All right, folks, this is Santa War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and welcoming back to the show, the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, proprietor of LewRockwell.com, Lew Rockwell.
Welcome back to the show, Lew.
Scott, great to be with you.
It's great to have you on today, and I had a great time at the Future Freedom Foundation conference last weekend.
The only, one of the only drawbacks, there were two or three speeches that I missed on Friday morning, including yours.
And I'm very happy to have read it now at LewRockwell.com, where it ran, I guess, day before yesterday.
But I was wondering if, you know, we could go over and you can basically share what you said in your speech with me and my audience, most of whom missed the conference.
We'll be delighted to, Scott.
First, I want to congratulate Jacob Hornberger, Bumper Hornberger, for another great conference on foreign policy and civil liberties.
This is the second one that his Future Freedom Foundation has held, and really, this is a very superior conferences in content and audience and just every organization.
And so he really does an extraordinary service.
And what I talked about was war and inflation.
I wanted to make the point that, you know, when the Federal Reserve was first sold to the American people back before 1913, when it was established, there were all kinds of excuses for it.
Well, it'll bring about liquidity, it'll erase the business cycle, it'll make commerce easier and make everybody more prosperous, any number of lies, except about supplying liquidity to the banking system.
They didn't lie about that.
But then nobody mentioned that here was an organization that would make possible horrific world wars, that it's only with central banking that a country can engage in the sorts of things the U.S. has done all during the 20th century and now in the 21st century, these massive, these massive killing expeditions and destruction of property.
You know, what, 100 million people dead since in wars that the U.S. has been involved in since in one sense or another since 1913.
And one of the points I made was that if a government has to gather its revenues for murder by taxation or by borrowing, there are real restrictions on it because people will not agree to be taxed beyond a certain point.
In fact, when governments raise taxes too high, it stabilizes and can even lead to revolutions.
I mean, the American Revolution was in many ways simulated by tax increases.
And so was the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution was stimulated by central banking, but also and the effects of it and the war, but also by tax increases.
The governments don't, you know, they want money in any way they can get it.
But there are limits to them, to borrowing and there are limits to taxation.
If George Bush had had to actually come up in taxation or borrowing with the money for his Iraq war, they never could, they never could have run it.
It's about $20,000 per household so far.
If they had to present that bill to everybody's household, you know, he'd be headed for in exile to Dubai or something.
I mean, he wouldn't be here.
But every time when he makes another request of the rubber stamp Congress for another $75 billion, another $100 billion, whatever it is, for his expeditionary adventures in Afghanistan and in Iraq and colonial adventures, you know, there's virtually no debate about it, nobody because they can just print it.
And that's what the central bank has served as such an essential adjunct to state power.
Never could have been a worldwide global US empire without the central bank.
So the central bank has done many evil things.
It's brought about inflation, you know, the value of the dollar yesterday about four cents of what it was in 1913.
It's brought about the business cycle, even worse.
The recessions and depressions, we're in a very bad recession right now that we haven't begun to see the end of yet.
The Federal Reserve is responsible for those, and I can talk about that if you want to a little bit later how that comes about.
But it also has made possible vast wars.
So the Federal Reserve has got a lot of bad things that it's responsible for, but these wars are, you know, just extraordinary.
So I wanted to, you know, say to people on the left who are, you know, always want to talk about, gee, if they weren't spending all that money in Iraq, they could spend it on the public schools.
Well, you'll just say I don't happen to think that's a good thing, although the public schools at least aren't directly killing anybody.
But obviously, I don't think that's a good thing, but they can't.
The left doesn't understand that if you're going to empower government to create money out of thin air and do it through the banking system, the benefit of the banking system, as well as the government itself and the military industrial complex and all the rest of the parasites who hover around Washington like flies around a garbage can, that you can't – there's no way that you can then avoid having money go to the military industrial complex, too.
And of course, people on the right who are concerned about the regulatory state, the taxes, all the terrible things that the government does to business and to our privacy, and that's sort of thing, but who also think that there can be global wars and the U.S. changing the world at the point of a gun in the neocon vision, well, you can't have that either.
And even libertarians very seldom talk about the Central Bank, and there are all kinds of reasons why that doesn't happen, some of them legitimate error and some of them for other reasons.
