06/11/13 – Mark Skousen – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is The Scott Horton Show, streamed from scotthorton.org and noagendastream.com, Monday through Friday from 11 to 1 Texas time, noon to 2 Eastern.
You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash scotthortonshow.
And our first guest on the show today is Mark Skousen.
He's putting on the Freedom Fest July 10th through 13th at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Fittingly, I guess we'll find out why fittingly here in just a second.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
I'm calling you from New York, the real financial center of the world.
No, Washington, D.C. is the financial center of the world.
Well, that's where all the power is.
All right, now, Skousen, I recognize that name.
Is it what, your father, your uncle, or somebody wrote the book all about how the Soviets always did their banking at 120 Broadway in New York City, the financial capital of the world, which was instructive.
That, I guess, helped explain how communism lasted as long as it did, right?
Well, a lot of financing.
Heck, the capitalists not only financed a lot of the Russian revolution and problems there, but they did the Nazis as well, and there's lots of those kinds of stories out there.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, it's a great book, and it's funny because I think sometimes conspiracy theorists attribute almost omniscient powers to the very most powerful and what they can do out of proportion, but oftentimes libertarians completely dismiss that kind of thinking altogether.
Being methodical individualists, it's sort of maybe hard to imagine plans that big and that bad and that long-term actually ever being implemented, but it always seemed to me that ...
No, that's a good point.
Yeah.
The only reason that the socialists were ever so successful in America in the 20th century is because they were doing their banking at 120 Broadway, too, and big business was perfectly happy with new liberalism because it wasn't a challenge to them.
It actually just helped them empower the government that they were the first to love, really.
Well, I think that any time you make a substantial ...
You have a concentration of wealth that's going to encourage people to exercise their power, political power.
The whole idea of crony capitalism, which is what we're talking about in essence, it is in a sense a conspiracy.
People do conspire with their money, sometimes publicly, sometimes behind closed doors.
The problem with the conspiracy is that it is a secret.
It tends to be secret, and so people who write books about secrets always have this problem as to how much of it is true and how much of it isn't.
I tried to make that argument that conspiracies do exist, but by nature, they're impossible to know exactly what happens unless we get somebody like we're having today where people are having the guts to expose the NSA, the IRS.
These are all whistleblowers out there, and I applaud them for doing this.
We really need to know what's going on with our government.
Yeah, I think the C word is just poison.
I remember a long time ago, a guy told me ...
I guess when I was younger, much more of a so-called conspiracy theorist.
A guy arguing with me argued not any of the points I was making, but just that, look, it's just politics.
Of course, arms dealers, farmers, bankers, pharmaceutical companies, anybody who has the ability to bribe the government into doing their dirty work is going to do their utmost to make it that way.
There's no secret about that, and you don't need any secret society to see how it operates either.
It's just called the boardroom.
It's called a golf game.
Yeah, it's that, and there are conspiracies out there.
We just have a hard time figuring out exactly what they're doing.
For many years, we saw that the Council on Foreign Relations, the CFR, which my uncle highlights in The Naked Capitalist as this giant conspiracy, but they're completely open now.
Their meetings are attended by the major media, and they actually attract people from both sides of the political spectrum.
Maybe because of my uncle's book and others, it's not what it used to be.
Yeah, it's just the respectable center now.
The Bilderbergers, the same thing.
The Bilderbergers have this annual meeting, and they invited Peter Thiel, one of the libertarians, to speak at the ...
I saw this public list of all these people.
I think the conspiracy stuff has shifted grounds.
It's probably another organization that's out there that's doing stuff.
Of course, most of what's wrong with America is consensus among the political class.
Nothing secret about it.
You can see their idiocy on CNN as they debate back and forth between two very narrow and very wrong goalposts.
One of the areas that we actually choose not to discuss at my big conference every year, Freedom Fest, is conspiracy theory.
We did have a very good film come in on 9-11 conspiracies and the various buildings and how they came down and so forth.
Ultimately, we just decided not to show it because it's one of those things where it creates a lot of anger and angst among people.
What are you going to do about it?
Yeah.
Well, I'd be surprised here.
There was a good documentary on the subject of how those towers came down.
It was called Gravity.
But anyway, let's talk about Freedom Fest.
This is a really big deal in the libertarian movement.
