01/24/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Happy Friday to you.
Man, I woke up this morning.
There was snow all over the ground in Austin, Texas.
Okay, it was ice.
But it's snow to me.
I'll take it.
This is a veritable winter wonderland.
Not much compared to probably the most of you.
Well, it was little enough that it was purely enjoyable and not a crisis, like it seems to be everywhere else where it's snowing in America right now.
All right.
Well, anyway, whatever.
Enough about the weather.
Let's talk with Sheldon Richman.
He's the vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
And he's got a couple of new articles here at FFF.org for talking about the surveillance state lives.
And today's article, Warfare, Welfare, Corporate State.
All of a piece.
And this is another and different response to this liberal hack who wrote this thing in the New Republic.
You might have heard about it.
Where, well, Lentz is his name.
And he attacked Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Glenn Greenwald as not trustworthy for a good liberal Democrat because of what horrible right-wing libertarians they are.
And which, of course, they're not.
And which, of course, is hilarious.
But anyway, so there's been quite a few different responses to this.
But I really liked yours, Sheldon.
So, first of all, I probably, well, as George W.
Bush would say, shorthanded it.
Why don't you go ahead and, first of all, describe the article we're critiquing here a little bit better your own way before we get too far into your critique.
Okay.
Well, Sean Lentz is a professor of history at Princeton.
He's been around a while.
He's a baby boomer.
He considers himself, I guess, a liberal in the sort of modern American sense.
But apparently his history would show him to be a Cold War liberal.
He was not a McGovernite liberal.
So he backs a muscular foreign policy, which he sees as, you know, going hand-in-hand with the welfare state, although stuff he likes.
So his concern about Assange and Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden are that these guys have a hidden agenda.
Well, kind of not so hidden because he then finds things on the record, which supposedly reveals the hidden agenda.
So they're not so hidden.
So not only do these guys want to bring attention to NSA, quote, abuses, which Lentz is willing to admit there were some, they want to do more than that.
They want to basically get rid of the whole surveillance state, which we need to fight our enemies, according to Lentz.
But they want to go further than that.
They stand against the whole liberal project, meaning, again, modern American liberal project, which means the whole welfare state, everything else.
So we should, he's telling his fellow progressives or whatever he called himself, don't embrace these guys, even if you like some of what they're saying about the NSA, because under the surface, you know, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Underneath, they have this whole agenda, which will bring down everything we know and love.
So he's trying to warn them off and, you know, don't see these guys as heroes.
They're bad guys.
They're trying to undermine confidence in the government that we know and love.
Which is hilarious, because, of course, Greenwald is actually, never mind his, you know, obsession with the Bill of Rights, he's a pretty conventional liberal, it seems like, and I've read him for a long, long time, and on, you know, other than, you know, the Dick Cheney emergency issues, but when it comes to just the normal questions of governance, he's a pretty conventional Democrat.
Come on.
No, I agree.
I agree.
On Twitter, I mean, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, he was making pro-ACA statements on Twitter.
So I agree with you.
He's not, in fact, I don't know.
I mean, he was all tears in his eyes when Obama was elected that night and everything.
He was all caught up with that stuff with the rest of them.
He's, you know, he's salon.com kind of guy, and that's not, I'm not saying that's bad about him.
I think that's, it makes him exceptional to me that he cares that much about the Bill of Rights and that little about fitting in with partisan politics, but that doesn't make his, his politics that far outside of the conventions of the ideas and policies of the Democrats.
Just their little in-group, you know?
Well, well, is trying to present to the readers this so-called evidence, perhaps that the Greenwald is not everything he represents himself to be.
So he has him, he has these damning facts about him.
What are the damning facts?
Well, he's hung out at the Cato Institute and has said, you know, I like the Cato guys.
And he actually went, and this is really home.
He, he, he points out that Greenwald once spoke at a Future Freedom Foundation conference.
I believe you might have been there, Scott, and he identified, he identifies the Future Freedom Foundation as a right-wing institution, which is hilarious.
As I say in the article, this, this is, this indicates either the level of research he did or his sense of humor.
Not sure which.
So he thinks he's got all these little indications that Greenwald really is, you know, leaning heavily libertarian.
But you're right.
You, you can, you can agree with, you could be for the Affordable Care Act still like a lot of what Cato has done, or, or, and you could come to an FFF conference on civil liberties in New York.
Well, that's just, you know, is using such a blunt instrument to support his preconceived notions and to get people to just say, you know, not embrace, not to see these people as heroes, that he's almost willing to say anything.
It's a pretty silly article when you get right down to it.
Yeah, I mean, it is.
And what's funny is I've talked with Glenn Greenwald about this kind of thing for years and years on this show about the realignment.
