All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming worldwide on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our guest today is Richard Mayberry.
He is the author of the U.S. and World Early Warning Report, which you can find at RichardMayberry.com.
That's M-A-Y-B-U-R-Y.
He is the president of Henry Madison Research and is the author of a couple of interesting models.
I guess you'd call them for understanding the way the world works, and hopefully we'll be talking about those here in just a moment.
Welcome back to the show, or I guess welcome to the show.
It's been two or three shows ago since I interviewed you.
Richard, how are you?
Very good.
And you?
I'm great.
It's great to have you back on the show here.
Let's go ahead and start with the most important thing here to me.
I spoke with John Basil Utley the other day, and we talked about his old professor, Carol Quigley, who wrote the book Tragedy and Hope, and how one of the things he talks about in that is the rise and fall of civilizations, the rise and fall of great empires over history, and how the West has been miraculously lucky, basically, in finding ways to continue to reinvent itself.
It went from Greek and Roman culture to the Holy Roman Empire and Christianity, then through the Reformation, and then, most importantly to me, the Scottish and French Enlightenment era.
And as you talk about, this is the same era when America was born.
And of course, we have the Scientific Revolution and these kinds of things, the Industrial Revolution, these kinds of things that have continued to keep the West the West and prominent on Earth, even while making major changes.
I guess my favorite change, as I know yours is, is the, I guess, codification of a theory that had been tossed around over the millennia, but was basically finally put together by John Locke in his theory of the tabula rasa and natural individual rights, unalienable rights and self-ownership, and the principles that America, in fact, were founded on.
Can you talk a little bit about that, and where you see the Enlightenment revolution in terms of Western civilization, and perhaps as compared to now?
Oh, yeah, big topic, interesting.
Well what I write about mostly is the old British common law, which in its very early years in the Dark Ages started to grow up out of the old Roman common law.
And the reason the common law was called the common law is that it was based on two laws that are common to all religions, two laws that all religions teach.
They don't all state them the same way, but they all come together.
There's a consensus on these two laws, and the first one is, do all you have agreed to do, and that eventually became the basis of contract law.
And the second one is, do not encroach on other persons or their property, and that eventually became the basis of tort law and some criminal law.
And you find that very clearly in the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, do not encroach on other persons or their property.
All major religions teach those two laws, and so during the Middle Ages, there was no real legal system left in the fall of the Western Roman Empire when that happened.
When it fell, it took the legal system with it, and there wasn't really any law.
And so when two people had a dispute, they had to work it out on their own, and in order to avoid bloodshed, they eventually hit on this idea of going to a neutral third party and having that neutral third party make a decision, you know, listen to both sides of their cases and make a decision.
And usually the neutral third party was a clergyman, and the clergyman would make his decisions on the basis of religious principles, and the clergy eventually hit on this idea, well, there are laws that are common to all religions, and we'll make our decisions on those two laws.
So the British common law evolved from that, and gradually, I think you would say that society became more rational as this idea of having a core set of principles that all religions agree on came to be very widespread.
And then, you know, we get to the mid-1700s, and the British government, which is building its empire, it's invading countries all over the world and growing more powerful, well, the Americans in North America, they get pretty ticked off about this.
They don't want to live under that government anymore, so they overthrow it and they establish a new government.
And if you look at the Constitution that they created to replace the old British government, you'll find that the underlying principles are those same ones, do all you have agreed to do, and do not encroach on other persons or their property.
The Constitution isn't a perfect application of those, you know, nothing that humans do is ever going to be perfect, but in my opinion, the U.S. Constitution is certainly one of and might be the best political application of those two laws that are taught by all religions.
And it was the liberty and abundance that grew out of the Constitution that made America this shining star that the whole world looked to for better than a hundred years, maybe the whole 200 years, as a kind of a leader of the world and a place where immigrants would flee to.
Now, does that answer your question?
Well, yeah, to a certain degree.
