I'm Scott Horton, and introducing Lew Rockwell, founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, author of Speaking of Liberty, proprietor of LewRockwell.com, and host of my favorite new radio show, The Lew Rockwell Show.
That's at LewRockwell.com slash podcast.
Welcome back to the show, Lew.
Scott, great to be with you.
Well, I have to tell you, I'm feeling the heat.
I got really stiff competition coming from Glenn Greenwald and from you and the whole internet radio business, and I have to tell you, your show is just absolutely great.
You've certainly got the radio voice far beyond what I'll ever have, perfect diction, you never say uh, you speak in perfect paragraphs every time, and your job is hanging out at the Mises Institute all day, where apparently all you have to do is stick your head out in the hallway and say, hey, brilliance, please come in here and let me interview you for a few minutes about the most important questions in the world, and it is just absolutely outstanding, Lew.
Congratulations.
Well, thank you very much, Scott.
I think you're giving me too much credit on the coherence question, but I appreciate it.
Oh, I don't think so.
No, I think you're absolutely great.
But I appreciate your remarks about the Mises Institute.
It's true, we do have some brilliant guys hanging around here, especially in the summertime when we have our big educational programs at Mises University and others, and we have great faculty available by phone as well, so I appreciate your mentioning of the podcast and a lot of great stuff to come, we're going to have one tomorrow on who are the neoconservatives, for example.
I think, you know, try to keep them interesting, and I sure appreciate people's feedback, too.
If anybody wants to email me at lewrockwell at mac.com, I'm very glad to hear criticisms and suggestions and just want to know what people want to hear, just like you.
Right?
We're in the market.
That's right.
We have to appeal to people.
We have to say things that are interesting.
We want them, obviously, to be consistent with our political principles, which are the reason we're doing these things, but you've got to be interesting, too.
Yeah, well, we'll try.
I'll tell you what was interesting to me was your podcast from the other day that was not an interview, it was just you.
Well, you talked a little bit about economics and such at the end, but mostly it was about the pick of Joe Biden to be Barack Obama's running mate, and I like how you talked about how in the original Constitution, the Vice President was supposed to be the President's political enemy, not his best friend, and picked solely by him, but then you go on to talk about who this guy Biden is and his history as a senator, and I've got to tell you, Biden seems to me a more, you know, on a personal level, whatever, I've never met the guy, but on TV, he seems like a more decent politician than some of these guys.
You mean he's just a more successful con man?
Ah, ha, ha.
I must say, I noticed last night, it struck me, and I kept, terrible though, I have to admit this in public, I actually watched the Democratic National Convention last night, and they kept showing shots of Biden, and I thought, you know, how many hair transplants, facelifts, nose jobs, chin jobs, you know, neck jobs or whatever has this guy had?
I mean, and of course, tanning and all those sorts of things, but he really has been made over in the last year, I guess, because he wanted this job, or he wanted to be president, if he couldn't have that, then he wanted to be vice president, but he's got a very bad record.
Of course, like, I guess, all Democratic senators and all Republican senators for the big state at home, and he's been a warmonger, and gosh, under the Clinton administration, he was one of the worst of the people who were pumping for bombing Serbia, the horrible war that Clinton ran that killed so many people, did so much property destruction, and, you know, we're still living with the results of it now.
We're still living, although we do in terms of the American debt and taxes and warfare state we face here, but the poor people of Serbia and Kosovo and Bosnia, all those areas that were so heavily damaged, and are still occupied in some cases by American troops.
We forget about that, and we concentrate, I guess, as we should on where the hot wars are, Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course, the neocons next planned hot war, Iran, where Bush has got a bunch of carrier task forces over there in the Persian Gulf, as we speak right at this moment.
I guess they named these ships after the most rotten figures in American history, so they've got the Abraham Lincoln, they've got the Theodore Roosevelt, and a couple of these other vast collections of weapons of mass destruction, entirely offensive weapons, not defensive at all, even within the context of just war theory, or if one is a minarchist and thinks that a state military is a legitimate thing, have absolutely no reason for existence, these carrier task forces, which simply are, as the government, the Pentagon terminally puts it, for the projection of power, which of course means the ability to bomb people back into the stone age if they've bugged the U.S. government in some way.
Well now, it's the Republicans who are the evil war mongers.
We've seen them in play for eight years.
They don't believe that there's any law that can bind the power of the commander-in-chief.
They think that he can tap people's phones, he can kidnap, torture, murder them, start aggressive wars, rewrite American nuclear warfare doctrine in a more aggressive structure.
These guys have got to be the most dangerous people on the planet, the Republicans.
So the Democrats, I admit, I don't have the stomach to watch the convention last night.
I tuned into PBS and saw about maybe three or four minutes of the guy praising Obama's education proposals or something, and I couldn't take it anymore.
So I give you credit for that.
But they've got to be, just simply by default, they've got to be better than the Republicans, Lew.
Well, you know, you would think.
But as I watched last night, and I did not watch every single minute, but I watched the vast majority of it, I heard no criticisms of Bush, no criticisms of Cheney, no criticisms of the war in Iraq, no criticisms of the potential war in Iran, and of course we know Obama says he wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, just like Bush.
