02/04/13 – Lew Rockwell – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is the great Lew Rockwell from LewRockwell.com.
And of course, he's the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
That's Mises.org.
Welcome back to the show, Lew.
How are you?
Great to be with you, Scott.
Good to have you here.
So listen, I don't have a specific article I'm referring to, I don't think.
But just sort of there's this kind of feeling, I guess, that I keep coming across on the American right that China is a terrible danger.
It's basically like Japan right before we got into World War II or something.
They're going to come here and kill us all.
They're going to take over the whole world.
And they do have hydrogen bombs.
And so, you know, I don't know, maybe there's a justification for the world empire.
After all, of course, the Democrats have their policy of containing China.
Please tell us about China from death camp to civilization and why people shouldn't be so scared about the way things are now.
Well, first of all, we should realize that the American state and its various ideological allies, like the American right, are always wanting to have an enemy.
You know, in order to have a government as big as this, and by the way, the U.S. government is the biggest, most powerful, richest government in the history of the world by many magnitudes, certainly far bigger than the Chinese government.
And in order to keep the American people agreeing to fund it, agreeing to be controlled by it, agreeing to be spied on and all the other evil things, and agreeing to be fooled by it, there always has to be some horrible guy over the next hill.
He's right there.
You know, I'm sure the Babylonians did this probably in the Stone Age.
They did it.
Oh, there's another tribe.
They're going to come and get us, so you better give all your money to me, the leader with the biggest axe.
So this is government.
Probably it didn't happen with the...
I shouldn't be attacking the Neanderthals or the early humans or whatever, because they didn't have a state.
They didn't have a government.
But this is a development of, quote unquote, civilization.
As an economy becomes wealthier, you have one group that, through conquest, takes power.
And they say, you know, we're the king, we're the republic, we're the democracy, we're the pharaoh, whatever the name is at various things, and we own you.
I mean, that's in effect what they...
They may not put it that way, although sometimes in the ancient world they did put it that way.
So in order to carry off this whole vast apparatus of predation, of torture, of murder, mass murder, and wars, and spying, and stuff that makes Big Brother in 1984 look like the ACLU, in order to get away with all that, they have to have...
Oh, there's somebody worse than us.
You won't believe it, but there's somebody worse than us they're going to take over, they're going to kill us.
So there have been many, many countries that they've said this about, none of which were ever a threat to the U.S., even though, of course, plenty of them were actually evil in their own context, whether we're talking about the German National Socialists, or the International Communists, the International Socialists in the Soviet Union, although, of course, they never have a problem being allied with these people.
The U.S. was allied with Stalin and that horrendous government during World War II, and really all during the 30s under Roosevelt.
So right now, especially the neocons and all the protectionists want to make an evil guy out of the Chinese.
So it seems to me, when we're thinking about China, first we have to realize that in moving from the days of Mao Zedong, which were not that long ago, to the current day, and really even as I wrote in that article in the early 2000s, they had moved from one of the worst governments in the history of the world, I mean, maybe on a level with Stalin and Hitler, to a much freer government.
Obviously, no government is perfect.
Every government is evil to one extent or another.
But they moved from the land of the concentration camps, of mass starvation, of just horrendous no civil liberties, no right to anything that you could just be instantly seized and beaten and killed if you looked askance at any of the rulers, even the local rulers.
I mean, just a total reign of terror against the Chinese people, to a place that was much more prosperous, no starvation, not only is there no starvation in China, and I wrote this in the early 2000s, especially not today, there's abundant food.
There's still plenty wrong.
They've still got a big military, although far less big proportionally than the U.S.
The U.S., of course, spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined, or certainly the rest of the so-called first world.
So you can own private property.
You can worship as you please.
Pretty much.
There is one group that they think is a political problem, and they're always after them.
But if you want to be a Confucian or a Christian or whatever, it's not a problem.
So is there perfect religious freedom?
Absolutely not.
But it's so much better than it used to be.
And just the fact that you can own private property, I mean, you can own agricultural land, you can own a condominium, you can own a little storefront business.
And so China is today semi-capitalist.