You know, you combine what to me seems to be the Rothbardian mix of natural rights theory, Jeffersonian and Lockean natural rights theory, Austrian economics, non-interventionism, and these are the very basic principles of modern libertarian thought, which is, you know, ultimately, I guess as you're indicating, reducible back to those two basic laws.
And this is quite different, right, than the history of humanity before where basically all religion is about the leader himself and how he's supposed to be able to get away with doing whatever he wants.
I mean, this really is a revolution in human affairs we're talking about here, right?
Absolutely.
Until the American Revolution, the prevailing political philosophy all over the world was the divine right of king, which is that the king is not subject to the laws that you and I are, that the king is exempt.
If the king wants to kill people or he wants to steal or kidnap or do whatever he wants, he's allowed to do that.
God has given him special permission to violate the rules that apply to the rest of it.
And when Thomas Jefferson came along in the Declaration of Independence and wrote, all men are created equal, what he was saying is the divine right of kings is nonsense, that if you're a human being, you're under the same rules that all other human beings are under.
You don't get any special privileges.
Now, I think what's really important to focus on here is that in the 20th century, governments have created so much chaos, the two world wars, the Great Depression and all sorts of other things, that people just became terrified.
What we're going through in the financial markets is just another extension of this.
Governments are always tinkering around with society, they're trying to practice social engineering, and they just keep making things worse.
And the people keep being more and more frightened by these emergencies, and they want to be rescued by the government, and they have abdicated huge amounts of liberty and just asked the government to be given all sorts of power to save them.
And so what we've actually come up with is a revival of the divine right of kings.
And what it is is the divine right of the majority.
If the majority is in favor of something, then it's okay.
No matter what it is, if the majority voted for it, then it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, or even better, if the majority oppose it, but their so-called representatives feel like passing it anyway, then that's good enough.
Yeah, that too.
All right, now let me get back to Quigley here real quick, because one of the things that Quigley talks about in that study of the rise and fall of these civilizations is he basically, I don't want to paraphrase him too closely or whatever, I don't know exactly, but he basically says, you know what, you can forget your religion, and you can forget your ideology, and you can forget geography, and you can forget it all.
Here's what it all comes down to as far as human liberty is concerned.
How well armed is the population compared to the people with the power?
Now, there was an era in Europe where basically all fighting was done on foot with swords, and people were relatively free because nobody could really concentrate that much power.
But then some jerk invented the saddle, and now you have this specialized warrior class of people who became the knights and the rulers who became much more tyrannical.
And then somebody invented the musket, and those started getting around, and that was when power became more equalized again.
Again, this is the era of America's founding.
And what Quigley says is that all we have left to protect liberty now in an era of incredibly specialized weaponry, as Bill Hicks used to joke about the U.S. military, I can kill you by looking at you.
We have no chance against these people.
The only thing that protects us from the specialized weaponry of our state is the law that's left over from the days when the average farmer was as armed as the military.
What do you think about that?
Well, I think it was true up to about 1975, and then the shoulder-launched guided missile was invented.
I did an article for USA Today back in the mid-'80s, where I pointed out that the shoulder-launched guided missile had put us back to where we were 200 years earlier, when it was the Pennsylvania flintlock rifle that gave the American colonists the ability to overthrow their government.
Isn't that interesting, yeah.
Good point.
So the shoulder-launched guided missile is really a modern version of the Pennsylvania flintlock rifle.
And what you see going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and all today, where the most powerful government ever seen on earth is having a very, very difficult time beating small bands of primitive guerrillas, the reason for that is the shoulder-launched guided missile.
The air superiority that the U.S. ought to have is very greatly nullified by the shoulder-launched guided missile.
If an airplane comes down below about 5,000 feet, it's taking a really big risk.
And then in about, I forget when it was, about the mid-'90s, another version of the shoulder-launched guided missile was invented for tanks, and that's called the Javelin in the United States.
And it accomplishes the same thing.
One man with this missile can knock out a tank.