I would have to say from the point of view I'm coming from, it's a very kind of official older, richer, think tanky libertarians.
Not much radical here.
I guess Doug Casey always is breathing fire.
But this is sort of, it almost seems like what you're really trying to do is introduce libertarian ideas into republicanism and get them to be a little bit more accepting.
That kind of thing, rather than trying to really stake out the hardcore libertarian position on these issues.
Am I right about that, Doug?
I don't think you're right about it.
We're a big tent, so we stretch that tent as far as we can.
So we do have Doug Casey and Jeff Berwick.
We have anarchists.
I mean, I don't know how more radical you can get in that.
Now we don't have bomb throwers yet, and we probably won't because, and we don't have white supremacists coming, and we don't have a lot of the loonies that are out there that are just coming up with every conspiracy theory in the world.
So we do have standards for our speakers.
We do check out their backgrounds so that we don't get into some of these areas that maybe you're talking about.
But yes, we, I mean, what other conference can you have as co-ambassadors, Steve Forbes and John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market.
So yes, we put on a very quality conference, and it is a little bit about educating people.
It's not total politics.
It's financial freedom.
We have an investment conference.
We have billionaire hedge fund people.
We have a student rate at $99, so we do invite a lot of young people that are there.
We get their ideas as well.
We do have a lot of the think tanks.
The whole idea of Freedom Fest is a national conference, a national convention, a world congress of libertarians.
And the idea is that instead of all herds of cats doing our blogs and our texting and our websites and our emails and our own organization, once a year we come together physically to learn of each other, network, socialize, celebrate liberty.
And I mean, look, we're losing this war.
So if we want to turn things around, I quote Ben Franklin, we must hang together or we shall surely hang separately.
Yeah.
No, I agree with that.
Yeah, and don't get me wrong.
I think I probably, well, first of all, I phrased that last question probably a little rudely, but I also sort of, the whole interview got off on a weird foot because we're talking about the naked capitalist just because I recognize your last name.
But it's not that I'm hell-bent on conspiracy stuff or that I'm complaining that I don't see my favorite conspiracy theorists at your site or on the website for the upcoming thing.
I understand how it sounded like that's what I meant.
We don't have people smoking weed in the exhibit hall.
But we do have the marijuana groups there that are favorable to legalization of drugs.
We don't have any problem with that.
But we don't have prostitutes walking the aisles and stuff like that.
So we do have standards that we've established.
I kind of, you know, we're, we have a combination of both libertarians and conservatives.
We try to have a big tent and we try to have civil debates.
We don't have shouting matches like you get on Fox News.
We have very official debates.
We do 10 of them every year.
One of our biggest debates that we have every other year is anarchy versus limited government.
That's always a fun one.
Is that Doug Casey arguing the anarchy position, I hope?
Yes, Doug Casey, David Friedman, a number of people who have taken that position.
That's good.
Yeah.
No, I guess I'm not really thinking either of prostitutes or pot smoking in the halls of the hotel.
Really, what more what I was thinking about, honestly, Mark, was about how the subject matter here is, are we Rome?
And yet there doesn't seem to be anyone on your list who's actually an avowed anti-imperialist or anyone who's on this list whose point is that the empire and that the war on terror are bankrupt and illegitimate, which of course they are bankrupt and illegitimate.
And of course, that's the root of what's so Roman about America, right, is that we can't afford the empire, not only because of the cost and the morality of killing foreigners all day for no reason, but because it is the health of the state and it's centralizing all the power in D.C.
It's the excuse for Greenspan and Bernanke to print money all day.
It's the excuse for every bit of the wiretapping and everybody else.
But the most radical foreign policy guy you got on here is David Boas, and his speech isn't even about the terror war and the bankruptcy of the empire at all.
Yeah, no, we do have him on a panel on the war powers and the U.S. Constitution, which addresses that very issue.
But look, we've got Nick Gillespie, the reason people are very anti-war.
We've got John Utley.
No, Nick Gillespie's horrible in the war.
Nick Gillespie hasn't done anything on the war on terror in 12 years.
Well, that doesn't mean he doesn't have positions on that sort of thing.
How about John Utley?
Are you familiar with him and Antiwar.com?
Well, I worship John Utley.
I didn't see him on your list.
He's one of my favorite people in the whole world, actually.
He's on that panel.