It's, I must say, quite amazing, quite one of the great developments, I think, of all of human history, to bring into the world division of labor, not only the former Soviet Union, all the former Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, India, and especially China.
I mean, the Chinese people are such an extraordinary people.
Jim Rogers always makes the point that really plenty of peoples have been great, if we want to use this sort of definition, once in history, whether it's the Romans, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Americans.
He said only the Chinese have been great twice.
I mean, really, culturally, economically, and they don't have a history of being aggressive outside their borders.
Now, like every government, they've done horrible things within their borders.
And so that's no good.
But right now, the U.S. is trying to get Japan to start a war with China over these islands in the South China Sea that Vietnam claims, Japan claims, China claims, Taiwan claims.
But the U.S. put Japan in charge after World War II of these islands.
And probably, you know, under international law, probably that's not correct.
But regardless of that, these are pretty much barren islands, although there's oil, perhaps, in the seabeds around them.
But the U.S. is ginning up a war.
They want certainly a cold war, maybe a hot war.
They want Japan to fight China.
This is, of course, a terrible idea for Japan and China, especially for the Chinese people and the Japanese people.
They're stirring up nationalism, which is always an evil.
I mean, why isn't it possible to appreciate the great things about any people?
In our own country, there's no shortage of people appreciating the good things about America and a lot of things that aren't good, they might call good.
The same is true in Japan and China.
In every other country, there are great achievements.
And we can all, and the key to being friendly with other people, benefiting from other people, letting them benefit from us, sort of the golden rule in economics is free trade.
So one of the things you'll notice that China's always attacked about is, oh my gosh, they're sending us cheap products.
Cheap products that Americans actually want to buy.
What a horrible thing.
And they talk about it as economic warfare.
Well, please, let's have more economic warfare.
So if you go into Walmart, you go into other kinds of stores where you see cheap, great products, they're almost invariably made in China.
I always sort of look out for Chinese products.
I like to buy Chinese products because I like to encourage free trade.
So it's wonderful, even in this world of total statism, in many ways, and of the U.S. government feeling it's the ruler of the world, the ruler of the solar system, the ruler of the galaxy, I guess.
They want to control everything.
The U.S. is a very anti-free trade power.
It wants everything regulated.
But still, there's some free trade.
And just the fact that China, after all the hatred, all the murder, all the piles of corpses, the mountains of corpses in China that accumulated under Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists, the fact that people can sell us things we want to buy, we can buy, we can sell them things that they would like to buy, and we can both benefit from being in this world.
We can make their lives better.
They can make our lives better.
It's just the most wonderful thing.
So anybody who hates that, you know is evil.
And of course, the neoconservatives have been at the forefront of wanting a new war with China.
They think this is the new Cold War, the new world war that might keep the U.S. imperial state at its present level of prosperity, at the expense of the whole world and the expense of the American people.
So I say, be grateful for what China's done, applaud them for what they've done, criticize them for what they haven't done.
Same here, too, by the way.
And I would say, given that the Chinese have been going towards freedom and the U.S. has been going away from freedom, we've got to applaud the Chinese more than the U.S.
All right.
So, well, a lot to go over there.
I guess, first of all, was it just that Mao died and then Deng Xiaoping came?
And I really like the way you talk about, I mean, it's horrible, but to bring up just how bad it got.
I mean, Stalin starved, what, 30 million people, something like that.
But Mao, even more than that, right?
He basically, the communists basically razed the entire civilization to the ground.
They had to start over in the 1970s from basically dirt, like cavemen or something after communism.
Well, it was quite, you know, an astounding, horrible, horrific thing that we don't actually know.
I mean, I read about cannibalism where, like, for years, villages would go and raid and eat each other's kids and stuff.
That's all they had to eat.
Well, I mean, that, you know, just, of course, it was deliberate starvation in the case of Stalin in Ukraine.
Maybe 16 million people, just that one particular crime, 16 million people died, 1.6 million people died.
We don't know how many people died under Stalin altogether.
Was it 30 million?
Was it 60 million?
But what, you know, is Stalin, or, I mean, or, and then, of course, you have what Mao did, just almost unbelievable.