But I just wanted to try to focus everybody's attention on the Federal Reserve, and if the Federal Reserve in that marble palace on Constitution Avenue were actually to be a, you know, visually a true picture of what it is, it'd be a huge mountain of skulls on its front lawn.
I mean, this is like murder incorporated.
This is what makes possible all the, you know, Halliburton and the Lockheeds and all the vast military bases and the bombers and the atomic bombs and all the horrible things that we know come about from the warfare state.
We can put that right at the door of the Federal Reserve.
Now, the Federal Reserve is obviously, obviously there have been plenty of wars before there was Central Banking, and government has all its ambitions to run the world before Central Banking, but Central Banking gave government a vast increase in its ability to do all the evil things that it wants to do.
So I would argue that if we're concerned about peace, as well as about prosperity, as well as about our freedom, we have to have as one of our key issues of focus, exactly as Ron Paul has done, on the evil of Central Banking and why we need sound money.
Well, you know, you put it in real stark contrast to the myth when you talk about a pile of skulls on their lawn and this intimate connection with the warfare state.
Well, let's go back in history then.
I think I remember learning from history that the same guys really responsible for setting up the Federal Reserve System, centered around the Morgan Bank, were really the same guys who pushed us into World War I.
Excuse me, that's right.
The Morgans and the Rockefellers were the two key financial interests, and the Morgans especially were, you know, the Rockefellers in those days were kind of junior partners to the Morgans.
The Morgans were the ones who had such vast, carried on their balance sheet, such a vast number of British government bonds, had Britain been defeated or had Britain been seriously harmed and not able to pay its bonds, J.P. Morgan and company would have gone under.
So in order to profit from war, and of course there are always people who profit from war, war is very good for some people.
So they did.
They schemed and helped push us into war after Woodrow Wilson, the evil Wilson, ran on a platform that he was going to keep us out of war, and that he would not, exactly like Roosevelt decades later in Part II of the so-called Great War of the 20th century.
So Wilson promised that, but then he of course immediately schemed, he lied, he did everything possible to bring about the U.S. entry into the war, and he of course brought that about and the Federal Reserve did finance the war for him.
Now Lou, the Federal Reserve was, as you said, created in 1913, and the war broke out in Europe the next year, America didn't get involved until 1917, of course.
Do you believe or suspect that the Central Bank was actually created for the purpose of being an engine of this hidden taxation, as you describe it, in order to build an American war machine, or this is just the after effect and it doesn't really matter what their motives were in the first place?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I mean, do they inflate to make war, or do they make war to inflate?
I mean, they actually benefit the state and its connected financial interests, benefit tremendously from inflation and from war, and these two things always go together.
I don't know whether they actually saw the war in Europe coming, but there certainly were people in Britain who had been advocating a war against Germany long before 1914, and the same with Russia and with France, the so-called allies.
So it's, you know, I don't know enough to say yes, but would I be surprised if they had actually, because they wanted a Central Bank for a very long time, so they wanted that separately.
But did they push it through and really scheme it through in a vast PR line campaign at that time to be ready for a European war?
It may very well be true.
Well, so let's go back in time to the American Revolution and the phrase, not worth the Continental.
Doesn't that come from the paper money during the Great Secession from England?
Yeah, you know, it's very funny.
They were one of the members of the Continental Congress in arguing against taxes.
He said, why should I consent to tax, I can't remember whether he said my constituents or the people or whatever, when we can send to the printer, get a paper, this is only an approximate quote, but it's pretty much accurate, get a wagon load of paper money and pay for it with just a quire of it, that is a small, in other words, you get this wagon load of paper money and you pay the printer with a little bit of the paper money, you get all the rest, and you don't have to levy a tax on anybody and upset them.
So certainly that's what the Continental Congress did.
They financed the war through the inflation of the Continental currency, and you're right, as a result of it, and it was about the prices, you know, the value of the Continental was about one one-thousandth of its value before the Revolution, after the Revolution, and the people who intended to hold this currency and use it, the people who were in favor of American independence got burned the most, and ironically the Tories, who wanted to continue British rule, would have nothing to do with this currency and just wanted to trade in gold and silver, you know, in relative terms they did much better.
So it's an ironic thing, but yeah, governments love paper money, I mean, not that inflation doesn't come with paper money.
If you look at the history of the denarius, which was the sort of central silver coin of the Roman Empire, in the early days it's a piece of solid silver.