And the realignment is not making liberals and conservatives somehow tricking them into being libertarians.
It's, it's basically just hoping, I mean, from my point of view as a libertarian, it's hoping to influence them to prioritize their libertarian instincts on the left and the right and make those the, the things that they're more concerned about, like peace and freedom.
There's a very right-wing argument for peace and very limited government.
And I think there's a very left-wing argument for peace and a very limited government.
And I think that if, if we can have, instead of having John McCain, the liberal Republican and Barack Obama, the conservative Democrat as the center, if we had Sheldon Richmond as the center where, you know, purist anarchism, purist abolitionism, purist against everything-ism as the center, and then we're accentuating the best of the left and right and getting them to prioritize stopping the worst things that the, the best of us are against the most, you know, should be against the most.
And then, so that doesn't mean that liberals or conservatives have to stop being liberals or conservatives.
It just means they need to get good on the things that liberals and conservatives are best on, you know, when they're, you know, what the hell I'm trying to say.
Well, Wellens is hysterical because he, he phrases everything in a way that's supposed to scare people off.
So, so Greenwald is indicted for associating with people as, as Wellens might put it, you know, on the extreme left and the extreme right.
Another way to put that however, is that there are anti-authoritarians on what Wellens is calling the extreme left and the extreme right.
Maybe there's a problem with the way we define the spectrum if this is the case.
And Greenwald has, to some extent, made common cause with the entire authoritarians of all types.
Well, I helped to do that myself.
Tell me what's wrong with that.
The other thing is he tries to make him out to be a Ron Paulian, and you seem to read his stuff to know that he never, and Justin Armando pointed this out in his article, which I'll link to in mine, he never endorsed Ron Paul.
What he did was tried progressives for not even being willing to concede that Ron Paul was saying good things about war, peace, and civil liberties, and the Bill of Rights.
In other words, and asking them, where are your priorities?
I remember a great column he did, back probably when he was still at Salon, saying, look, when you got, when Bush was in power, you guys thought war, peace, and civil liberties were the top priorities.
Even more important, now that Obama's in there, you don't, you think those things are way down on the list, because you won't even give Ron Paul the time of day when he still thinks those are the top priorities.
That was a brilliant piece of analysis by Greenwald.
Well, it's totally lost on Walens.
There's just something wrong with Greenwald, because he's hanging out with people that Walens wants to place either on the extreme left or the extreme right.
It's a totally dishonorable piece of work.
Well, and the thing is, too, and it's been, there's some actually, some pretty funny articles and some pretty great takedowns of it, but...
Well I linked to some good stuff.
There was very good leftist criticism of Walens, and I linked to two things, so if people want to find them, they can just find my article at fff.org, by Fraze, Peter Fraze, I think it is, and Henry Farrell, I believe, at Crooked Timber.
I know what I was going to say.
One of the things that Justin brings up is just how there's sort of been a rash of these going along.
I saw at FFF today where there's an episode of Tom Wood's show where he's interviewing Jacob Hornberger, president of FFF, about an article at Alternet about how all the libertarians would just have all of the poor and weak starve and die in the street and that kind of thing, and Justin points out how there's been a whole bunch of these.
Michael Lind has really taken time out at Salon.com to attack us, and Alternet, and of course there's Ames and all those guys, and it seems like what's going on here is the liberals are really scared of all of a sudden libertarianism when it's not ignored, and it becomes part of the conversation.
I completely freak out, and their idea is that all curious, college-aged, young, open-minded people ought to be liberal democrats like them, or at least liberal progressive somethings like them, and they're frightened that we're like luring them away with our consistent advocacy of individual liberty across the board, you know?
It's not making so much sense, Sheldon.
You're pissing them off.
Well, I am, and I hope I am, a lot of other people are, but what I tried to show at the end is that Wilentz, in a sense, which Wilentz is right, but he doesn't understand it, is true that if you attack the national security state, you are attacking the whole thing.
You know, I don't know what Snowden, Assange, and Greenwald would say to this, they may disagree with me, but I think that's why I say, that's why it's called all of a piece, that these are three interlocking parts, the welfare state, the warfare state, and the corporate state, and so I think an attack on one is an attack on all, so Wilentz unwittingly stumbled onto the truth, the wonder of wonders.
Well, yeah, and you say it well, too, that the welfare state amounts to a bribe to shut up about the corporate welfare state.
That's what this is really about.
Wow.
I mean, come on, Alexander Hamilton founded this thing.
It's a fascist combine, man, just like in War of the Cuckoos' Nest.
Look, welfare programs begin with the Queen Elizabeth, and I don't mean Queen Elizabeth II, and it was a way to keep the poor and the unemployed from a vacancy that might end up turning into revolution, so it was always a form of control.