So you would think, even just out of pure political calculation, that these people would understand that there is a movement in this country of people who don't like these wars, and you would only have to be just slightly to the anti-war side of the Republicans.
But there seems to be no interest in that, I guess maybe because the military-industrial complex is paying off the Democrats, just like it pays off the Republicans.
We have what is actually not, of course, a free country by the standards of the 18th century or the 19th century.
We have, as you say, a dictatorship, an elected dictatorship, but it's a dictatorship nevertheless.
I mean, Bush has got powers that some of the Caesars would have envied.
He's got more power than any absolute monarch who ever existed.
No absolute monarch, despite that name, could actually just launch a major war on his own, because they didn't have the money, they had to tax people, and that was that they didn't have a Federal Reserve that could just print up whatever money they needed for their wars.
This is the reason there's no debate in Congress, except by Ron Paul and a few others, about when they want to start a new war when there's another $100 billion for Iraq.
Nobody cares, because they don't actually have to tax anybody.
They don't even have to borrow it, although sometimes they do borrow it.
They just run the printing press longer, and that's the reason we've got a depression.
That's the reason there's a depression affecting the entire world, and yet here we are in that sort of an economic condition, and they're talking about more wars.
And the Democrats, I didn't hear them talk about the economy, I didn't hear them talk about the Bush administration, I didn't hear them talk about all the problems with John McCain.
None of this.
It was just all, you know, weeping over Teddy Kennedy and his huge yacht, and we're supposed to be moved by that, and he promised that before he died he was going to see to it that there was more socialism in America.
Thanks a lot, Teddy.
And then everybody weeps on cue.
And then we had Michelle Obama giving her talk, she looked very nice, and she gave a nice talk about how she has a brother, and a father, and a mother, and children, and a husband.
Okay, well, that's fine.
And then, of course, the crazy Pelosi, just a total pro-war, pro-state, pro-police-state monster.
She pretends to be something else, but she rolls over for Bush every time.
She's been his partner in crime as long as she's been Speaker of the House, and indeed when she was Minority Leader.
And Jimmy Carter, who was the only guy there who had anything decent in his past, and I must say, looked great.
He and Rosalynn, they looked terrific, but he wasn't allowed to speak.
They put up a film about him, a very boring film about his work in helping poor people build houses, and that's all wonderful.
And certainly there's no other U.S. President who's ever done anything like that.
The rest of them are sitting around in the Lockheed boardroom collecting their checks.
So I have to give Carter credit for all the things he does in his private life.
But they wouldn't let him speak.
And my guess is they wouldn't let him speak because they were afraid he might mention the word Middle East, since of course he has politically incorrect views on all the U.S. wars and all the things that are planned for the Middle East.
So they didn't want anybody taking a pro-peace position.
Very very sad, outrageous in fact, because of course most of the people who vote for the Democrats, whatever their problems in economics, do tend to be far more pro-peace and far more pro-civil liberties than the people who vote for the Republicans.
So those people are being betrayed.
All of us are being betrayed, all the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and the proposed dead in Iran and the proposed dead all over the rest of the world.
The Democrats are, I guess once again, just entirely failing them.
Well, you know, Lou, Stephen Zunes wrote an article about the pick of Joe Biden, and he pointed out that Obama's strength really this whole time has been, well, like in the race against Hillary, for example, that yeah, she's got experience, but I have judgment.
I was the new guy, and I knew better than to get into this stupid war, and she didn't, and she's supposedly so smart, was basically his argument, and apparently that won out on a lot of people, and that now by picking Biden, he has just completely precluded the possibility of saying, this guy McCain was trying to get us into a war with Iraq since 1998 or before, and he's got terrible judgment, and he's a dangerous man with this kind of power, and whatever.
He's completely shut off the possibility of saying that by picking a running mate who also voted for the war, and in fact, as head of the Foreign Relations Committee, helped to facilitate it, and so now all he can do is try to run to the right of McCain as a militarist when that'll never work, and in fact, to show you an indication of where the American people are at, I saw the poll the other day.
They like Obama on most things, but they really trust McCain on solving our problems in Iraq over Obama.
He's never going to be able to overcome that, and yet now that's his only option, is to try to run as a smarter, better militarist than McCain.
Well, really, it's both strange and an outrage, and it reminds me, of course, of the Kerry campaign, when if Kerry had run just slightly to the anti-war side of George W. Bush, I guess that he would have been elected, but of course, there are all kinds of undercurrents, things that don't appear on our TV screen.
I mean, who knows who's pressuring Obama, who knows what kind of deals he's made?
I mean, his key donors are places like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, and these are not institutions that are interested in peace.
So I guess just politics is corrupt, and when we talk about politics and about war questions, I wanted to mention a new book that's just out, showing the possibility of good people on the left and good people on the right, regardless of our differences in other areas, coming together on the issues of war and peace.
This is a book that's edited by Murray Polder, who's a long-time left-wing anti-war activist, and by Thomas Woods, who's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, who's the author of many books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and The Church and the Market, and co-author of Who Killed the Constitution?
So this is, I'll tell you, the most thrilling anthology I have ever seen.