Well, I've also written several times about the defensive versus offensive cost ratio in these things.
The missile that shoots down the airplane costs maybe $50,000, and the airplane costs $50 million.
So the defensive weapon is, what is that, 1,000 times cheaper than the offensive weapon.
And that's the economic dynamic that is in the war today, is the fact that the defensive weapons, which are the shoulder-launched guided missiles, are 1,000 times, at least 1,000 times cheaper than the offensive weapons.
So for every dollar that, let's say, the Taliban spends, Washington has to spend 1,000.
Yeah, well, and the same thing, I guess, goes for Kalashnikovs and for EFPs, too, right?
Least Side Bombs.
What's an ESP?
Oh, the Explosively Formed Penetrator, the IED kind of homemade landmines they use against our guys in Iraq.
Yeah, same thing.
The vehicles that those things are designed to blow up cost, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars in some cases, and the bomb costs practically nothing.
So the U.S. has to spend mountains of money to counter these people who really don't need much money at all.
And in order to spend that money, the U.S. government has been printing enormous amounts of dollars, inflating the money supply, and that inflation caused this big speculative frenzy in the real estate market.
And now, you know, essentially the economic crisis that we're in today is the result of the 9-11.
Washington fell for the bait.
Instead of handling 9-11 as if it was a big crime, they handled it as a war and they went into a program of war spending.
And war is the most expensive thing humans do.
So we're essentially, you know, on the economic rocks here because of that defensive versus offensive cost ratio.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I actually have here a partial transcript, at least, of Osama bin Laden's speech from October of 2004, which people somehow took as an endorsement of the Democrat.
I hardly think so.
But anyway, he said, we are continuing, and you got to hand it to this Osama bin Laden guy for a psycho mass murderer.
He's a pretty honest guy, it seems like, at least in this part.
He says, we are continuing this policy and bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.
He says, the Mujahideen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union and Afghanistan in the 80s, quote, using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers.
We, alongside the Mujahideen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.
He also says al-Qaeda has found it, quote, easy for us to provoke and bait this administration.
All that we have to do is send two Mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which it is written al-Qaeda in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations, he said.
Yeah, I mean, how could you disagree with any of that?
It's exactly what's been happening.
The guy knows what he's doing.
He, you know, he plays us like a violin.
You know, looking back overall, it's interesting you bring this up.
You know, I haven't really thought through this whole thing in a long time.
In 1985, when I wrote that article for USA Today, the title of the article was Patrick Henry with Missiles.
And I explained what happened in the American Revolution, where the Pennsylvania flintlock rifle enabled the colonists to beat the most powerful government on earth.
And I said, watch out, the new Total Launch Guided Missiles are going to enable the Afghans to beat the Russians.
And I, you know, I was just laughed at all over the place.
But that's what happened.
The Russians could not use their airpower because the Stinger missiles kept those planes away.
And now, you know, and I and what I said was, once they get rid of the Russian Empire, they're going to go after the American Empire.
So here we are.
You wrote that in 1985.
That's right.
You still got a copy of that one?
Yeah.
Oh, man, I'd love to read that.
You know, Eric Margulies, the great reporter from the Sun newspapers in Canada, he he was piling around with the Mujahideen covering their story back then.
And he in I don't think it was an interview.
I think he was, you know, sitting having dinner or something with this guy.
I think it's Abdul Azam, who was Bill Clinton.
I'm Bill Clinton.
Same difference.
Osama bin Laden's mentor.
And Azam told Margulies, yes, as soon as we're done with the Russians, our next goal is to kick the American Empire out of the Middle East.
And that was back in 1986 or something like that.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I think that article is on our Web site.
If you can't find it, let me know and I'll get it to you.
But I'm pretty sure it's on the Web site.
Great.
And that's, again, Richard Mayberry dot com, the early warning report.
In fact, if any of you guys hanging out in the chat room could do me a favor and try to Google that up and send me the link and we can talk a little bit more about it.
