, but of course, no American thinks there's anything wrong with that.
No American thinks there's anything wrong with the fact that the U.S. has set up the dictator of Egypt, and that the entire Egyptian regime is in effect run by the U.S., that we put these dictators in power in Muslim countries, and that we decide what's the proper religion for them, and tell them you can't believe that, you should believe that, I mean, people resent that.
We would resent it, as Ron Paul always points out.
We should always think about, as he says, the golden rule should apply to foreign policy as well as to personal conduct.
We have to think about how we would feel if that were being done to us, but this is one of those unanswerable, excuse me, one of those unaskable questions in American life, that thank goodness Ron Paul brought to prominence.
Well, you know, one of my commenters at the Stress Blog wrote that he thinks that a lot of the fear that the radical Islamic extremists are all going to come and, you know, convert us with their terrorism or whatever it is, is just projection, that really Americans know good and well that we prop up the dictatorship in Egypt, which tortures the people who live there, and they know good and well that America, the American government slaughters people by the hundreds of thousands over in the Arab world, and they can't help but think, well, if I was one of them, I would want to kill me too, so I must be in great danger, and therefore I'm voting McCain.
Well, you know, I'd like to think that they actually are that thoughtful.
Maybe it's all just a subconscious thing.
I think a lot of people just think, they wouldn't put it in these terms, but this is what they actually think, we're the only humans.
Right.
Anybody who's not on the side of the U.S. is, in some sense, a sub-human and can just be killed.
Yeah, well, it's just like when a plane crashes.
So the fact that the U.S. killed a million people in Iraq, right, means nothing.
Right, or even when, like, an airliner crashes in Europe somewhere and they say, six Americans were aboard, and never mind the rest of them or where they were from.
Well, I mean, I remember back in the George Bush I regime, when the U.S. of course always has its warships off, making trouble off Iran, and of course, if Iran were to send a warship off the U.S., why, it would be the end of the world.
I mean, the hysteria would be, you know, but anyway, so here's the U.S., one of these quadrillion dollar Aegis destroyers, and they said, oh, the Iranians are shooting a missile at us, so they shoot it down.
It's a civilian jetliner.
There were more than 300 people killed, men, women, and children.
Did America care about this?
No.
In fact, Americans thought the Iranians were horrible for being outraged.
The U.S. had just shot down, I mean, can you imagine our reaction if some foreign warship shot down an American jetliner taking off from an airport here?
And yet, I think it comes down to the fact that people don't think they're human, that they're not human beings like us.
If they're not being ruled by Uncle Sam and paying taxes to Uncle Sam, which is what makes you a human, then, you know, you can just be killed at will.
Anybody the U.S. kills, any child whose arms and legs they pull off, deserved it.
Everybody deserves what happens to them, but nothing is ever deserved by an American.
And Garrett Gouret, the great old right guy, talked about the American complex of fear and faulting.
In other words, that we're constantly, oh, no, they're going to get us, oh, no, they're going to get us.
And we're the greatest, we're number one, we should rule the world, and that's the attitude today, too.
Yeah, that's the great quote.
We're the greatest, but, oh, no, they're going to get us.
So it's a very strange thing, and it's an unfortunate defect in the American character.
Well, you know, there was an article one time on lewrockwell.com.
By the way, I'm speaking with Lew Rockwell, if you're just tuning in from lewrockwell.com and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and there was an article on here, I think it was by Daniel McCarthy, that divided, you know, we were talking about the left and the right and all the different divisions, but he divided the American political thought by Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Wilsonians.
And I thought that was very instructive, and I think that the Jacksonians are those that you call the red state fascists.
Yeah, because fascism is typically used just as an epithet, but I want to emphasize, and I'm starting writing about this in 2004, that it's an actual ideological movement, and that not all statism is on the left.
There is a right-wing statism, and that fascism has certain beliefs, I mean, it's militaristic, it's belligerently nationalistic, believes in aggressive war, believes in a police state, believes in a welfare state, believes in the leader principle, the executive should be running everything, and other things, too, but it unfortunately comports pretty much exactly with the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Isn't it strange that a bunch of Southern good-old-boy types have as their intellectual leaders a bunch of ex-Trotskyites and kind of weirdo tankers in Washington and D.C.?
I mean, I can't think of any real Jacksonian intellectual leaders.
They're the followers.
Let's go kick butt, I don't know anything about it.