Okay.
Well, that's good to hear.
That's what I'm talking about.
That's what I want to see.
No, no.
We've got Doug Casey.
We've got Jim Rogers, who's very anti this kind of stuff on that.
Sure.
I should say we are putting the Republican Party on trial, and one of our issues is the Bush doctrine and taking on the Republicans for promoting these unjustifiable wars in the Middle East.
We do have Senator Rand Paul coming, not his father, who's probably more anti-war than Rand Paul is, but still we think we have a good tradition there in that respect.
We did try to organize a full-scale debate with Bumper Hornberger, who's really good on this issue.
I don't know if you know him or not, but Bumper is really good, but he declined, even though we set up a debate with him and Max Boot, which would have been a really good one.
So we invite as many of the...
I have to agree with you 100% the more we can get of people in that camp, the better, and we do have strong representation in that area, and I'm sorry you missed some of those names, but we do have a number of people who are taking a very strong anti-war position.
Yeah.
No, that's good.
I guess I didn't get a chance to look through the whole, so I'm just on the keynote speaker's page, I guess.
I didn't see Utley and them on there, and it's unfortunate that Hornberger couldn't make it, because he's the best of the best, and that's exactly what I'm looking for, is an uncompromising denunciation of what, frankly, Max Boot and the rest of these guys have been up to all along.
Absolutely.
It's not just that they're kind of long.
I was really shocked, because we were willing to pay big bucks to put together this, and he's been to our conference on many occasions.
It's hard to figure everybody out, why they come, why they don't come, but we are growing, and our whole idea is to have a critical mass, if you will.
Once you get a critical mass, you can change the world, and that's what we're trying to do.
We're expecting 2,000 to 3,000 people there this year, so I think we're on our way, and I hope you and your listeners can make it out there and make every effort to come to our conference every year.
Well, I sure hope to be able to make it.
I don't know if I'm going to be able to or not, but I'm definitely going to try to, but I think that's such an important point, what you say, the critical mass there.
I don't really have a very good kind of key word for it like you got there, but the idea that, well, for example, the more conservative-leaning guys who attend a conference like this would have to, by the end of it, just sort of admit that everybody knows all that warmonger and stuff that they believe in is wrong, and it's just, that's the critical mass, right?
Is when everybody's just rolling their eyes at Max Boot.
Nobody believes this nonsense anymore.
Who do you think you are, Bill Clinton or something?
Are you going to remake the whole world with your power?
Give me a break.
And then at the point where it's all just laughable and everyone just rolls their eyes and thinks Max Boot is a joke, that's when finally his position will die off and will no longer be so prominent in the halls of power, you know?
Well, I have to admit, I was really taken aback, and The Wall Street Journal in particular, with Paul Gigot there as editor, has taken this Bush doctrine concept.
He actually supported this new NSA power grab of collecting all the emails and the big data collecting that is going on.
They actually wrote an editorial yesterday or the day before in support of this, and that came as a very grave disappointment, in my mind, that The Wall Street Journal is really good on so many economic issues, and then when it comes to this issue, which could take away our freedoms ultimately, they can't see the light.
Right.
Well, you know, Max Boot even just wrote a thing for commentary praising the appointment of Samantha Power, the quintessential do-gooder interventionist, saying, you know, hopefully she'll be able to get us into war in Syria.
I mean, somebody's lost.
There's always something out there where we can be do-gooders, isn't there?
There's always some kind of war where we can liberate them and get them to think like we do.
All right.
Well, if you need somebody to bait Max Boot, I'll fill in.
Good, good.
Well, you know, we were willing to pay his way out there and everything, because he is fairly expensive being a member of the Council for Foreign Relations.
Yeah, of course.
Got to charge those high fees.
On the other hand, I work for rock-bottom prices, so.
Oh, good, good.
Yes.
All right.
Anyway, thank you very much for your time.
Good luck with the conference.
It looks like it's going to be a good one, and I hope it does go very well for you.
If your people go to freedomfest.com, that's our website.
Yep.
I was just going to say that.
All right.
Thanks very much.
Okay.
Thank you.
Bye.
All right.
That's Mark Skousen from markskousen.com.
He's the economist behind Freedom Fest.
It's July 10th through 13th at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
The world's largest gathering of free minds, freedomfest at freedomfest.com.
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