If you're able to find it, I need to go ahead and subscribe to this thing.
And in fact, let's go ahead and talk about this angle.
I'm kind of confused because, well, I'm only a little bit confused, but it seems like, again, you're in everything I've ever read that you write.
I mean, even quote my hero, Harry Brown, you come off like anarcho-capitalist Rothbardian libertarian.
Yeah.
As far as I can tell, you don't have any association with the Mises Institute or any of those guys.
And instead you do this investment newsletter for people.
Explain that.
Well, I like living well and you make a lot better money in the investment world than you do elsewhere.
Maybe I need to consider that.
Yeah.
Radio show host says, well, you know, Doug Casey, right?
Yeah.
OK.
The venture billionaire.
Yes.
Right.
OK.
Venture capitalist or something like that.
I've known each other for almost 30 years now.
And I remember back like 20 years ago, I was saying to Doug, you know, and this was back when I was not as prosperous as I am now.
I was a writer, but not doing all that well.
And I said, you know, we're talking about liberty all the time and how it's such a superior system.
Well, if it's so valuable, we ought to be able to make money using it for practical purposes.
And Doug says, yeah, you're right.
And that conversation stuck with me for quite a while.
And I eventually decided that you should be able to take the libertarian viewpoint and use it for specific investment tactics and strategies.
And that's what my newsletter is about.
I never, ever deviate from the whole libertarian matrix that you're talking about there.
Well, the two laws, you know, that's libertarianism to me, those two laws.
Right.
I never deviate from that.
I use it to analyze what's going on in geopolitics and the economy and to try to come up with predictions of what will happen and what investments will benefit.
And I think that blowing my own horn here a little bit, you won't find anybody who's made more money for his subscribers than early warning report has since, at least since the war began and probably long before that.
And one of the gimmicks I use is that is I have a very deep religious faith that governments will always screw up.
And that's part of the analysis all the time is whenever they run up against the problem, I ask, how are they going to screw this up and what investments will profit from it?
And boy, does it work?
Yeah.
Well, now, when the Republicans came to power, someone that I know and care a lot about who actually has some money to invest said, all right, Mr. Smarty Pants knows everything.
So what should I do now?
And I said, well, that's easy.
Invest in Boeing and Lockheed, Exxon and gold, because here comes war and inflation.
I mean, are you kidding me?
The Republicans are in power.
So obviously I was right about that.
Too bad I didn't have any money to invest, I guess.
But so it looks like at least it's going to be the Democrats.
Would you give the very same advice or how would your advice be different?
I'm sure your advice wasn't too much different than what I just said eight years ago, right?
That's really true.
In the October issue of early warning report, I did a pretty lengthy explanation of what I believe the new investment strategy should be is actually just a replay of what the strategy was in 2001 after 9-11, because the Russians have revived the Cold War.
And I think their clear purpose is to put Washington in a mode where it has to recapitalize the U.S. military, because practically everything they have is worn out now.
They've got to rebuild the whole U.S. military for the purpose not of fighting guerrillas, but of fighting a big country like Russia.
And I think that you're just going to see coming out of this economic crisis, you know, one of the boom areas is going to be the arms industry, as well as the non-dollar assets, because there's going to be a lot more inflation and non-dollar assets will do very well.
But yeah, you know, gold, my top pick in all of this is Lockheed, because Lockheed is the biggest arms maker in the world.
And I think they're going to get a flood of orders from the Congress in order to counter the Russians.
Now, your investment advice sounds perfect as far as I can tell, but who started the new Cold War again?
I'm sorry, say again?
You say the Russians are the ones who started this?
Well, I mean, yeah, you know, as far as pinning the blame, we can argue that back and forth.
But the fact is that the Russians a couple months ago or so chose to come out of Russia and go into Georgia.
And Georgia was applying to be a NATO member.
Well, that was pretty clearly a basically a declaration of Cold War that the Russians are coming back now they're making their comeback.
And so it was it was like a wake up call in Washington.