I love the South, I live in the South, and I love the people of the South who are so friendly and polite and former ladies and gentlemen of the South than many other parts of the country, like the Northeast, where I'm from.
I sure agree with that.
But there's an unfortunate tendency among the borderers, the Scotch-Irish and so forth, they just love to fight, and Irishmen and Scotsmen were the sort of shock troops of the British Empire, and their descendants, who populate large parts of the South, are the shock troops of the American Empire, too.
So it's a terrible thing, and the South was, in many ways, a victim of the U.S. government, but just like Ireland and Scotland were victims of the government in London, but still people populate the armies, and if you look at the dead from Iraq, in terms of the American troops, it's typically, you know, the typical dead kid is a young Southern boy, a working-class kid.
From a small town.
From a small town.
Nobody from Harvard or Yale being killed in Iraq.
I mean, this is, of course, a class thing, and it's horrific.
So the whole thing is very unfortunate.
But I wish to goodness that Southerners, and for that matter Westerners and Northerners and every other American, would not enlist in the Imperial Army.
And of course, I think they're, you know, I'm afraid that either, whether it's Obama or Hillary or McCain, we're going to see a huge push, and I fear it may be successful, to have national service, the purpose of which will be, of course, to inculcate all young people in love and obedience to the state, but to have a draft, in effect.
They don't feel they can get away with a direct draft, so what they're going to do is they're going to have a national service program, government service program, where every 18-year-old will have to spend whatever it'll be, two years, working for the government, but if you decide to go into the military, if you decide to, say, change bedpans at the VA, you're going to get very little money and lousy living conditions and so forth.
If you decide to go in the military, you'll get a lot more money, and you get vast benefits afterwards, too.
So this is the way they want to bring in more troops into the military.
And with the candidates we're down to now, it's pretty much unavoidable, isn't it, with these three?
Well, all three of them are militarists.
There's enough conservative or some sort of, I don't know which kind of pressure on George Bush to keep him from doing this, but with McCain or Hillary or even Obama, I think it's going to be a leading part of their agenda.
Well, I think it's not that the regime doesn't want it.
They just feel that Bush is so unpopular, so disliked, that it would taint the program if he were to push it.
Therefore, they're going to wait until there's a new Fuhrer in Washington, and then they're going to put this through to have every young person.
I know Ron Paul, one of the heroic opponents of the draft and all the sorts of programs of this sort, national services, over during his entire public life.
I always liked the fact that he'd point out when he'd speak in Congress, he'd say, why does everybody have to be 18?
He said, why should you just take the young people?
How about you guys here in Congress?
You've benefited from the system much more than some 18-year-old kid.
You know, there's plenty of jobs you could do.
You can clean a latrine.
You can peel a potato just as well as an 18-year-old.
So if we're going to have this, and I'm entirely opposed to it, let's make sure we draft congressmen, we draft businessmen, we draft network anchors, we draft the whole upper class, and not just teenagers.
Yeah, draft Georgetown right there outside of Washington, D.C.
Well, and speaking of Ron Paul, what about the future of the old right, the future of libertarianism?
We have all these new books coming out.
We have the leading figurehead of the new right has died, and it seems like the old right is making a resurgence.
What do you see for the future?
Well, I'm very enthusiastic.
I think that you can probably hear our...
Why, by the way, does the town of Auburn have a government siren that goes off at noon?
I'm sorry, you said what?
You have a siren?
Why does my town have a government siren?
I don't know if you can hear it over the phone here that goes off at noon.
Oh, no, I can't hear it, but I have no idea why.
There's sirens around.
You know, of course, allegedly the reason is so people would know to take their lunch.
But, I mean, this goes back to, like, agricultural times.
But needless to say, government still has the siren program.
Well, anyway, so I apologize if you can hear that over the phone.
No, no, it's not coming through, but that is funny.
So I think Ron Paul has recruited and educated a vast number of especially young people to defect to the old right cause.
So it's true that the number of votes he's getting among the rotten Republican base is pretty small, but there are a whole bunch of, you know, I would say millions of young people.
He just had at least 7,000, some people at the University of Texas at a rally in Austin.
Maybe you were even there.
Yeah, I was.
But a lot of people who I talked to tried to go and couldn't get there because all the streets were blocked.
I mean, the traffic was such that a lot of people were turned away.
So there's no telling how many would have wanted to go.
I have to tell you, it was an incredible sight, the number of people there, Lou.