It's called We Who Dared to Say No to War, American Anti-War Writings from 1812 to Now.
And so they've picked left-wingers and right-wingers from opponents of the War of 1812, and the Mexican War, and the Civil War, and the war on Spain, and the war in the Philippines, and World War I and World War II, and so right up to Iraq.
What thrilling, and some of these people I've never heard of, I guess that's the purpose of these scholars in making us aware of these great voices for peace in the American past.
Some of them are famous, Murray Rothbard, and Daniel Webster, and people of that sort.
But what an extraordinary collection.
I'll tell you, rather than watch the Democratic Convention, we should all be reading this book.
It's published by Basic Books.
It's just out.
And let me just mention the title again, We Who Dared to Say No to War, American Anti-War Writings from 1812 to Now, edited by Murray Polner and Tom Woods, and both of them, I might say, are contributors to LewRockwell.com, as are a number of the living writers in this book.
I actually have it right here.
It's next on my list.
Hey, you're way ahead of me.
I'm a really big fan of Tom Woods' writing, too, and I think I can safely say he's a friend of mine.
So I'm really looking forward to getting into that book.
And you're right.
Who wants to watch a bunch of Democrats talk about how great each other are when there's nothing great for them to cite?
I mean, it's the worst.
I can't bear to do it.
I'd rather watch Fox News Sunday morning or something.
Well, that's, I don't know, that's a very tough choice to make.
Yeah, I know.
But, I don't know, Hillary tonight, and Bill tomorrow night, and then, of course, we have the Republican thing coming up.
Yeah, speaking of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Lew, did you see Democracy Now yesterday?
No, I did not.
Well, they had this interview with, I forget the man's name, he's the publisher of Harper's Magazine has a new book out, and he talked all about the Clinton conspiracy to thwart Howard Dean in Iowa in 2004 in the primaries because they were worried that he could be a credible candidate and beat Bush.
And they wanted to make sure that Bush would win so that Hillary could run in 08.
And it's all out there.
Their best friends set up the money to run the smear attack ads on Dean and the rest of it.
Interesting how Dean, of course, was the pro-peace candidate in that election at that time.
Also, the London Guardian had a wonderful long article about why all the people in Washington were going crazy about Dean, even aside from any war questions.
He was the first major league political candidate to raise all his money from the internet.
He did not have any of the K Street lobbyists who controlled the typical presidential candidate funding him.
Even before Ron Paul, he had gotten his money from small donors all across the country via the internet.
And the London Guardian said that the lobbyist types in the Democratic Party decided he had to be destroyed for this alone because you could not risk having a president they didn't control.
Yeah.
Big mistake on his part that he didn't go to them.
He got such a big head, he thought he could get away with it.
And of course, he was the pro-peace candidate.
It's absolutely true.
They set out to destroy him in Iowa.
So I knew that it happened.
And every time I think of the Clintons, I remember all the people they killed in Arkansas.
Of course, I guess this is anybody who becomes the president, it becomes a high-ranking official of a state, either is a murderer or is willing to countenance murder.
I can be very bald about it.
There's a Simpsons like that where it's the future and Lisa Simpson becomes the president and the Secret Service guy tells her, each president gets three free murders.
I always, because there are many instances one could use in this connection, but I always think back to the beginning of Bush's monstrous war in Iraq and the brilliant American intelligence that told him that Saddam Hussein and his two sons were dining in a particular restaurant in Baghdad.
So Bush started off the war by dropping a 5,000 pound bomb on this restaurant.
Well, Saddam and his sons weren't there, but he killed the restaurant owner, he killed the chef, he killed the busboys, the customers, the waiters, and so forth, and a lot of people in the surrounding area.
Why isn't this considered murder?
But of course, it's not murder, it's public policy.
So they all are prepared to do that, and this is the Clintons, of course, if we remember back to all those wonderful stories, and you can pretty much believe everything the Republicans say about the Democrats and everything the Democrats say about the Republicans.
There were a lot of people who were conveniently disappeared and turned up dead in Arkansas when they went against the Clintons.
So this is a guy who had no problem, of course, in his wars and all the terrible things he did as president, although I must say, he was better than Bush.
Yeah, well, it makes me wonder whether they could just drop bombs in our neighborhoods and airstrikes and then say, well, we got 30 militants, and get away with that.
Well, that's certainly what they do overseas, and there was a case in Philadelphia of the police aerial bombing a house that they said militants were in, and they killed a lot of innocents.
Right, the MOVE house.
Yeah.
So this is government.
This is what government, this is, you better obey if you don't obey, be killed, and there's no such thing as murder to the government, it's called collateral damage, or it's called friendly fire, or some of these other euphemisms.
But as Murray Rothbard always pointed out, the key thing about the state is it's a band of thieves writ large.
It's morally no different from a band of thieves, only, of course, it's far worse than a band of thieves and far more murderous than the typical band of thieves, because far bigger and more powerful, and also a vast propaganda campaign being waged on behalf of it and of the government schools and the government-connected media, government-connected academia, and the whole intellectual apparatus to convince us that we'd be dead without the state.
We have to have the state.