Oh, I'll be darned.
They aren't the nice guys that we thought they were.
And so, you know, the Russians, they're just swimming in oil and gas and a huge amount of profit.
And some of that's been poured into their weapons.
And I think they are planning to start pushing back against NATO now.
NATO has spent the last almost 20 years moving eastward, moving its borders eastward encroaching on on the Russians used to be that that Central Europe was a buffer between Western Europe and the Russian Empire.
And NATO has moved into that buffer and adopted, you know, Poland and Czech Republic and other countries there as members of NATO.
And the Russians just get more and more scared because that's their history is being invaded by by foreign countries.
If you're Russian, you're taught to be constantly watching the horizon to see what's coming at you.
And as NATO moved eastward, they just increased the tension in Russia and Vladimir Putin took advantage of that.
And so now the Russians are going to start pushing back.
Well, now, so from the point of view, not of a Lockheed stockholder, but just as an American looking at overall national interest, the expansion of NATO, do you look at that as increasing the strength and power and influence of the United States?
Or is that the kind of overextension really that's weakening us and really, really picking a fight with the Russians who, as you indicate, are in a position to frustrate our empire's plans in many ways?
Oh, yes, certainly.
I agree with that.
The this idea that the U.S. is supposed to have a global empire, I mean, that all by itself is insane.
I mean, that's megalomania on an amazing scale.
And ever since 9-11, Washington has just been swimming in testosterone, trying to expand its empire.
And you would no regard whatsoever for the people that they're frightening.
And the Russians are, because of their history, they're just naturally paranoid people.
And so as this expansion of the U.S. empire has been happening, the Russians have just gotten more and more scared.
This idea of when they inducted Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into NATO, that was really crazy, because these are three little countries that NATO can't possibly defend.
And they're right there on the border of Russia.
The Russians, I mean, they're just freaking out about it.
They have been ever since it happened.
And they can just see NATO coming at them.
And it reminds them of the Mongol many centuries ago coming at them.
Well, and this gets this gets right to what you call the new axis.
And the real lesson, I think, behind it is that this axis is this new alliance of the powers that really are major enough powers to not be thoroughly dominated by the West, that we are pushing them all together.
For example, Russia and China, they have historical differences going back to the beginning of time that keep them from close alliances, even during the Cold War.
And yet we're pushing them together in our attempt to be, as they call it, the benevolent global hegemon.
Yeah, that's right.
The new axis is the term I coined, I think, in 1996, where I pointed out just what you just said, that the federal government, by trying to expand its global empire, is frightening all of these other countries who have long histories of being invaded, constantly being invaded.
They are all paranoid, and for good reason.
And the US government has totally ignored that paranoia that these people were born into.
And it's been expanding its empire, frightening them.
And so they come together as an alliance.
And I think that it's extremely likely that the guerrillas that the US military is fighting in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan are actually backed by the new axis, the governments of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Libya, Serbia.
There are several others there that I've got on the list.
I think there's around 15 or so.
These governments are finding that they can form an alliance with somebody like Vladimir Putin, probably secretly, to most extent, because, you know, everybody has Washington as this common enemy.
And Washington just totally ignores the psychology of all these other people.
They just see things in terms of good guys against bad guys, like a Hollywood movie from World War II.
Good guys against bad guys.
And the world is never that simple.
Right now, I've got to ask you about the morality of, well, following through on what your insight provides you as being the best investment opportunities.
I think at least some would say, I think I might even say that it's quite immoral to cash in on all the welfare money being doled out to Lockheed on the part of the American taxpayer by the Congress, and to take your dividend check from that when this is all money that they make off of mass murdering people.
Richard, how do you reconcile this with, we ought to have a Jeffersonian belief in the natural rights and dignity of every human on earth, and we ought to have a foreign policy of peace?
Well, the first thing I point out is that the whole financial structure of the world is corrupt.
And we're sure seeing the signs of that when we turn on the TV every morning.