And, you know, everybody cheering.
And, of course, Ron gives the pure, unadulterated message.
I mean, he's talking about, get out of the wars, let's not have a Federal Reserve, no income tax, no police state, no patriarch, no drug war, and all the rest.
And everybody very enthusiastic.
So I've noticed that he's gotten, I mean, at the Mises Institute, we know as our book sales have gone way up, people interested not only in his books, but in Murray Rothbard and Mises and other people to learn about economics, to learn about political philosophy.
And I think Ron has really lit a prairie fire.
So it's among the people that we most care about for the future, and that's young people.
So I think the future looks very, very bright.
Maybe not the political future, but I must say I never thought the political future was too hot anyway.
But I think the effect of his campaign, of his movement, is going to bear a lot of fruit over the next two or three decades.
And I think it's really the hope of America.
And because America is so important to the rest of the world in a positive sense economically and in a negative sense militarily, it's important to other countries, too.
I heard a funny thing this morning where McConnell, who's head of the National Intelligence Directorate, said he was going to give a report to Congress on all the security threats that are facing America.
And I thought, well, how about a report on all the security threats that America represents to other countries?
Wouldn't that be funny if they did one of those in NAE?
Other countries don't count unless they're subservient to the U.S.
If they're not U.S. satellites, then kill them.
Well, you know, in one of the interviews that Ron did with the media when he was here in Austin, one of the things that he said was he was so impressed that he thought it would take another generation or more to get this many people to understand and believe in the libertarian message, and that he was just absolutely thrilled as a guy who has been doing this for a very long time.
Yeah.
And, you know, we all thought that things would gradually build, which they have been gradually building all my life.
I could do this far more just in libertarianism than when I was a kid.
Just a tremendous difference in Austrian economics and understanding of the evil of central banking and of an imperialist foreign policy and so forth.
But Ron stepped it up massively.
I mean, it's just a huge, huge, giant step forward.
So I think it's very, very thrilling.
All right, Lou.
One last thing here.
And this is really beneath you and beneath this interview.
But it is it addresses a foundational myth, I think, of, well, central banking and American empire.
There is a new move by MoveOn.org and a bunch of other groups to label the current recession the Iraq recession.
Justin Armando in his article on Antiwar.com today says might as well call it the imperial recession.
But in searching around a little bit last night, I found this by Paul Krugman at the New York Times.
Its headline, an Iraq recession with a question mark.
And he says, OK, people ask me questions all the time.
I'm against the war.
It was unnecessary.
But economics isn't a morality play in which evil deeds are always punished and good deeds rewarded.
The fact is that war is in general expansionary for the economy, at least in the short run.
World War Two, remember, ended the Great Depression.
The 10 billion or so we're spending each month in Iraq mainly goes to U.S. produced goods and services, which means that the war is actually supporting demand.
Yes, there would be infinitely better ways to spend the money.
But at a time when a shortfall of demand is the problem, the Iraq war nonetheless acts as a sort of WPA, supporting employment directly and indirectly.
Well, he's right.
It is the WPA, the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal.
And Paul Krugman is a Keynesian who believes that, believes all the Keynesian myths, one of which is that mass murder and destruction of property and transfer of wealth from working people to the merchants of death in the military industrial complex.
This is, quote, is good for, quote, unquote, the economy, which is not good for the economy.
It's good for the government.
It's good for the special interests that are getting the dough.
But it's tremendously destructive.
I mean, destruction is not economically helpful.
And this is one of the most vicious myths.
And, of course, the idea that World War II got us out of the Depression.
And by the way, interesting as he's admitting there without actually saying it, the New Deal didn't get us out of the Depression, neither did the warfare side of the New Deal.
Although Roosevelt did kill off the unemployed.
I mean, I guess maybe he would argue that that was a good thing.
But we did not get out of the Depression until after the war, until the magnificent year of 1946, when the federal budget fell by two thirds.
And Keynesians like Krugman warned at the time that there was going to be a much deeper depression because all the workers, all the soldiers would be coming back into the economy.
There were no jobs for them.
But, of course, because, thank God, the Republicans are relatively decent in those days.
And also, even the Democrats couldn't get away with the idea of keeping as massive a government as had existed during World War II.
When the government shrank dramatically in size, the economy boomed.
And Robert Higgs writes about this, that this is probably the U.S. economy grew in the year of 1946 by 30 percent.
We're talking real economic growth, 30 percent.