Remember, these are crimes of government, by the way.
Whatever private sector crimes there are, and they're certainly horrific when, you know, a burglar invades a home and kills the people in there and that sort of thing, these are still penny ante as compared to what governments do.
And the Soviet government, the Chinese Communist government.
So to go from that, and I think, you know, it's also the typical neocon argument, whether they're talking about poor Iran, to take one example.
These people could never change.
They're evil.
You know, they sort of have a Calvinist view or something.
They've got the black hats.
They can never change.
So we just have to kill them.
But the fact that Russia was able to change, China was able to change without a huge, without a huge cataclysm and convulsion within the country, without huge civil wars that you might have thought would be necessary.
And of course, part of the reason is their economic systems were total disasters.
When you have a communist, as Mises first discussed in 1920, when you have a socialist government of the sort that Stalin had or that the Red Chinese had, you can't actually make any economic judgments.
You don't have, it's actually impossible to know.
Even the central planning board can't know what to do.
All they do is create disaster, create starvation, create unbelievable pollution, create people being shoved by, you know, their faces shoved into the mud, their children dying of starvation.
And so that, exactly as Mises predicted, this kind of thing is so bad, so anti-human, so against the flourishing of the human race, which you'd like to think everybody believes in, although not everybody does, but most of us do.
The socialist system was so bad economically that it helped bring about these peaceful revolutions.
So does that mean everything is right in Russia or China?
No, any more than everything's right in the U.S.
But they have made huge advances, and it shows that people can change.
Just as we know individuals can change, societies can change.
This is one of the reasons to be optimistic about our own country.
We can get better.
We're not locked into just getting worse and worse and more totalitarian.
And we can look at what happened in Russia and China.
People reformed, societies reformed themselves, and they even were able to reform these totalitarian governments with their vast networks of concentration camps for anybody who said boo.
They were actually able to change that.
So it's a great thing, it's a great reason to be optimistic about the human race.
And all of our futures, this is again what Mises talked about, Rothbard talked about it, that because of the fact that we became an industrial civilization, they both felt, and Hayek and Hazlitt and others too, that they couldn't actually get away with socialism indefinitely because it would mean mass starvation, and the people wouldn't put up with that.
So at some point, people wouldn't put up with it.
Of course, they too always had an external enemy.
And in the Soviet case, it was, oh, the Americans, or first it was the Germans, then it's the Americans that are going to get us.
And the Chinese, it was the Japanese, the Americans, the Russians, you know, they always had their external enemies.
But everything is so much better.
People have decent clothes, they have cars, they have decent homes, decent diets.
In so-called red China today, if you as a parent want to send your children to a private school, you can do it.
A private school.
So it's just the amount of progress that's taken place.
Why aren't we saying hallelujah to the Chinese instead of hating their guts?
But it's again because the neocons, the government, the media, all the enemies, want an external enemy to justify the biggest government in the history of the world, that carbuncle that's headquartered in Washington, D.C.
Well, now, so what about the idea, though, that too much capitalism for too long in a row will mean that their Politburo, which it is still, after all, a Communist Party dictatorship there, even though it's not a Marxist economic system anymore.
What about the idea that one day they'll have enough tax revenue that they could be as big and powerful as the U.S. government?
And then at that point, they'll take over the world.
And then who will be left to stop them and that kind of thing?
I mean, do you worry at all about the terrible Chinese future when they dominate all of Asia and run us out of the Pacific Ocean?
Well, again, you know, we'll have to wait and see.
But China today is not an aggressive power, really is not.
Very few exceptions and all.
It's very, very long history.
It's not been an aggressive power.
And I always remember reading a Bill Kristol article in the Weekly Standard.
This is some years ago, an alarmist article about China.
And he said, can you believe it?
China seeks to be the significant power in the South China Sea instead of the U.S.
Well, wait a minute.
I mean, what if, you know, when China seeks to be the significant power in the Gulf of Mexico, let me know.
But it seems to me they're military, which is far too big.
They spend far too much money on it, like every government.
But it's largely a defensive force.
There is the problem of Taiwan.