The state brings us civilization, the state brings us peace, the state brings us justice, but clearly, of course, it's just the opposite.
The state brings us war, the state brings us looting, the state brings us crime and every horrible thing in society.
So this is the government, this is the people who are connected to the government, and I must say, when I watch, say, morning Joe in the morning, or Chris Matthews at night, or the CNN people at the convention, it's so sickening to see the reporters bone on me with the state officials.
I mean, they're obviously all part of the same gang.
They have different functions within the gang, but they're all pals together, ripping off and oppressing all the rest of us, and in the case of the American government, not only Americans, but people all over the world.
And what do you think it means that the American people trust McCain over Obama on the war?
Because if you just take, you know, probably, I guess what I would assume is the average American's understanding of it, Obama is the nominally peace-oriented, let's end this war guy, and McCain, I think people understood, right?
That got out into the general public, that McCain said, hey, let's go ahead and stay for a hundred years.
They prefer him?
I don't understand, Lou.
And his numbers went up with all the belligerence against the nuclear-armed Russians.
How could this be?
Well, it's a, I must say it's a very disturbing thing.
I mean, you can think, and this is certainly true of some people, that they're fooled.
I mean, that there's, you know, they're subjected to propaganda from the earliest days in the government schools, and they're fooled.
There are also some people who are bloodthirsty.
This is certainly true of the Roman people.
They cheered when, you know, when Caesar went into a rebellious era in Gaul, where the people were upset at being ruled by the Romans, reconquered them, and then cut the hands off every single man in society, everybody above the teenage level cut the hands off of them.
And the Romans all love that.
So there's something very terrible in the human psyche, that people love this sort of thing.
So there's, you know, I'm afraid that that's at least part of it.
Also, it's not, I'm sorry to say, in the American context, for the most part, pro-war gets you elected.
It may be in part because there's nobody making the peace case, so I'd like to see the peace case made.
Ron Paul certainly always makes the peace case, and he's been elected as a congressman.
But by the way, in the Polder Woods anthology, there's a fantastic talk by Abraham Lincoln, of all people, and talking against the Mexican War, and it's got a great title, The Half-Insane Mumbling of a Fever Dream, he's talking about.
And the only time Lincoln was ever defeated was when he opposed the Mexican War, and he became a warmonger after that, of course.
So I don't know, there's a terrible part of the American psyche, too.
Maybe it's from the various early days, at least in New England, when the Pilgrims came and they had the view that they were God's chosen people, that America was the new Zion, they were the new chosen people, and that anybody who resisted them, because they were the chosen people, was just like some bad guy out of the Old Testament, the Amalekites or whatever, and so the Indians could just be slaughtered, man, woman, and child, without any compunction, because they were daring to resist God's chosen people.
So there's that whole sort of New England view that wants to mind everybody else's business, wants to control everybody else's life, that they took over America first, and now they're taking over the world.
Very, very disturbing and upsetting, and of course not a reason not to fight against it.
We have to fight against it.
By the way, it's fun to fight against it.
It's fun to oppose evil, but it's also necessary to tell the truth.
And if we tell the truth, that's the only way that we have any chance of refuting this sort of regime.
So we have to tell the truth, we have to be for peace, we have to be for freedom, despite the fact that we're faced with a two-party duopoly that's just, as Butler Schaefer always says, two wings of the same bird of prey.
Yeah, that's what I learned in high school about the two parties.
And the bird of prey was big business, the capitalists who hate capitalism and use the state to divvy up resources among themselves.
Well, it's true we have, in fact, a corporate state.
We have an economic system that, if it were examined in a dispassionate, scholarly way, we would have to call it a fascist system, where it's big government and big business in cahoots against the rest of us.
So yeah, there are corporations that are certainly in the military-industrial complex, and in our very mixed economy, we have not a free market economy, but only a partially free market economy, where the path to, at least one path to, riches and power, which unfortunately some people want, power over others, is the connections with the government.
So yeah, you have companies that are not only making vast amounts of money off the government, and off us through the government, I should say, but are also seeking to expand the state in order to make more money.
And when you think of just how stupid an institution the state is, I mean, it's a very dumb operation in my view, and certainly this has been true from an empirical standpoint.
Every time there's some brilliant, evil new idea to expand the state, start a new war, or have some new social program, it tends to be people in the private sector who are suggesting it to the government, and lobbying for it, and helping bring it about.
Yeah, well you have that, what they call the revolving door, or I think it was Richard Cummings, I like said it better, it's the iron triangle between the bureaucrats and the big businessmen who all work together.
And this actually brings me back to Joe Biden, turns out I found out, I think this was on Democracy Now!
yesterday, that he was one of the principal authors of the giant drug war act of 1986.
And this is actually, I don't know percentage wise, but it's some, apparently, it's some major proportion of our economic system now, is the prison industrial complex.
There are giant concrete firms, and iron bar firms, and police weapons manufacturer firms, and the police unions themselves, and an entire gigantic sort of ecosystem of drug warriors who will never concede defeat, and who will never stop preying on the rest of us.
Well we live in a very militarized society, I mean, we're probably as militarized and as militaristic as Turkey, which is always considered like a sub-rose of military dictatorship.