After all the wars and inflation, it's a piece of copper coated in silver.
But with, and then of course, kings and other forms of government, typically in the days of gold and silver coins, what they've done is they do coin clipping, where they would clip the edges off, and that by the way is why we still have, even though there's no reason for it with these bologna sandwich cupro-nickel coins that LBJ gave us, but it still has the reading around the edges, those little lines are to tell you if somebody has clipped off the edge.
So that's a relic from the days of silver and gold coins.
I remember reading about the history of one of the other emperor of China, who actually had the death penalty for anybody who wouldn't accept his bogus monies, he was doing the very same thing, I think it was in The Creature from Jekyll Island, Griffin talks about that.
Well you know, if you read Marco Polo's fantastic book about his travels, I mean it's just, I highly recommend it, it's a fascinating book, but part of it is he talks about visiting the Chinese empire, Kublai Khan, and he says, boy it's the most astounding thing, he prints this paper money and the officials sign it, and then people have to take it, he said, yeah, very interesting, he thinks it's an interesting thing, maybe they should adopt it in Europe, he wasn't much of an economist, Marco Polo, but that's one of our sources for Kublai Khan, and it's funny, in the American paper money experience, originally they, just like Kublai Khan in the 13th century, originally had officials sign each bill, as had happened with the paper money in the colonies earlier, but the, obviously they started putting this stuff out at such a tremendous rate, that they just had to print the signatures on, by the way, Ben Franklin, a big advocate of paper money, had the contract to print the paper money, I'm sure just a merest happenstance that he was an advocate of inflation, and also had the contract, but this is of course the way government works.
Now, I think part of this discussion, we're sort of taking it for granted that we both understand that the creation of new money, this printing press money, magic wand money, is the cause of inflation, and yet, that understanding actually doesn't seem to permeate through at say, I don't know, the TV, you know, financial networks.
Well, Scott, you're right in that, you know, they want, for example, if the gasoline prices are going up, we're supposed to blame the ARABs, those horrible people who should all have their throats slit by Bush and his war on terror, or, you know, we're supposed to blame the gas station, all those horrible people who are selling us gasoline at a higher price, or it's, you know, the fault of OPEC, or maybe it's Exxon, or whatever, but it's, you know, it's not, it's the fault of the depreciation of the money.
So, inflation, governments, ever since they first seized control of money, have depreciated it.
Not every government, the Byzantine Empire, interestingly enough, did not depreciate their gold coinage over many hundreds of years, and it became the standard coin all over the world, we find them all over the world today, still find these coins, because it was the coin that was accepted, everybody trusted it, and it didn't depreciate, maybe one reason the Byzantine Empire lasted as long as it did.
But governments, by and large, you know, tend to, tend to inflate, and in the old days before central banking, there were two bad results of this.
One is the depreciation of the value of the money, I mean, just in the sense that if you increase the supply of tomatoes, all other things being equal, tomatoes are going to be cheaper.
Well, if you increase the supply of dollars, all other things being equal, the dollar is cheaper, therefore it takes more dollars to buy something, so this is why prices go up.
There's also another effect of inflation that's not talked about, and it's a redistributionary effect, that is, the people who get the new money first, the government, in the old days, the courtiers, you know, the people around the court these days, the banks, the military industrial complex, the government contractors, the government itself, who get the new money first and are able to spend it before it loses its value, take money away from the people who get it last, poor people, old people, retired people, people outside of the big cities who live in the country, and so forth.
So inflation results not only in the value of every dollar going down, but it has a redistributive effect because you can buy more when you get the money first, and the people who get it last can buy less, and they lose wealth more.
So it's, you know, inflation is just an unbelievably vicious tactic by government.
And I guess everything government does is vicious, but inflation is just a pretty rotten thing, and of course it's disguised, which is why they love it, and they're always, and the government can put point fingers at various people who are to blame, and, you know, right now they're blaming oil speculators as being responsible for, you know, the oil price going up, anybody but them.
But with central banking, it adds a third leg to this evil stool, and it's the business cycle, because when you inflate through the banks, in the old days it was just, you know, the king would call in all the money, melt down the money, add lead to it, and send it out and say, by the way, you have to accept this money that has less silver in it than the old money for the same value or we're going to kill you, or put you in jail or whatever.