And that was the biggest year of economic growth maybe ever in human history, certainly in American history.
And that was because of the shrinking of the government.
But the idea that the central planning of World War II, the rationing, the vast destruction of wealth by taking money out of the pockets of people and putting it into entirely uneconomic things like building bombs and bullets and tanks and bombers and all the rest of the rotten apparatus of the warfare state, that made everybody poorer.
People got poorer during World War II even than they had been before the war.
So World War II was an impoverishing thing for the American people and certainly an impoverishing thing for the people who were bombed or otherwise killed by American weapons or by German weapons or Japanese weapons or whatever else, Russian weapons.
Think of Roosevelt's great ally in that war.
Krugman is a liar, what can I say?
Or maybe he believes it and he just decrees Keynesian.
But he's telling an untruth either intentionally or unintentionally when he says that.
And it's because he's justifying the entire regime.
Because if indeed the government can, quote unquote, get us out of the depression by having a war, well, shouldn't we have permanent war?
In fact, that's what he's saying.
Well, and that's what a lot of people said on the eve of the war in Iraq.
Well, you know, war is good for the economy.
Well, before the first war in Iraq, the evil James Baker, the consigliere to the Bush crime family, said this war is about jobs, jobs, jobs.
And so, as you know, they're all Keynesians.
As Nixon famously said, we're all Keynesians now.
And indeed, Keynesianism is the economics and the philosophy of a mixed economy and a warfare state, welfare state like the U.S.
What I like about Keynesianism is, and particularly military Keynesianism, is it's just so counterintuitive.
You know, when I was in high school, I read 1984.
And in part of that story, the evil torturer O'Brien pretends to be Winston Smith's friend for a little while and gives him a book by the evil Goldstein that explains what's really going on here.
And there's a whole section about, yeah, the reason we're building the giant floating fortress is so that we can take the wealth of the people and dump it into the ocean where they can't get to it, where they won't be able to spend it improving themselves and making themselves too intelligent.
Well, I always like what Lou Lehrman once said before he became a neocon, who I worked for when he ran for governor of New York.
But I was still involved in politics directly before I went straight.
But he once said, you know, if war is actually good for the economy, but you don't want to hurt people, you don't want to kill people, how about this?
We in the Japanese each build a massive fleet of the most modern ships, highly technical weapons and atom bombs and missiles and so forth.
And we agree to meet in the middle of the Pacific, and then we take all the sailors off because we don't want anybody harmed.
And we sink them all.
Therefore, we can have the economic benefits of war without hurting anybody.
It makes perfect sense.
I mean, it only takes a minute to realize, wait a minute, this is not, how can this be helpful economically?
Keynesianism is, of course, entirely irrational and crazy, except from the standpoint of the government.
Because what Keynes said was, and I'm quoting Rothbard here, that economists attended before the day of Keynes to all be Dr. Nose in the Ron Paul tradition, telling politicians, look, high taxes are a bad idea.
Deficits are a bad idea.
Big government spending is a bad idea.
Government regulation is a bad idea from an economic standpoint.
And then all of a sudden, the economists are telling the politicians, hey, spending is great.
Deficits are great.
Inflation is great.
Regulation is great.
In fact, the economy is like a truck going down a mountain road.
And if the government's not there at the steering wheel, it's going to go off the road and be crashed.
So we have to have the government running the economy to keep everything in good order.
And the way that you actually have a prosperous economy, spend every dime, borrow every dime, inflate massively, and have a massive regulatory state.
So needless to say, this is something the politicians all wanted to do this anyway.
I loved having this intellectual rationale.
Keynesianism has been a blight on the world ever since John Maynard Keynes wrote his famous treatise on the general theory of economics.
All right.
Now, if we can end this interview on a high note, I wonder if I can get your comment on the New York Philharmonic's recent trip to North Korea.
Well, I thought that was thrilling.
You know, I guess like a lot of people, I was afraid that there was going to be a war with North Korea.
North Korea, a very poor, starving country that, of course, at one point they were blowing up as, ah, they're going to bomb us.
They're going to, you know, hurt the US.
They're going to, you know.
Again, you know, one of these hysterical things straight out of the, you know, 10-minute hate in 1984.
Yeah, axis of evil.
They were right there on the list.
So thank goodness.
You know, maybe there's not going to be a war.
Thank goodness they gave in.
I mean, nobody should have atomic weapons anyway.
They're evil.