It's civilian politicians, but the military calls the tune for them.
In some sense the United States is like that, it's not just the military of course, but it's all the big corporations connected to the military, and all the areas of the country that have plants, and then there's the militarized prison system, and the federalized militarized police, and there are rural areas that of course have these vast new privatized prisons, and privatization is a great thing, even if it's a sort of fascist privatization where one firm gets the garbage contractors versus a socialist operation doing it municipally, that's better.
It's not what it ought to be, but it's better.
But of course when you're privatizing things the state does illegitimately, then it's horrific.
Far better that the taxes be collected by the IRS than by some private firm, would be, and in fact the Republicans keep suggesting this, and thank goodness the Democrats have blocked it.
They block it for socialist reasons, but I don't care why they block it, to have private firms collecting taxes would be just, would be horrific.
No more than you want private firms running the prison camps, the prison camps in Guantanamo or in Diego Garcia or who knows where else in the rest of the world, or these prison camps that they have domestically, the vast majority of people in them not guilty of any crime.
I mean they're guilty of, quote unquote guilty of various drug offenses, but of course those are not crimes.
Even the things that are crimes that involve the use of violence and coercion tend to be oftentimes connected to the fact that drugs are illegal.
The state of course glories in this.
One of the key things about people who go into government is they love exercising power over people.
They love bombing other countries.
They love ordering prisoners around.
They love being able to toss people into solitary confinement.
They love being able to waterboard.
They love this stuff.
There are, you know, there are bad people in the world.
This is where they gravitate to.
I always remember William Sapphire, not a guy I generally like, but a very interesting writer, big neoconservative, former columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
He was a Nixon speechwriter and he talked about when Nixon, on the horrible day of August 15, 1971, when he imposed price and wage controls and he closed the gold window, that is cut the final tie between the dollar and gold, and enabled our present Federal Reserve System of totally discretionary money printing and worldwide damage from that.
This all stemmed from what Nixon did on that day and they've been meeting at Camp David and Sapphire wasn't high-ranking enough to have been in the meeting, but after the meeting broke up where Nixon decided and his advisors decided on this, he pulled aside his friend Herb Stein, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and he said to Herb, you know, what happened?
And Herb Stein said, we've put price and wage controls on the economy.
The inflation rate, by the way, was far lower than it is right now.
He claimed that this was going to stop inflation and it was going to, with the closing of the gold window, the dollar was going to become sounder.
Of course, the typical government lies.
So Sapphire said to him, he said, how could you have done that?
You know that price and wage controls don't work.
And Stein said to him, I know they don't work, but that was the most fun I've ever had.
It is participating in the ordering of people and potential jailing of people for raising prices.
Yeah, only to keep up with what the government had done to their money in the first place.
So this is, but this is what people going to the government like, this sort of stuff.
They like being, they like having us all in a cage and they like the torturing and they like taxing and they like spying.
Very bad bunch of people in the government.
Paul Begala, who worked for Bill Clinton, once said, hey, stroke of the pen, law of the land.
Pretty cool.
He did indeed say that.
And of course, I was reminded the other day, you know, we think about these signing statements where the president or the dictator says, by the way, although I'm signing this law, I'm nullifying the following parts and I'm interpreting other parts in the following way, like in like Caesar Augustus and the Roman Senate.
So this didn't begin with George W. Bush, although he is the worst.
He's done more of it than any of the others.
Each one of these presidents gets worse and worse.
The dictatorship becomes more, more open and more, more pervasive.
But Clinton did a lot of these signing statements, too.
So Clinton not only was signing executive orders and other totalitarian instrument that they all use, where they just stroke of the pen, law of the land, as you say, but he also had these signing statements where he would reinterpret the laws passed by Congress in his own dictatorial fashion.
And, you know, this is the way it always happens, especially when there's a crisis.
And I don't remember what Paul Begala was referring to, but I'm sure it was some sweeping executive order that destroyed liberty in uncounted ways.
But it's always crisis and Leviathan.
We talked with Robert Higgs on this show last week, the great libertarian scholar who wrote that book.
And this is something that you mentioned in your recent article about Georgia, is that even though war is the health of the state and powerful people get to expand their power and consolidate their power and and exercise all these grandiose actions on other people, that ultimately, though, politicians are no good at running anything and they don't even really have the.
Well, I don't want to say they don't have the power because they certainly try, but they don't have the ability to actually dictate events.
And this is something that you brought up in this in the sense of our conflict in the Caucasus Mountains, where you have basically a bunch of Keystone imperialist stumble bums running around and getting us unintentionally, I think, nose to nose with the Russians over something of no importance.
Well, I guess it's unintentional.
I mean, Shakers really is a stooge of the US.
And one other thing Biden just did recently, by the way, was visit Saakashvili and promise him on his own a billion dollars in foreign aid.
Hope Joe has that much in his checking account.
And I'm sure it's for more military weapons.
But that was Biden intervening over there and saying the American taxpayers should be taxed an additional billion dollars for this, for this dictatorial creep in Georgia.
But he did he really decide on his own to to attack the Russian peacekeepers in in South Ossetia?