Or in the case of the French Revolution with the assignat, you had to accept this paper money or we're going to kill you at the same, you know, at the same value, and you must accept it.
It didn't work, by the way, but that's government.
Well, with the, with going up through the banking system, what effect it has is it lowers the interest rate below which, below the market rate, and one of the effects of this is you get all kinds of investments being made that at the time, during the artificial boom caused by the big increase in the money supply like the Fed has engineered, especially since 9-11, you have all kinds of things, I don't know, vast, condos being built, houses, all kinds of Bear Stearns, you know, building a brand new building and everybody's living it up and everything looks great and it looks like you've been very smart.
Then when the inevitable bust comes about, and they have to have a bust or otherwise you get hyperinflation and the total destruction of the currency, which even the government doesn't want, so when the bust comes, then you have a recession or a depression.
We may be, in fact, headed for a depression right now.
So it's, this is also a result of the Federal Reserve.
So the Federal Reserve makes your dollar worth less, it takes money from the poor and middle class and gives it to the rich government-connected people, it causes the business cycle, it causes crazy artificial booms when the real damage is done and the suffering of the recession, the depression, and it also makes possible the warfare state in the size to which we've unfortunately been accustomed, where Bush can just on his own say so, say, hey, I'm going to bomb you people in Iran and kill you all unless you, you know, bow down to me and kowtow to me.
And he can do that because, of course, the constitutional system is entirely broken down and he's in effect an elected dictator, but also because nobody has to worry about paying for anything, he can just have the, call up the Federal Reserve and say, hey boys, print me some dough.
Now it's not quite that direct, but that is really in effect exactly what happens.
So central banking is such an evil institution, and every libertarian, everybody who cares about peace, everybody who cares about freedom, everybody who cares about any kind of prosperity, and by the way, the entire American people's standard of living, except for the people connected with the government, is going down right now.
We are all getting poorer, and if people really understood that, maybe they'd be surrounding the Fed with pitchforks and torches and calling for Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Greenspan to come out.
Now, you know, one thing about Bush is not only is he not raising taxes, he's actually cutting taxes and sending people, quote-unquote, free money in the mail.
He is cutting taxes, although his deficits, his vast deficits, are tax increases.
Because if you borrow all this money, because of course he's not only, he's gotten, you know, he's cut taxes, he's increased borrowing, and of course he's especially increased inflation, but the borrowing he's done, how do you pay that money back?
It can only be paid back two ways, either through more inflation, even more inflation, but it's difficult for them to inflate too much, because then they can't sell their bonds anymore.
So really, most of it has to be paid back through taxation.
So there's going to be higher taxation in the future, because of the deficits that Bush has run, and so we can't actually credit him with cutting taxes, because the key thing is what is the size of government spending?
I mean, that's what, you know, that's, and of course he's vastly increasing government spending.
He's like another LBJ or FDR, another one of these monsters in the White House, and he's just doing horrific damage, and I hear there are going to be a lot of demonstrations against him in Italy, which is a great thing, but if the American people had any sense whatsoever, they'd be demonstrating against him here to millions of us.
Well now, I think that the current head of the central bank, Ben Bernanke, must either subscribe to some weird school of economics, or be a liar, because I saw him on TV saying that if prices continue to rise, that that could cause inflation, and he can't possibly mean that, can he, Lew?
Well, you know, of course, government doesn't only depreciate the money, it depreciates our language, in order to lie.
So the government, you know, the government, inflation always meant, and indeed if you look it up in the dictionary, it still means an increase in the money supply.
Now one of the effects of an increase in the money supply is rising prices, but what the government and all its kept economists have succeeded in doing is make people think of inflation as rising prices, and of course then you focus on, well, who are those awful people raising their prices, those horrible store owners and department store owners and businessmen and so forth.
So we've got to do something about them, and maybe the government can protect us.
So this is, the government, this is why another favorite, just to get on a slightly different subject of the way the government does this in contemporary terms, is they've always referred to violence in Iraq or Afghanistan, more violence, less violence, we want to have less violence.
This is in order to make it seem like it might be the crips and the bloods, or, you know, or regular crime, it's actually of course fighting and war they're talking about.
When they say there's more violence, they mean more fighting, but they don't want to discuss fighting, just like nobody is ever wounded, by the way, you may notice, soldiers are injured, but they're never wounded, you could be injured in a car accident.