And I've been saying this for decades when people have asked me the question you just asked about the morality of the thing.
The entire system is corrupt.
You cannot have a fiat paper currency system and have it be honest, because the currency itself, the foundation of the whole thing is corrupt.
So whenever you're making an investment, it's a choice between one thing that's corrupt and another thing that's corrupt.
And they're corrupt in different ways.
Sometimes there's more corruption or less in given investment.
So the option of a totally clean investment hardly exists out there.
I would say gold, silver, platinum, those would be totally clean.
But if you put your portfolio in those kinds of things, you're going to take a colossal loss at some time along the way.
So you have to have a portfolio that's really well balanced to withstand the kind of shocks that we're going through right now.
And that necessarily puts you into a whole lot of things that are corrupt.
So the question is, well, how corrupt are these industries actually?
Well, one point I would make on it is that I believe in self-defense.
And so there is a need for a weapons industry in my mind.
To say that you have a right to defend your life and then cut you off from the weapons necessary to do it is to just make a hollow argument.
So there is a need for a weapons industry.
Now, the weapons industries that exist, some of them are fairly corrupt.
But then again, what are the alternatives?
If you buy into what's generally considered not corrupt, which is U.S. government bonds, the Treasury bills, Treasury notes, Treasury bonds, you are actually buying something that's far more corrupt than Lockheed, because those in the act of buying those bonds, you are loaning money to the government and giving a carte blanche to do anything it wants with that money.
Whereas if you buy into, for instance, Lockheed, all you're buying is a share of a stock that's going to pay you a dividend.
You're not doing anything that actually causes a war or any kind of bloodshed.
You're just skimming off some of the cash flow from it, some of the profit.
When you loan your money to the government directly in a bond, or when you put your money in a bank, which puts some of that money in government bonds, you are directly giving the government the ability to go out and start the war.
What can you invest in that isn't in government bonds to some extent?
If you see what I mean, people never look at the corruption of the financial system very closely, except when we get into a crisis like we're in now.
And so they don't really realize that something like a government bond is just a way of helping the government go out and kill innocent people.
And so they think that's a good alternative to something like Lockheed, but it's not.
It's worse than Lockheed.
So I'm just saying...
Yeah, but you could invest in Mama's Shrimp Company or something too, right?
Yeah, that's true.
And I encourage you to do those kinds of investments.
But when the money's flowing in a given direction, you want to be on the receiving end of the flow, not the paying end of the flow.
And what we're seeing now is this dramatic, I think we will see another dramatic diversion of flows of money into weapons industries.
And you've just got a choice whether you're going to take a hit, be one of the losers or one of the gainers.
And I'm not saying I like this.
I don't think that I would want to live in this kind of world if I had a choice.
But nevertheless, if you really get down to looking at the stuff that's not supposed to be corrupt, an awful lot of it is.
Yeah, all those shrimp companies are on welfare too.
Let's not kid ourselves.
All right.
So, okay.
I mean, that's a decent answer.
I don't have any money, so I've never had to really debate these things.
But I buy gasoline from the worst criminals in the world every day.
So what are you going to do?
Well, let me point out when you buy a stock in a company, all you're buying is the dividend, the right to sell a stock and the right to vote in the company elections if you want to do that.
That's the only three things you get when you buy a stock.
So when you buy into Lockheed, you're only getting those three things and none of them causes war.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and also it's not like you, as Lockheed executives did, joined in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and go about promoting this warmongering.
You, in fact, counsel the exact opposite, which says something.
Yeah, I always, I mean, I never pull any punches there.
I think this whole thing is absolutely stupid, as corrupt as it can get.
It's horrible, but it's the world we live in and you've got to be able to put your money someplace where it's not going to just dry up and blow away.
And so I try to help my people stay as safe and as prosperous as possible within those very corrupt parameters.
All right.
Now, Richard, in the last few minutes here, I have, I guess I'll go ahead and try to figure out a way to make this just one big two part question or something.