They're designed to kill civilians.
So they are, even if one believes in a government army, atomic weapons are inherently immoral and nobody should have them.
So it's great they got rid of it.
And now all the US needs to do, and I think, you know, things like sending the New York Philharmonic over there is magnificent.
It's great for the North Koreans.
It's great for us.
All these sorts of cultural exchanges are just wonderful.
And in fact, of course, even though they accuse people like us of being isolationists, we believe in the maximum trade, maximum cultural exchange, maximum student travel and so forth to get to know other people.
We don't want to be isolated from the world.
And of course, the people who claim to be anti-isolation is to want economic sanctions and make it illegal to travel to Cuba and all the rest of the totalitarian impositions of the US state.
So this is a wonderful thing.
And now what the US needs to do is stop hindering South Korea from having talks with North Korea for a very long time.
Thank goodness the worst militaristic creeps of South Korea have been out of power, the ones who started the Korean War.
And there are people in the government of South Korea, in fact, the entire intellectual class of South Korea, the commercial class and so forth, except those who are directly connected to the US government or those parts of the Korean government, like their version of the CIA that are funded by the US government.
They want to have peace with North Korea.
They want maximum trade.
They want maximum visits.
They want to be able to have families be reunited and families that have been split for so long to be able to visit their relatives in North Korea and South Korea.
US has prevented this because, of course, the US always wants war, always wants hate, always wants anything to stir up trouble, because this is the way an empire rules.
As the Romans said, divide and rule.
And that's the America, that's the rule of all empires.
So the US needs to get out of South Korea, get the troops out of there, stop trying to control Korea, let the Koreans settle their own problems.
And I think that if we were to do that, you'd see communism immediately disappear in North Korea.
The only way communism is kept in existence, obviously you have the bad guys internally, but you have the external pressure that keeps them in power, and that's implied by the US.
Just like the US has helped keep in effect Castro in power in Cuba.
So hands off, stop persecuting them, stop trying to kill them, none of our business, let the Koreans handle their own lives, and everybody would be better off there, and especially the poor North Koreans, who are a vast number of people starved to death, they're under a horrible totalitarian regime.
As much as any people in the world, they need freedom, they need prosperity, South Korea has got the absolute ability to bring that to North Korea.
And if the US would stop meddling, it could be just a great development to bring the people of North Korea, a brilliant people, into the world economy, as the people of Russia and of Eastern Europe, of India and China have been brought into the world economy.
It would be a magnificent development, the US, the alleged leader of the free world, of course, as usual, preventing the breakout of freedom.
Well, it all comes back to, well, what you were saying earlier about other people in the world being human or not, and it's really, I remember when Madeleine Albright went, I guess in 98 or something like that, and the North Koreans put on the most spectacular kind of circus or what have you in front of her, and that made the TV, and like, hey look, there's North Koreans, they're individuals, rather than, you know, just picturing a shape on a map or something, here, these are people showing their culture to us, and now we're doing likewise, and hopefully more and more of that will realize that we're not talking about shapes on a map, we're talking about individuals here, it's not okay to murder them.
I remember when Michael Moore's movie on 9-11...
Fahrenheit 9-11.
Fahrenheit 9-11 came out.
One of the things that the conservatives most criticized him for was showing street scenes of Baghdad, because, of course, the U.S. media will never show normal people in normal, leading their normal lives in any country being demonized by the U.S.
That's one of the rules.
They can't be shown because it makes it harder for the U.S. state to want to murder them.
So the fact that he showed children in the playground, business people in the businesses, families walking in the street going to a restaurant or whatever, this goes against the state propaganda.
It's why we're never, for example, shown, and I think one of the good things about the Beijing Olympics that we maybe will be shown, but so far we're never shown what China looks like.
Right.
I mean, Shanghai looks like Houston.
I mean, it's full of the most magnificent commercial office buildings and businesses and booming people and driving in their cars.
And it's nothing like, you know, it's a modern, wonderful capitalist city.
But we can never be shown that because we're supposed to hate the guts of the Chinese.
And, of course, they're always sort of keeping the Chinese in reserve for the new Cold War and the new enemy, which the neocons and the Christian right both are advocating.
Yeah, we'll get to them soon enough.
Great.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate your time today.
Everybody, it's Lou Rockwell.
He's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He's the author of the book Speaking of Liberty, and he runs the most popular libertarian website in the world, lourockwell.com.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thanks, Scott.