Maybe he did, but he'd had a meeting just two weeks before with Condoleezza Rice and various other American officials.
I don't know.
I mean, was the whole thing planned?
Is this what Bush actually is?
Is this the actual this is not my original point, but is this the October surprise?
Is this what was designed to elect McCain, not a war in Iran, which maybe McCain can be trusted, but he's got these people to do when he's president.
But is this the stirring up of the militarism and of fear and of of what the great Garrett Goret, the old right journalist called the complex of fear and vaunting?
Yeah, he talked about how, you know, Americans were always saying, we're number one, we're the greatest, we're the best.
Oh, no, they're going to attack us.
Oh, no, the terrorists.
So this is this is this is something that this is not something brand new in America.
This is, oh, no, they're going to get us.
We're the best.
We're the straightest.
We're the strongest.
So this complex of fear and vaunting aids the election of McCain.
So is this I don't know, maybe this is maybe this is an accidental thing.
Maybe Saakashvili, although he's a puppet of the U.S. and the pay of the U.S. installed by the U.S., maybe he decided to take this kind of crazed action on his own and maybe he didn't decide to take it on his own.
Well, we know that McCain's buddy, Sherman, who I guess is in line to be his national security adviser upon taking office, collected what, millions or at least more than one million from the Georgian government to represent them?
Yes, to represent them, that they should be, of course, be on the gravy train of the American public, that they should get lots of dough in terms of foreign aid.
He gets a cut from that and then also that we should go to war for them and protect them in whatever local hegemony they want to exercise.
Sherman has also been, he's a lobbyist for Ukraine, which wants the same sort of protection, wants to join NATO and be protected and consented by American blood and treasure.
And he's also done that for Latvia, which indeed he succeeded in getting.
Latvia brought it to NATO and what a crazy, outraged NATO was never what it was pretended to be.
It was always pretended to be a defensive alliance against those Russkies.
But those Russkies were actually never any threat, not because they were good guys.
I mean, Stalin's regime was probably the worst regime ever in the history of the world.
These things are tough to quantify, right?
Who do you say is worse, Hitler or Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot or the rest of them?
But Hitler is at least in a tie for the worst.
So this is not saying anything good about the Soviets, but the Soviets had no money.
They had no resources.
The nature of socialism is such that it was always an economic basket case.
They couldn't manufacture anything that was guaranteed to work and there were many, many problems with socialism.
So because of socialism, the Soviet Union was never the aggressive power that was pretended during the Cold War.
They never were a threat.
The purpose of NATO was for the U.S. to occupy permanently Western Europe, as indeed it still does occupy Western Europe.
We've still got troops in Germany and Spain and Italy and England.
Charles de Gaulle, who was vilified for this, got them out of France.
He didn't want them in France.
He was also vilified for wanting to continue using gold.
I remember when the Wall Street Journal was running hate editorials.
That's the first time I saw reasons to hate France, even before the recent business in Iraq and the Freedom Prize and Bill O'Reilly pouring French wine down the drain and all the rest of that insanity.
So the U.S. still occupies and that's NATO.
So now the U.S. has, of course, made NATO or wants to make NATO into an aggressive military alliance so that soldiers of other countries can get killed and not just Americans to make it politically easier for them to wage their wars.
Thank goodness there's some pushback in NATO.
There's some peoples in Europe who've seen enough of war.
They don't want any more war.
And so I know the U.S. is having a slight trouble getting NATO.
They wanted NATO, in effect, to go in and fight on the side of Georgia, start a hot war with the Russians.
What are you just I don't think insane quite quite does it.
And I will say that's something that impresses me about the neoconservatives.
This is, I think, true of John McCain.
It's true of Sherman.
It's true of Bill Crystal and all these guys.
It's true of George W. Bush.
They seem to have a screw loose.
I mean, the old imperialists, the neocons did not invent imperialism, right?
It existed through all of human state history and certainly has existed in the American context.
But in the American context, it tended to be sort of the Rockefeller types, the Wall Street, Wall Street imperialists.
And they were evil enough and bad enough and awful enough.
They didn't seem to actually be crazy.
There's something crazy about the neocons.
And when you think that, as an example of just the ultimate in dictatorship, that following around the man that we call the president is a army colonel with what they call laughingly the football, which is a box that contains all the nuclear codes and ability to transmit them so that the president can, on his own say so, at any moment of the day or night, he decides on it, destroy the world.
I mean, he can actually launch a full scale nuclear attack against anybody he wants to wipe off the face of the earth and murder on his own say so.
I mean, that's power that, of course, no king, no Caesar, no dictator.
Nobody's ever had that kind of a power before.
We just accept it as perfectly normal.
This one guy should be able to destroy us and destroy everybody else.
Yeah, but Lou, we're a democracy.
So if the president ever does that and he was elected, then it's the will of the people and it's perfectly OK.
Well, of course, we were talking before about how so many Americans think John McCain is better as the as the killer in chief than Obama.
And, you know, I guess that's right in that sense.
That's, of course, says good things about Obama that they don't see him that way.
But, you know, that that that's one argument against democracy.
But I always think it's important to remember that the government always devalues the words as well as the money.
What does democracy actually mean in the current American context?