They ought to let Taiwan go and be free, probably.
And China, just like the U.S., probably needs to be broken up.
It's probably far too big a country.
There's just far too much centralization.
So I hope that they will be broken up.
I mean, cities and various regions of China in the past have sought to be free.
And empires and other bad governments have sought to prevent that.
Usually have prevented it.
But there still, to this day, are devolutionary and secessionary movements in China.
And they get about the same reception there as similar ones do here.
So I think a big central government doesn't like the idea of people breaking away and living their own lives.
So there's no shortage of work for libertarians in the world, whether it's libertarian intellectuals, libertarian activists.
But again, when you look at China, you have all the reason in the world to be optimistic for the human race.
It's such a great development.
And the idea that these creepy neocons and their cohorts are turning this into a danger.
I mean, look at all their claims about China's manipulating the yuan to bring about trade advantages to itself.
Well, of course, the US is the biggest currency manipulator in the history of the world.
It's constantly depreciating the value of the dollar in order to subsidize its exports.
And because China is not letting that happen and was tying their currency to the dollar, it's considered a huge outrage.
How dare they?
How dare they prevent the big US exporters and big US banks and so forth from being able to profit from the crazy stuff the Fed is doing?
So they're not a currency manipulator, or rather, they're far less a currency manipulator than the US.
Also, it's considered very scary and evil that there are people interested in a gold standard in China.
They think maybe this is the future for their country rather than fiat currency.
Certainly, they're buying vast amounts of gold.
The Chinese Central Bank, which, of course, would accomplish what we're wanting, right, is for them to stop inflating so much.
If they went on a gold standard, then OK, then whatever they do, whatever they do, it's a reason to hate them.
Yeah, doesn't matter what they do.
Well, you know, when they talk to each other, I can't understand it.
And I'm pretty sure that they're talking about me.
Well, you know, the US, in one of its National Security Council findings, was it number 48?
I'm not remembering the number, where they pretty much said any other country that seeks to improve its position militarily or economically is a threat to the US, that the world should remain exactly as it is with the US dominating everything.
So don't you dare become more prosperous, you guys, because, you know, that makes you bad.
Stay poor and stay dependent on the current world system.
Well, thank goodness, the Brazilians, you know, I mean, countries all over the world, and they're all very imperfect.
Every single state is imperfect.
But the Brazilians, you know, would like to be more prosperous.
The Indians want to be more prosperous.
The Russians want to be more prosperous.
The Chinese want to be more prosperous.
They want what every human being wants.
They want a better life for themselves, better lives for their children, better lives for their grandchildren, and so forth, and for their society.
The Chinese are very proud of their literature.
They're very proud of their culture.
They're very proud of their art, and, you know, to go down the list.
And why shouldn't they be?
There's much to be proud of.
And again, this is every people, but certainly the Chinese are quite an extraordinary people, a brilliant people, a very hardworking people.
And just to release them, we see, by the way, something similar happening in Vietnam.
Just to release them from the chain around their neck put there by the communists, a Western philosophy, of course.
This is a philosophy that came out of Western Europe.
It's not native to China.
Just release, take the chains off.
And all of a sudden, these people are booming.
So why isn't that something to thank God for?
I mean, why isn't that just a wonderful thing?
Why are we supposed to feel threatened by other people not starving?
It's really, you could say this about many things, but that alone seems to me all you need to know about the U.S. empire.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, you know, I guess I'm just lucky that my dad's a businessman.
And he saw in the 1990s from, you know, in that decade, from the very beginning to the very end of it, he saw Shanghai go from a little bitty town, you know, half the size of Austin, to something two or three times the size of Houston, or at least the downtown area of it.
So it's just a tremendous thing.
And it wasn't all just central planning and bubble activity or anything.
It was real growth.
And this thing became a world-class city in the space of one decade.
Absolutely unimaginable by anybody.
I mean, would Rothbard even have predicted that that could happen, you know?
And you'll notice that you'd never see pictures of Shanghai.
I mean, there was a Tom Cruise movie set in Shanghai.
I don't remember ever seeing pictures of Shanghai because, of course, it's politically incorrect.