There's a very good book called Regulating the Poor, written by left-wingers, Piven and Cloward.
It's still worth looking at.
It's a couple decades old, but more than a couple, but a very good analysis of how welfare waxes and wanes depending on the state of the economy and the concern of the officials that the people who are vulnerable to capitalism or state capitalism, whatever you want to call it, they don't want them getting upset and creating a strike, so they buy them off.
It's a way to take people's mind off what's really wrong with the system and how it needs to be changed.
Well, you know, in this day and age, there's always the direct absolute example, like it's a political cartoon in real life where George Bush literally sends you $300 in the mail no matter who you are.
Everybody gets $300 for their dividend for letting him invade Iraq.
What the hell is that?
You know what I mean?
Where it's that obvious.
Here's your payoff.
Shut up.
And you know, here's another worse one.
I went to Camp Casey in the summer of 2005 to support the Cindy Sheehan thing and do a little bit of pseudo-journalism and whatever up there, and I interviewed a soldier who was at that point, I don't know, maybe he wasn't AWOL, but he was just on leave, but he was going back because his thing was they gave him all this money for college and he kind of already spent it, some on college and some on living while he was at college, and he owes him $50,000, so he's going back to war.
And there he was at Camp Casey totally believing in the anti-war thing and no longer believing in the war at all, but he'd gotten his giant welfare check and cashed it in advance, oops, and so now he owes him his blood.
You know, I think getting back to your earlier point, I think it's very interesting, and this bears watching, that people like Wilentz are concerned that there's a convergence going on between the truly radical left, not the ones that have long ago been co-opted, and anti-authoritarians, you know, on the right and the libertarians, that they're finding common ground against this state that we're living under.
And there seems to be panic going on that these people are fighting each other, and maybe as a result a coherent, I would think, libertarian version of a combination of their worldviews ending up in a true libertarian amalgamation of ideologies will be formidable in opposing this monster.
That's what they seem worried.
I mean, you know, they're the ones who are actually worried.
Maybe they have good reason to be worried.
Yeah, I mean, ideologically anyway, it is, the split is becoming much more, and they've made it this way with the state that they've built, the empire that they've built, that the division more is the authoritarians versus the anti-authoritarians.
I don't know if you ever saw that speech I gave at the Ron Paul thing in 012 there, where I said that he ought to keep running with Dennis Kucinich as his running mate, and they could be the Democratic Republicans and insist that Obama and Romney run together, and they would be the war party, and then we'll have the real division how it should be.
You know, the people who love the IRS and the people who love homeland security and who love foreign empire, they can go and vote for Obama and Romney and get droned, and everybody who cares at all about the Bill of Rights can support Paul and Kucinich, and, you know, it seemed like, and Ron Paul's always willing to compromise.
Yeah, I called out the great division between the socialists and the statists.
That should be the big division.
Those who trust society and those who only trust the state.
Yeah, no one will ever get what you mean by that with the word socialist in there, but I know what you mean.
I'm explaining it.
I'm explaining it.
Look, one of the high points of my TV viewing over the last five years is when, I think it was CNN, had Ron Paul and Ralph Nader on together, and it was a love fest.
And Wolf Blitzer, or whoever, you know, whichever talking head was there, was trying to get them to talk about their disagreements, and they wouldn't take the bait.
They kept saying, no, but we agree on it.
We hate the corporate state.
We hate the warfare state.
We hate the spying.
And, you know, Wolf or whatever would say, well, yeah, but what about the minimum wage?
They didn't want to talk about that.
They wanted to talk about what they agreed on.
It was fantastic.
Yeah, and you know, it ought to be, and this is the reason maybe why it's extra scary to him too, is because it ought to at least be easy to get people to come together about, look, never mind what we want to do to each other for a minute.
Let's just agree about what to stop doing, right?
Let's stop the spying.
Let's stop the bombing Middle Easterners.
Let's stop, you know, whatever world empire behavior.
Let's stop the militarizing the police and imprisoning everybody with a joint in their pocket and all of that kind of stuff.
And then you get people to rally around that.
And then later on, when the emergency of America accidentally becoming a totalitarian society is, you know, over and we, we prevent that, then we can fight about exactly, you know, who gets a cost of living adjustment for their social security check or whatever the hell kind of, you know, demunicipalizing garbage service or whatever it is.
Right.
And put that stuff off till after.
That's right.
That's right.
And I'm hoping the Naderites and those types will discover that these things that the, you know, this, this sort of center left makes such a big deal of it, like the minimum wage is in fact a way to shut up low income people, you know, throw them a few little crumbs, even though in the end it destroys jobs and, or makes jobs less attractive than they even were before.