The first one basically is, is this stupidity or the plan?
Of course, I know you must be familiar with the famous Jefferson quote about if we ever let the banks control the creation of the currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, then the corporations which grow up around them will rob the people until they're homeless on the land their fathers conquered.
So Thomas Jefferson had his own theory of Austrian theory of the business cycle way back in the beginning of the 19th century when he was opposing Alexander Hamilton's dastardly plans.
And so it would seem like if Jefferson understood way back then, then certainly the central bankers who keep doing this to our economy, the boom and the bust and the war and all this destruction would know exactly what they're doing.
And yet, on the other hand, it seems like there's really a lot of ignorance.
And there's basically the Austrian school that understands and basically nobody else really does.
And they all kind of believe in this idiotic Keynesian economics.
So I wonder if you think that to the people like, oh, I don't know, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson and the CEOs over at Goldman Sachs, do they know what they're doing when they're creating a giant bubble and then letting it pop?
And then secondly, to kind of go along with that, they're saying that we're on the verge of another Great Depression, that apparently this bubble pop that's going on now is going to be so bad.
And I wonder if you think that that's stupidity or the plan?
Who are these people?
What the hell's going on here?
Well, something I write half a dozen times a year in early warning report is political power corrupts the morals and the judgment.
So I think it's both.
I think it is moral corruption, and I think it is that political power makes you stupid.
And I think the American founders would all agree with that just immediately.
And once a person walks into Washington, D.C., walks into one of those offices and sits down and starts exercising the power, then, in my mind, he's a write-off.
He has gone over to the dark side and he's going to behave that way.
And, you know, we can, you know, talking about that, that's another whole hour show there, which is a really fascinating subject.
But that's what's really at the bottom of it, is political power corrupts.
The American founders knew that.
That's why they created the Constitution, to try to limit the amount of power that would be out there, so that no matter who got control of it, he wouldn't be able to do much damage.
But over the years, that safeguard has been, you know, dismantled.
And people like Bernanke and Paulson have enormous amounts of power, and I think it makes them stupid.
And again, you know, political power corrupts the morals and the judgment.
And I don't think you need to know any more than that to know what's wrong.
Yeah, well, and, you know, I think the one exception really proves the rule, doesn't it?
Watching Ron Paul up there in association with the rest of these goofballs, you can really tell the contrast there, you know?
Yeah.
I don't know if you're a big Ron Paul fan or not, but...
Ron's an old friend, yeah.
In fact, he endorsed my newsletter.
So, yeah, I know him well, and he's the only bright star in the whole Washington firmament.
All right.
Well, now, so very, very quickly here, at the end, it looks to me like some kind of revolution within the form going on here with D.C. basically taking over Wall Street and incredible amounts of unimagined legislation coming down the pike of new regulations and control over this economy.
Where do you think we'll be in a year, in two years from right now?
Well, I'm writing an article on that right now for the November issue.
I think that...
I'm starting to get very optimistic, because I think that we are headed into the next American revolution, and I...
You know, what's going on here is the American people are getting an object lesson in how really awful the government is, and I think what you're seeing every day on TV now is the American people seeing why they can't trust the government.
And so that's the essential thing that has to happen for them to overthrow the thing and go back to the Constitution, is to lose confidence in political power, to realize that this thing's a big hoax, that the government is not the solution, it's the problem, as Ronald Reagan said.
They are coming to that conclusion here now, and you've got the Ron Paul revolution out there giving them an alternative, saying, you know, sit down, read the Constitution, read the works of the American founders, realize why the American founders tried to keep the government very small and limited.
That's happening now, and it's happening fast on a day-to-day basis.
So I'm getting more optimistic as time goes on.
Now, that does not mean, I think, that we're going to avoid bloodshed here, or that the revolution's going to be 100% peaceful.
I think we're into some really hard time, but the lesson that people ought to have learned, they are now learning.
And I'm just getting more optimistic as time goes on.
Well, that's great to hear.