Yeah, there was even an article about how, this is a few years back, where someone wrote about how they had instructions from on high at their newspaper that we have changed our language on that.
Well, you know, I mean, they do it across all kinds of, you know, I mean, it's, in all areas, Guido Holzmann, who's an economist, one of the senior scholars of the Mises Institute and a professor of economics in France, once gave a, maybe I'll have to find that and put that up on lewrockwell.com, but he gave a great paper on government's depreciation of the language.
It's all deliberate, and the government, we always have to remember, in the words of Murray Rothbard, is a band of thieves writ large.
I mean, they try to portray themselves as being, you know, interested in the public good and the national good and, you know, the national defense and, you know, all that sort of stuff, but they're in effect a band of thieves, who then have to disguise that so that everybody will keep kowtowing to them and turning over their money and their children to them.
For some of us, that's why we're libertarians.
We don't want to turn over our money, or our children, or our lives, or our freedom, or our privacy, to that group of criminals in Washington, D.C.
Well, you know, the way Ron Paul tells the story, it seems like most members of Congress, perhaps virtually all members of Congress, are as in the dark about how this works as the average American.
I mean, to me, the contrast between your simple, honest, direct language in describing how this works makes it seem so obvious, and yet what we're talking about is basically a big secret here in America, and apparently even within the halls of power in D.C.
Well, you know, another aspect of this, and I actually fear this for the future, and I'm so old that I remember this very well, when Nixon put price and wage controls, ended the last tie between the dollar and gold, and said that this was because of inflation, and he was going to get rid of inflation.
Nixon didn't believe that price and wage controls could cure inflation, which, again, is a monetary phenomenon.
He didn't believe that it was going to make people more prosperous or whatever, but it had the success, like all government programs, of transferring the blame, or at least one aspect of the success of a government program, and transferring the blame from the government and its central bank to businessmen.
So the government is trying to help you people, we're trying to keep the prices down, but you know, those rotten businessmen are either trying to raise their prices, or maybe they're making the chocolate bar smaller, because they have to charge the same price.
You know, they're ripping you off, so watch out, it's the businessmen, and only the government can protect you.
So this is, I must say, I wouldn't be surprised to see George Bush, who, as far as I can tell, is a fascist.
I mean, who believes in the corporate state, who believes in militarism, belligerent nationalism, abolition of civil liberties, demonization of the other, I mean, all the things we think of that go along with fascism, that's the Bush regime.
So they certainly wouldn't hesitate to put price and wage controls on, and so deep is the, I'm afraid, the ignorance of the American people on economics, although I've done...
There are many of us who have dedicated our lives to trying to change that, that he might get away with it, or maybe not, we just have to see.
I mean, maybe the American people will have had enough.
It's one reason the government doesn't want a recession or a depression, and doesn't want hyperinflation and that sort of thing, because it's destabilizing, and they think they can handle things.
They think that they can turn all these bad things that they've created to their own advantage, but they can't be sure.
So they're always slightly worried about the effects, can be destabilizing to the state.
And as Murray Rothbard showed us in the works of the great Étienne de La Boétie, the French theorist of the 16th century, or David Hume, Mises, Rothbard himself, government depends on the consent of the governed, and the reason for that, even a dictatorial government, even Hitler or Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Castro, whatever, they depend on the consent of the governed.
That is, people at least think that if they organize and bring danger on themselves in order to try to get rid of the government, that might make things worse.
Of course, there's huge propaganda involved and everything, but the reason that it has to depend on the consent of the governed is because the government is necessarily a minority.
They can't live it up at our expense if they're the majority living off the minority.
It has to be a tiny, a relatively tiny minority living off the rest of the people.
And so that actually requires their obedience.
If the people ever stop giving their obedience, then even the biggest, most powerful, most police-steady government will crumble before your eyes like an old newspaper.
Like the Soviet Union.
Like the Soviet Union, like Iran under the Shah, which was an example of this, like the British India government as against Gandhi and all his followers, like in Romania and so forth, and when this all happened, of course, in the Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the US went on an unbelievable offensive to make sure that massive governments would be left in power.
They sent over, you know, all kinds of money, all kinds of intellectuals, all kinds of experts to immediately make sure, I'm just thinking of one particular case, that Poland would have an OSHA.