It means U.S. control.
If there's an election, say, in Palestine where the quote unquote wrong side wins, that's not democratic.
And you can perfectly do it, punish them, do everything possible to get them to reverse that and change the election.
It has to be an election that the U.S. approves of.
That's democracy.
Also, and that is democracy means U.S. control.
So the democratic areas of the world can include horrible dictatorships like, I don't know, Egypt, Jordan, other places that are police states.
They're all good guys and they're all sort of in the democratic ambit because they are subservient to the U.S. and are run by the U.S.
And you can have places where there are free elections.
I'm not I'm not a big fan of mass democracy, but you can have areas where there are free elections.
But if, again, if the wrong people are elected, they're somehow considered undemocratic.
I mean, this guy, Saakashvili, we're told about, you know, we're told that Putin is not really a democratic figure.
He's an authoritarian.
Well, that's exactly right.
But Saakashvili got, I think it was 96 percent of the vote in the last election.
Yeah, that's Soviet, Soviet kind of electoral statistics.
But he is democratic because he does the U.S.'s bidding.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, if I can give you just a couple more minutes.
Sure.
OK, I wanted to ask you, this is another crisis on Leviathan.
Think you mentioned at the beginning of the interview about how well in the context of why the American people, you know, aren't angry enough about this kind of thing is because they can print the money and they disguise the effect of when the inflation really does come.
They blame wage earners for finally getting a raise and pushing up prices and whatever.
And and so we have the economic destruction that nobody really outside the Mises Institute doesn't seem like can put the two and two together.
That it's the delayed effects.
The inflation is the delayed effects of all that printing press money.
And yet we see as we get into this economic crisis, that's the result of all this monetary policy and foreign policy that, well, it's almost like the 30s only seems like there's so many other news stories in the cycle about, you know, Joe Biden's haircut or whatever it is that they're talking about, that it seems sort of buried.
But I don't know.
I'm kind of getting indications here and there, Lou, and I don't read the business news enough, but I'm kind of getting indications here and there that we're actually in the middle of getting a brand new deal, a brand new or I guess I should say brand new additions to the regulatory state on all matters of economic policy below the radar with the excuse that they're saving us from the economic problems that they've caused.
Well, of course, and you mentioned Robert Higgs and one of the great honors of editing the Rockwell dot com is the fact that I get to publish articles by Robert Higgs.
And I want to anybody wants to look at his archive, you'll see you'll see a group of unbelievably compelling and impressive pieces of well-written scholarship that can teach you so much about war and government and the nature of the current regime.
But it's absolutely true.
I mean, government, as Bob Higgs points out, always wants to use the crises that it creates as reasons to give itself more power, even though its previous power is what brought about the problem.
So, yeah, we have just as in the 1930s, we have Bush, for example, giving vast new power and proposing even vaster powers of control for the Federal Reserve over the whole American economy.
And Pat, I mean, he should be Pat Paulson, Henry Paulson, the secretary of the Treasury.
Pat Paulson was funny and Henry Paulson is not funny, proposing that the Federal Reserve become the regulator of the whole American economy.
And they love it not only because it's the central bank, but because there's even less connection between the Fed and the American people than with a regular agency.
Well, what does that really entail?
What does that mean, control over the whole economy?
Well, it would mean that areas of investment would mean which companies succeed and which companies fail.
This is their ideal.
It would mean that any significant financial decision made on Wall Street or by any bank, any place, would have to be approved much more so than is the case today by the bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve.
So that is a big increase in power for the central bank.
On the other hand, you alluded to this earlier, state officials all believe that all they have to do is point a gun at somebody and it's going to bring the desired result about.
And in some sense, they're like King Canute, ordering the tide to stop and not to come in, but they can't actually stop the tide from coming in.
There are economic laws.
There are if-then.
I mean, if the government does certain things, certain other things are going to follow.
So if they have the massive monetary creation that's taken place ever since 9-11, where Bush and Greenspan and now Bernanke made the decision to just vastly increase the money supply, leading to the real estate boom, the stock market boom, probably the biggest boom, artificial boom, and the most damaging artificial boom in the history of the human race is what Bush and Greenspan and Pelosi and the rest of the criminals in Washington have created.
Adjusted for inflation?
Beg your pardon?
Adjusted for inflation?
Yeah.
No, there's no telling.
I mean, we're only seeing the beginning of it.
Of course, housing prices are falling.
Housing prices, by the way, should fall.
They were artificially driven up.
Now reality has to return.
They have to come back down.
Tough for us homeowners, but for people who would like to become homeowners, of course, it's good news, and there's always a silver lining in these clouds.
So they've put us into a horrific position.
They think that this is going to be an easy sell for them to vastly expand the state.
On the other hand, I'm optimistic in some ways.
I think that there's more and more people, despite the military stuff, people are having more and more doubts about the government.
I think that is all coming back in a way that we've not seen since 9-11.
I also think there's something else to keep in mind.
We live under the biggest, richest, most powerful government in the history of the world by many magnitudes, the biggest bureaucracy.
There's never been anything like this.
So because it's the biggest, because it's the richest, because it's the most complicated and the most powerful, it's also the most incompetent.