But it doesn't do anything structural.
It doesn't really go with the structural stuff, the injustices, like old occupational licensing and all the stuff that will lock out low income people from having alternatives to wage labor instead of, Oh, don't worry through Washington.
We'll raise your hourly wage.
We'll raise the minimum wage.
And this is just a way of putting people to sleep and they're okay.
We're being taken care of.
And so they don't, nobody talks about the real stuff that matters, like all these things that lock poor people, low income people out of, uh, you know, off kicks them off the road to, uh, to self, uh, things.
So I'm hoping, I'm hoping that the more principled leftists can under, uh, understand that maybe by hanging out with libertarians, they'll begin to see it.
Well, you know, we got this thing going for us too, about the business cycle theory where everybody else is just wrong about what causes these terrible disruptions in the economy all the time.
And it's so hard on the poor.
And I mean, you think about, I don't know, man, I'm not much of a sociologist or whatever.
I do foreign policy, but just think about the tears in the fabric of our people or whatever, as you just have, I don't know the numbers of hundreds of thousands of businesses go bankrupt and families destroyed and kids in foster care and guys eating their pistols and you know, all for what, where it totally doesn't have to be that way at all, which is government intervention in the economy and screwing around that makes it that way.
That makes it where it might as well be a crime to save a little bit of money.
How is a poor person ever supposed to get ahead if they can't save anything without losing to inflation, you know, overnight?
And it's just, you know, I don't know.
It seems like you don't have to agree with us on anything else to understand that it's the central bank manipulating things that makes it the way it is with this boom in the bus, a shock to the system every few years like this, you know, yeah, I'm sorry.
I have to have that.
And the people you're talking about are also the first to lose jobs when there's a recession after a bubble, you know, that's been blown up by federal policy one way or another.
And then the jobs don't come back.
And so there's a, you know, essentially a jobless, jobless, quote unquote recovery.
And, and, and who's, you know, who's hurt worse, worst of all, but that's the result of an alliance of government and banking, you know, big businesses.
It's, it's hardly a product of the free market.
We know darn well it's not because there's no free market.
It can't, it can't be a product of free market if there was no free market.
But so, so what, what we need to do in, in reaching out to again, principled leftists is, is we need to get them to see that, you know, even if they disagree with our analysis, it's, it's a good faith analysis that has something behind it.
I mean, and we can argue about it, but what, you know, what you see that's so ugly in towards the two, the two, you know, the right and left, as you move toward the center is, you know, they can never concede that their adversaries are arguing good faith.
I mean, if you watch Fox or if you watch MSNBC, everybody assumes that if you don't agree with me, you're, you know, you're evil incarnate.
Right.
Well, and you know, that's part of my problem too, because I figure all state powers, aggression and aggression is evil.
And all of these people got 10 million policies that therefore, which makes them pretty all, you know, almost everybody beyond the pale to me.
But then again, I have my priorities.
And so, you know it seems like if we could try to get them to stop doing the worst first, but you know, the left, right divide, it was the South park about the Iraq war, which I think they only ever did one about the Iraq war, but it was about the divide here at home.
And it was just country versus rock and roll is all it was.
It was like city people versus country people, uh, you know, whether you say y'all or whether you don't, that was the difference, whether between your pro war or not.
And ultimately like that's basically true.
That was the difference between whether you're pro torture or not was, well, did the Republicans tell you that you're pro torture?
Good.
Then you are, or did the Republicans tell you that you're pro torture?
Good.
Then you're not because you're not whatever they say.
And so, and then that the divide is that simple.
Like, uh, it's not even rich and poor.
You got country club people and working class people.
If they just kind of feel more country music-y than they're Republicans.
And it's kind of just as simple as that.
These decisions are made by the vaguest of impressions, not by any of these life or death, all important policy decisions at all.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'm looking forward to more science and hysteria from the lenses because to a degree of convincing people, you know, people want to believe that kind of crap or I don't know.
It doesn't seem like it went over that well so far.
Yeah.
I'm not sure how it's going to resonate.
I mean, outside of this narrow establishment circles, but let them, let them keep doing that because I think that in the end that helps us, first of all, it exposes our work to maybe to new eyes and they'll click on some of the links and go see what we're saying.
And, uh, I, I think that's only to the good, but let them read it.
Well, Sheldon, I'm sorry.
I talked so much.
I should ask you a bunch of questions about the security state because you wrote a great piece about that.
The surveillance state lives also at FFF.org that I hope people will go and take a look at, but now I got to go because it's time to interview Gareth again.
Thank you.
Thanks very much for your time, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
However, that is the heroic Sheldon Richman, the plumb line, the most libertarian man in the universe.
And that's according to Anthony Gregory, who's second place.
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