They were horrified that there might not be this particular kind of regulation of the labor market.
So the US government spent a lot of money, a lot of people, to try to, again, and unfortunately they succeeded.
So that's the US government.
Everybody thinks it's interested in freedom.
I mean, it's just total baloney.
Always remember when the government talks about freedom, when the government talks about democracy, what both those words mean in the words of the US government and its affiliated media and so forth, is a rule by the US government.
If a country is free, that means it's ruled by the US.
If it's unfree, it's not ruled by the US.
If it's democratic, the elections have come out the way the US wants.
If the wrong people are elected, that's not democratic.
So this is, again, part of just the propaganda of the US empire, which we should never forget is the biggest, richest, most powerful government in the history of the world by many magnitudes.
I mean, forget Hitler or Stalin or the Roman Empire or whatever.
This bureaucratic apparatus of death and theft is by far the biggest ever to exist.
And also, I would argue, for that reason, far more vulnerable than any that has ever existed.
Because there are all kinds of trouble, as Mises and others have shown, with the bureaucratic system.
And when you get a system, when you get a bureaucracy the size of the US, it's why they can't do anything right anymore.
It's why they, with all their troops and all their money, they have trouble maintaining 150,000 soldiers in Iraq.
Whereas in the LBJ days, they had no trouble maintaining 600,000 or 700,000 troops in Vietnam.
And part of the reason was they had a draft, but they don't dare have a draft today.
So they can't build themselves a decent memorial.
I don't know if you've seen the World War II memorial, the FDR memorial, the other memorials that have been built in recent years in DC.
They're all ugly and awful and ineffective, as versus the evil, say, Lincoln Memorial.
But it's a very effective temple to the government and to the god Lincoln.
They're not able to do that stuff anymore.
Look at Katrina.
And they can't help but make fools of themselves.
Look how badly they do in Iraq.
Of course, they murder a million people.
And all the military-industrial complex and Cheney and Bush families and the Carlisle group and everything are all making big bucks.
But they actually are far less effective than they used to be.
And they're actually far more vulnerable.
So if we can ever start to change the climate of opinion, which is my view, where we should always be oriented versus trying to elect some bird to office.
But I think we actually have a chance.
I should add that I exempt Ron Paul from this, because if you notice, Ron's campaigns, whether as a congressman or recently when he ran for president, are all educational campaigns.
Justin Armando has a great article in TakiMag.com on different strategies.
And the Ron Paul strategy, which comes from the Murray Rothbard strategy, of trying to reach the people with a radical message, telling them the truth about economics, about central banking, about war, about taxes, and all the other government ripoffs.
So Ron is not in it for power.
He's in it to change the climate of opinion.
So that's a very different thing from, of course, the vast majority of people who run for office want to rule other people.
Therefore, you know, they're evil and very bad guys.
Well, you know, it seems like so many of these insights come somewhere along the lines from Mises and from Rothbard.
And what is it exactly about Austrian economics or the individualist principles involved that make all this seem so clear?
I mean, most people, Lew, have an entirely different set of moral standards for the state than a libertarian like you has.
What exactly is it about Austrian economics that seems to make all these complicated truths seem so simple?
Well, you know, I would say that, you know, first of all, there's a big background to Austrian economics.
I mean, there were great people working.
Murray Rothbard writes about this in his history of thought, but some of the late scholastic thinkers who were first, were really the first economists, many great champions of liberty in the past.
But with Mises comes really the first full understanding of how the economy works.
And, you know, what brings human flourishing and what brings human prosperity and what works against it.
And then you add Rothbard to that, who was really the founder of modern libertarianism.
And his strategic thinking and his, you know, he was such, I mean, really, you know, everything I say, I could say, you know, as Murray Rothbard pointed out.
I mean, like every word out of my mouth, I could say that, or as Ludwig von Mises pointed out.
But Murray, you know, was the first to, again, to, you know, say the government, look, the government's a band of thieves.
They're stealing from you.
That's what, of course, is a band of thieves writ large, as he said.
So it's, or his point that, you know, that the essence of the state is that it's allowed to do things that are criminal if done by people in the private sector.
Why should they?
Why does something that's criminal, if you or I do it, kill, kidnap, steal, all of a sudden become the heroic, you know, draft and war for against terror and taxation for the public good or whatever, once I put on a government suit?