To show the cities or the people of any country the U.S. is targeting.
Right, just like Tehran.
Tehran or Syria, you know, Antioch and so forth.
You don't ever see, you don't ever, you're supposed to, these are un-people, they're not humans, and so just so that everybody will feel fine about killing them all if the U.S. government decides it can get away with it, and it's in its interest to get away with it.
Well, I know how they do it, too, because it actually works on me a little bit, and that is that when it comes to Iran, for example, I picture more or less the shape of Iran on a map, right?
A drawing from a bird's-eye view rather than a street-level view of what it's like to be in Iran at all.
I've never been there.
I've hardly ever seen pictures or video of it.
I'd have to, you know, we're talking about the subject now, so now I'm thinking back, and I have seen some footage of what it's like to look at Iran from the standing there level, but mostly, no, whenever we're talking about Iran, the picture in my head is just a shape on a map.
There could be 50 million people there or none, as far as I know.
Well, Michael Moore's movie, not in general a fan of Michael Moore, but his movie Fahrenheit 9-11 is very good.
It's got a lot of great stuff in it, and I remember the neocons criticizing that movie for this, that he showed scenes of everyday life in Iraq and showed a symphony orchestra, showed mothers taking their little children to play in a park, showed people going in and out of restaurants, eating in restaurants, showed businesses, showed just street scenes.
Because, of course, you look at these people and you think, well, man, we don't want to murder these people.
These are people like us, have the same hopes for the future and the same fears, and we share far more in common with them than we do with the government of either country.
But he was specifically criticized by the neocons because they said it gave them a false impression you should just show, I don't know, the army marching or whatever.
You're not supposed to show, and you'll never see this about China either.
I've only ever once seen, this was in a documentary on television, sponsored, I guess, by General Motors and by Buick, because the Chinese love Buicks.
Buicks are considered a very high-level, of course, there's a big Chinese automotive industry, there are Buicks built in China.
So this was showing a Chinese street and a Buick dealership in, I think it was Shanghai, in downtown Shanghai, and all the people coming and oohing and aahing over the cars and so forth.
And again, it's the kind of thing you are virtually never allowed to see.
So it's what we should want to see.
We should want to see.
We should want to travel.
We should want to go to China.
We should want to go visit Iran.
We should want to go visit, I guess, Syria is tough, but at least before the bombs start falling, it's important for people to know what it's like and what is it like in Tehran.
It really is such a great case study in just how commie our media is.
I mean, when I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the last gasp of the Soviet Union there, but it was also a kind of brinksmanship era, the height of the Soviet Union and its power in the world and that kind of thing.
And one of the things that I learned about the Soviet Union that proved what a great country I lived in was over there, the government controls all the newspapers and tells everybody what to think about everything.
And yet you couldn't really ascribe less state influence in our situation, could you?
Professor Yuri Maltsev, who was an economist at the Soviet Union, now teaches economics here, an Austrian economist, said that the thing that struck him when we came to the United States, he said, was that, of course, the media was entirely state media, just like in the Soviet Union, even if not officially so, unofficially so.
He said the difference was the Americans believed it.
He said in the Soviet Union, if the, if Providence said it was going to rain tomorrow, he assumed it was going to be sunny.
Right.
He said here, he said, so for the preponderance of people believe what the government media say.
So.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry we're over time and I got to let you go.
This has been a great interview.
I hope I can get you back on the show to talk about this great speech that you gave that I wish I'd been there for that, this thing in Houston, the Misesian century, because, of course, it is 2013, which means it's the anniversary of a lot of things that happened a hundred years ago.
So we're going to have to talk soon about all of that.
But I got to go because Phil Durali is coming up to talk about Israel bombing Syria.
Bye bye.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Lou.
Everybody, that's the great Lou Rockwell.
His website, of course, is lourockwell.com.
Check out his podcast radio show there and check out the great blog at lourockwell.com/blog.
And, of course, Mises.org, M-I-S-E-S.org.
You can find 100 million zillion pages of Austrian economic stuff.
They are for free in PDF format and HTML, too.
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