So they can't do anything right.
They couldn't have their heroic rescue at Katrina.
They messed everything up.
They can't even build themselves a good-looking monument in Washington anymore.
They're all ugly.
They can't do anything.
So as they become more calcified and just more tied up in themselves, they can't actually get away with the stuff that they'd like to get away with.
And again, Hitler's government, Stalin's government, the Roman Empire, never been anything like this, anywhere near like this.
So as they expand it, it's going to become even less competent, and there's room for freedom.
There's room for those of us who would like to see a freer society, who don't want a total fascist state, who would like to have peace and prosperity and freedom.
There's reason for us and room for us to make our arguments and try to convince people.
Well, and now here's one where they failed to get this done, and I think this is a very illustrative example of the kinds of things that we're facing in this country, where George Bush and his cronies, and I guess this was the Cato Institute plan, wanted to privatize, they call privatize, I guess it should have a different spelling than real privatization, but they wanted to what they call privatize Social Security, which I believe simply meant to make the national government the single greatest stockholder on Wall Street.
And would that not have been just an absolute revolution in American affairs?
I mean, that kind of thing, they didn't get away with it, but it seemed to me, from my very thin understanding of the proposal, that the economic power shift to D.C., where most of the power lies anyway at this point, would have just almost been complete and total.
Scott, never trust anything in D.C., whether it's think tanks, or the Congress, or the Presidency, or the Supreme Court, or the rest of them.
So yes, this was a terrible proposal by Cato to so-called privatize Social Security.
What it was, was the first forced savings plan in American history that they would have succeeded in imposing.
Actual forced savings, not a phony savings plan as in the case of the Social Security system as it presently exists, but where all young workers would have been required to put away a certain percentage of their income and then invest it in government-approved forms.
But the whole thing would have been under government control.
The savings would have been forced.
You would have had no choice about it.
You go to jail if you don't go along with them.
So this would have made the Social Security system much worse in that moral sense.
The government would have been, in effect, investing on Wall Street, controlling even more American companies than they do, and in a more detailed way than they do at the present.
And then it also would have vastly increased the deficit because they wanted to continue the payouts of the Social Security system.
Less would be coming into it by young workers who would have this forced savings program.
So they would have had to borrow even more, vastly more.
They were talking about increasing the deficit by many, many hundreds of billions of dollars.
So it was a terrible plan, a fascist plan, a plan that came out of Wall Street in connection with government.
And thank goodness it did get beaten.
So yes, we are able sometimes to beat back these plans for more statism.
Something else to keep in mind is anytime they're proposing some horrific new increase in state power, they always do it by using libertarian rhetoric.
Privatization, we're fighting for freedom, we're bringing liberty, we're liberating, or whatever.
They always want to use libertarian rhetoric, which we should never forget is still the most powerful form of rhetoric because people in their hearts, decent people, do indeed want freedom for themselves.
They don't actually want to be running other people's lives and sticking guns in other people's noses.
They don't want that sort of conduct.
They don't want to be taxed out the kazoo as they presently are, and even more so as both Obama and McCain are talking about.
So there is in the heart of people a longing for freedom.
That's what George Bush says.
I hate to quote him, but of course he's right.
Now what he means by freedom is totally neocon control of the globe.
That's not what you and I mean for freedom.
And it's why what you do, Scott, with anti-war radio is so powerful and so important, and I know you're on a number of radio stations now, not only on the Internet, but of course on your flagship station in Texas.
So you just do great work.
Well, I really appreciate that, and I was about to start praising you, and especially what you said at the beginning of the show about the importance of Murray Polner.
Is it Polner?
Polner, yes.
Yes, and Thomas E. Wood's new book about the realignment.
This is something that's sort of a pet project of mine.
I can't really see it going anywhere, but I would really like to see the very best of the paleoconservatives, the very best of liberals and leftists come together with really the libertarian movement, the libertarian ideology as the real moderate center, as opposed to the conservative Democrats and the liberal Republicans who make up the quite extremist center that we have now.
It seems like we need to, and it's already working to a degree.
We'll see how things go after the power shifts to liberals in the White House, but this is something that I think is really important and something that I know that you recognize, and it seems to me like the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, that the principles that you stand for there, the different writers that you include, and the entire take that you have that these sites have on where America is and where we need to be going.
There's great leadership in that realignment.
I really hope to see more and more people catching on, as I know they are.
Scott, you and I agree, and think of a man like Glenn Greenwald, with whom we agree probably 70 or 80% of the time, versus a guy like John McCain, with whom we agree about 0% of the time.
Maybe less than that.
One is the conservative, one is the leftist, but this new Poehler-Woods anthology, and I'm going to mention the name again, We Who Dared to Say No to War, American anti-war writing from 1812 to now, what an inspiring book.
What great men and women have gone before us, and what a cause we have to uphold, and what a thrill it is to be doing it.
Thank you very much for all your efforts along these lines, everybody.
That's Lew Rockwell.
He's the founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the proprietor of LewRockwell.com, and check out the new radio show.
It really is great.
LewRockwell.com slash podcast.
Thanks again, Lew.
Thank you, Scott.