And of course, it doesn't change its moral qualities, only it's far worse.
I mean, there's no private criminals who have ever done anything to the equivalent of George Bush.
I mean, you know, the whole mafia, which by and large, of course, is actually involved in providing services people want to buy.
That's another way they're different from the government.
But think of all the actual criminals in the world.
I mean, the actual burglars and, you know, I apologize.
I can't remember how many murders we have, you know, every year in the United States, but it takes quite a while before you would get to a million murders.
Bush has killed a million people, murdered a million people in Iraq, you know, in the last five years in his war.
That's not counting the people he's murdered in Afghanistan.
That's not counting all the assassinations of the CIA and so forth all over the world.
So, you know, government officials are just like hyper criminals.
They're burglars and rapists and murderers and thieves.
But, you know, they're glorified and you bow down to them and they should rule us.
They have a right to rule us.
And don't you dare say no.
Just give them all your money and your kids, your property, your schools, your homes, your businesses.
Give them control over every aspect of your life.
And again, you know, always in back of everything the government does is the gun.
They've always got a gun to your head.
It's always do it or we're going to put you in jail.
Resist and we'll kill you.
In fact, the government reserves the right to itself to kill you if you sufficiently resist paying a parking ticket.
So this is the nature of the government, the criminal enterprise.
And I would say that Rothbardianism and Austrian economics, yeah, it does help you see this in the most clear way.
And I can't recommend enough that people read Murray Rothbard if you want to know about freedom.
And on mises.org, M-I-S-E-S.org, many of Murray's books are there for free for the reading and PDFs.
I've got many of his articles.
War, Peace and the State is, as Tom Woods pointed out today at a program we're holding here at the Mises Institute, that this is a life-changing article.
I mean, you never are the same after you read this article on the nature of state and war.
That's on lewrockwell.com.
And just look at the Rothbard archive.
Pick any of his articles.
He was such a compelling writer, such a persuasive and interesting writer that you're just drawn right in.
This is not hard reading.
It's exciting and life-changing.
And again, if you want to enlist in the great battle of our times for freedom and against the state, Rothbard is your essential weapon.
Well, you know, your protege and intellectual descendant of Rothbard, Anthony Gregory, made a great point this last weekend, I thought, when he said that there really is no such thing as the public sphere or public power at all.
That, again, going back to Mises and Man Acts, everybody is an individual and everybody in government is still just a person.
As you said, they're all looking out for number one.
And that really, it's just a myth that there's even such a thing as the public sphere at all.
It's all private.
It's just some of us have a flag we can cloak ourselves in and go around and stick everybody up.
Well, Anthony's a brilliant, brilliant guy, and I don't think he could really qualify as my protege.
That would be very flattering to me.
But, you know, in a sense, there is a public sector.
There is public service.
There is public spiritedness.
But you sure don't find it in government.
Think of any bureaucrat you've ever dealt with.
Where do you find public spiritedness?
Only in the private sector.
Businessmen, physicians, the clergy, in commerce, the guy who works all night keeping his little store open so you can go get a Diet Coke when you want one.
That's public service.
Not putting on a uniform and going killing people for the government in foreign countries or having a big salary at a big limo in Washington or, you know, the monster McCain keeps talking about that he's dedicated his life to public service and he's had three generations of public service.
Yeah, they've been parasites of the taxpayers, his grandfather, his father, and him.
And we're supposed to think that this is actually morally superior to be living off your fellow citizens at the point of a gun by force.
This is supposed to be supposed to think this is actually a good thing.
It actually makes him a criminal.
Of course, he's a criminal.
And that doesn't differentiate him from Obama or they're all criminals.
Maybe some of them less criminal.
Maybe Obama is, I used to think, maybe less likely to start a war.
I must say I'm not so sure about that after some of his recent speeches.
But when they call it public service, it's actually ripping you off for their own benefit.
When they call it the private sector, that's where the actual public service goes on.
I have to tell you a story.
I don't want to be too detailed, but there's a favorite writer of mine who's some brand of a leftist.
I'm not entirely sure.
And he came away from the Future Freedom Foundation Restoring the Republic Conference.
I believe a changed man, shocked to see that libertarianism does not mean an apology for the rich white man's anarchy where Dick Cheney and his buddies get to go do whatever they want and not even have to help the poor people with food stamps.