I've got to tell you, I sort of fear for the kind of situation where people are openly rebelling because, I mean, I guess if we win, then great, and everybody wants to go back to the Constitution of 1789, great, but in the meantime, we create the excuse for the complete militarization of our society and total war by our government against us, and, you know, blow back in all directions, and left-wingers and right-wingers pointing fingers at each other, and red-state fascists joining the local Blackwater militia, and I mean, we could have some serious shit go down around here.
Oh, yeah, I fully expect all of that to happen.
Oh, God.
I mean, it's, you know, every possible bad thing you can imagine is probably going to happen, but when we come out of it, let's say three, five, seven years from now, I think the American people will go back to the Constitution because they're being forced now.
They don't want to see how corrupt the government is, but they're being forced now to see this thing's a big hoax, and because it's a hoax, they've got to look for an alternative, and there's Ron Paul out there.
I, you know, like I say, I'm really getting optimistic.
All right, one last thing before I let you go, Richard, and that is a special word of thanks, because when I first interviewed you back in 2004 or 2005 or whichever it was, it just so happened that my old high school science teacher was listening to the show, and he called me up, I don't know, I guess a couple of weeks after that or something.
He found my number and called me up and said, you know, I was driving down the road, and I was listening to this interesting conversation about John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment and natural rights and all these things, and boy, we didn't even get a chance to talk about Chaos Stan and damn Karl Marx and all that this time, but anyway, so he heard this and said, hey, that's my student doing the interview there.
Wow, and in fact went and reread John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government and, you know, all those things along those lines, reread all his Jefferson and got all interested in American policy in the big picture again, as he hadn't been in a long time and interested in rereading Mises and Jefferson and all these things, and then we got to strike up a friendship and all that, and it was all thanks to my interview with you, so that was really cool.
I want to thank you for that.
Well, thanks for pointing that out.
That warms my heart.
Thank you.
And this also has been a great interview.
Please, let's not wait three years or four years or whatever it's been to do this again, and in fact, I'd really like to talk about the Chaos Stan model and how that relates to the American philosophy of liberty and all that, too, someday.
Okay, well, you know, sometime after the show, in the next few days, give me a call and we'll set up another time.
Great, great.
I look forward to it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Richard Mayberry.
He's the author of the U.S. and World Early Warning Report.
That's at richardmayberry.com, and especially check this out.
My friend Mudshark in the chat room went and found the link Patrick Henry updated with missiles by Richard Mayberry from the Washington Times commentary Friday, March 22, 1985.
Incredible article.
I was scanning through it while he was talking a little bit.
I can do that.
I can read and listen at the same time.
Incredible.
I'll be posting this link at thestressblog.com, maybe at theantiwar.com blog as well.
Thank you very much for listening, everybody.
It's been Antiwar Radio and Chaos 92.7.
We got a rerun of somebody coming up next for you after this short tune from Fire Hose, and we'll be back here tomorrow.
Who am I interviewing tomorrow?
I forget, but I got great stuff lined up all for the rest of the week, and here in just a few minutes or an hour or something, I'm going to be recording an interview with Joe Cirincione about Syria's nuclear program and all kinds of great stuff, so stay tuned to Antiwar Radio all week long, 11 to 1 Texas time here on Chaos Radio 92.7.
Oh, and I meant to say another thing about Richard Mayberry.
I almost forgot the Uncle Eric books.
This is such great stuff.
Whatever happened to Penny Candy, World War I, World War II, the money mystery, the clipper ship strategy, whatever happened to justice?
Are you a liberal, conservative, or confused?
Ancient Rome, how it affects you today?
What would Thomas Jefferson think about this?
And on like that, and it's really great stuff.
I really can't wait till my nephew's just a couple of years older I can get him the Uncle Eric books, whatever happened to Penny Candy, World War I and World War II, the rest of the story.
Good stuff, good stuff.
RichardMayberry.com.
All right, see you all tomorrow.