But in fact, here he saw Anthony Gregory, Robert Higgs, yourself, Jacob Hornberger and the rest of these people speaking and saw that, wait, this is the libertarianism that's supposed to apply to the life of that anonymous dead Iraqi kid.
This is libertarianism for the least among us, the most powerful, powerless among us, not corporate America is the persecuted minority that we have to be careful and look out for.
Well, it's true.
And of course, there unfortunately are libertarians who tend to be funded by oil plutocrats and who are connected to the government and the biggest funders of the Republican Party and those sorts of guys.
And they're not the type to appeal to your friend.
In fact, they're pillars of the establishment, and they exist and are paid and are successful in living it up because they serve the state.
But then there are the real libertarians, the people who actually believe that human liberty is the first and really the only goal of all politics.
And if we're an anarchist, we believe that, of course, the goal should be complete freedom from coercion.
And I was like Stephan Kinsella's description of what an anarchist is.
It's somebody who believes that it's never moral to initiate force against the innocent or to threaten the initiation of force against the innocent.
And when you tell people that, they guess, well, I don't believe in doing it.
I don't believe in initiating force against the innocent.
But then, of course, it turns out they believe in taxation.
They believe in regulation.
They believe in forcing kids to go to public schools and all the rest of the coercions of the government.
So if you are a real libertarian, I would argue, you believe that it is never moral to initiate force against the innocent or to threaten the initiation of force.
And it doesn't mean that you necessarily know how such a society would be organized.
It doesn't mean that you might think that it's ever possible to get to that sort of society.
But it just means you think that what they do is immoral, and you want to oppose it to the best of your ability.
And I should mention that take a look at Stephan Kinsella's K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A's archive on LewRockwell.com, that article and a lot of other great articles there, too.
We sure will.
And we'll link to it in the blog entry for this interview, as well.
And now, before I let you go, Lew, if you still have a moment, I'd like to give you an opportunity to say something nice about Ron Paul's new book, because I'm sure you got it in you.
What a great book.
I mean, in some sense, you can think of many things that have been the outcome of Ron's campaign, which, as you may know, he's closed down.
His presidential campaign is closed down.
Oh, I didn't know that it had officially closed.
Yeah, it closes down officially today.
And he's starting to do a new educational and political organization, I guess you'd be talking about, at his big rally in Houston tonight, next to the horrible Republican state convention.
But there are many things that his campaign, in terms of educating young people and getting them interested in issues like the Federal Reserve.
By the way, if you ever encounter a libertarian who's pro-Fed, that's all you need to know about them.
They're not actually for liberty.
So against the Federal Reserve, against the warfare state, against interventionist foreign policies of all sorts, for the free market, against government regulation, against the income tax, and so forth.
He's mobilized people, 1.2 million votes, but I think that just begins to indicate the kind of influence he's had.
But one great concrete part of his legacy is this book, The Revolution, a Manifesto.
It's not a long book.
It's, I think, 170 pages long.
But it's so well-written and so packed, full of great libertarian principles.
It explains what he's about, the ideas that he has dedicated his life to.
And really, this book is the kind of book, very few books in this category, it's the kind of book that you can actually give to some member of your family, a neighbor, a student, a friend, your father, or whatever.
And change their lives on these issues.
I mean, it has that kind of persuasive power.
So everybody ought to pick up a copy.
It's on the New York Times bestseller list, and rightly so.
It's a very great book.
All right.
Well, I want to thank you for your time very much today, Lou.
It's not quite as difficult to say the things that you're saying now.
But in the dark days of late 2001, 2002, 2003, when the flag waving and the denunciation were all so loud that most people were too afraid to speak up, you were shining a light there at lourockwell.com and at the Mises Institute.
And you haven't had to backtrack and improve your rhetoric since those days, because you got it right all along.
And there are a lot of us who really appreciate that.
Well, you're very nice, Scott.
Thank you.
And thanks for having me on today.
And everybody, you'll be able to watch Lou Rockwell's speech at the Future Freedom Foundation's website.
That's fff.org.
And right now you can read the transcript of it at lourockwell.com.
Our enemy, the Fed.
You can find it right there in Lou's archives, also titled War and Inflation.
And we'll link right to it in the entry here.
Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin.
