08/19/14 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the thing here.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest, maybe our guest today.
I'm not sure.
I got a few more invites out.
We'll see.
But it's our friend Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
And, of course, they're the reason that I don't agree with you about everything.
The Illuminati pays them to pay me to think that you're wrong about stuff.
So that's why I'm so compromised.
It's Hornberger, Bovard, Richmond and the other rulers of the universe who tell me what to pretend to think.
So thank you very much for that, Jacob.
And welcome back to the show.
It's always a pleasure to be here, Scott.
Pardon me for indulging in other people's stupid conspiracy theories for a moment there.
It's a little bit of fun.
Hey, listen.
So here's the thing.
You wrote this.
I can't even think about it without laughing my ass off.
It's called Embracing Communism.
We're running it today as a viewpoint at antiwar.com.
Embracing Communists.
Pardon me.
Same difference in a way.
Embracing Communists here at fff.org.
And it's about America's relationship, ever-escalating relationship with Vietnam, but in a nice way escalating or not.
Tell me, Jacob.
Well, it is one of the most incredible things you've ever seen.
I mean, I would invite people to read my article, but also read my article because I have the link there to the New York Times article about what happened here.
And the reason that you want to look at the New York Times article is not just the article, but the photograph that comes with the article.
It's incredible.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey, is in Vietnam, which, as we all know, is run by a communist regime, the same communist regime that ousted the U.S. from Vietnam after killing some 58,000 American soldiers.
And he's saluting, he's passing in review of communist soldiers saluting.
I mean, did you ever think you'd see a day when an American army general would be reviewing communist troops and saluting them?
And the purpose of his visit is to get a partnership established with the Vietnamese communist regime where the U.S. is selling weapons to them and entering into a partnership as a counterbalance against China.
You know, in other words, the big same power politics we see in the Middle East and the rest of the world where the U.S. is making such a mess.
They're now going over to Asia.
But what's phenomenal to me, Scott, I mean, let's not forget, this is the Vietnam War, you know, where they said, we have to go to Vietnam, we have to sacrifice all these American soldiers because the communists are coming to get us and communism so bad.
This is the same regime that the guy's now saluting and trying to enter into a partnership with.
It's incredible.
Yeah, it really is something else.
And I mean, there's so many different things about it.
I mean, I'm not even sure where to begin with all this.
How about the fact that, well, first of all, he's sitting there reviewing them, but they're really the ones who are the supplicants in this situation.
I mean, it's funny.
It looks like he's saluting them, but really they're saluting him after whooping America's ass 30 years ago.
Oh, no, I'm getting old.
Thirty five, 40 years ago, they, there they are basically being folded into the American empire anyway.
But then there's also the great irony of America using Vietnam as a counterweight to China when the entire excuse for the war was that Ho Chi Minh was nothing but a sock puppet for Mao Zedong and that if we didn't stop the dominoes from falling, this united communist front was going to conquer all of East Asia.
And now here we are relying on the Vietnamese nationalism of the communist regime, right?
Not the southern regime, the communist regime that won the war to help him in China.
Not that they're going to invade him or anything, but to be a counterweight to them in the region and their aims and goals undermines it.
And wasn't it the Democrats?
Does it matter how many decades ago it was, Jacob, that it was the Democrats that were the same ones pushing this nonsense when here's the very same party a few decades later is willing to go sell them weapons now?
Yeah.
And it's not just making nice with a nation state that defeated the U.S. on the battlefield.
I mean, that would be one thing if it was just a regular regime that like Britain, you know, Britain and the U.S. got in a war in 1812 and so forth.
We're talking about a communist regime that the real nature of this regime has not changed over the last 30, 40 years.
It has remained a communist regime.
And remember, you know, all the great anti-communist fervor among conservatives.
And it was, I mean, the antipathy toward communism is justified.
The UNI's libertarians, everything in our fiber is against communism and socialism and so forth.
But we certainly would not defend all the Cold War antics and all the, you know, big, the adoption of essentially communist tactics to fight communism.
And so here is the U.S. military embracing a communist regime.
I mean, in and of itself, even if there had been no war against the North Vietnamese, I would say it's just disgraceful when you make nice with communists.
And, but like I put in my article, there's nothing new about this.
It really goes to show you what the U.S. national security state has done to our nation.
This apparatus that was adopted after World War II, they entered into the partnership with the mafia, don't forget, to assassinate Castro.
I mean, this is a formal partnership that was entered into with this criminal organization that's out giving drugs to kids and committing murders and extortion and blackmail.
They entered into a partnership with them.
They entered into a partnership with German Nazis after the war.
And now you have them committing our country to a partnership with communists, a communist regime.
And really, we know what this is about.
They're trying to get them to buy American weapons in order to create that sense of dependency where they can control them the way they control the Egyptian dictatorship that's dependent on U.S. weapons and so forth.
It's classic military tactics.
You know, we'll furnish you the weapons, maybe even for free.
And then you'll have to do our bidding because we're the only ones who can give you the repair parts for it and stuff.
Yeah, it's such a protection racket.
Well, and, you know, and I want to ask you a lot more about America's policy toward Cuba in the next segment, actually.
But as far as making nice, I wonder if you make a difference between, say, like, you know, opening the door to China, Nixon going to China and saying, let's end our Cold War against each other in trade versus what we're doing with Vietnam now, where we're trying to make them a satellite of our empire and, you know, government to government transfers and particularly weapons like you're talking about, as opposed to just let's let, you know, capital and goods cross these borders back and forth.
That is a fascinating question.
I'm glad you did mention you didn't you didn't support any America adopting communist methods to fight communism.
But communist methods include closing trade to communist countries, right?
Yeah, like the embargo against Cuba, you know, which we're talking about a little while, but but that's a classic example of depriving Americans of their rights in order to supposedly fight the communist regime in Cuba.
And so you're not against, you know, capitalists in America going and doing business with capitalists in Vietnam.
You're just complaining about weapons and government involvement.
Is that right?
Exactly.
That what what the the ideal that you do is you get the U.S. government to lift all the restrictions on the on the ability of American citizens to travel and trade abroad.
So if Americans want to go to communist China or go to the Soviet Union or when it was there or China or Cuba or North Korea, there should be free to do so.
The government should not have these embargoes and trade restrictions and immigration controls and so forth, but keep the government from entering into these alliances and partnerships, especially with communist regimes.
So you can have a system, for example, with Cuba where you lift the embargo, liberate the American people to travel and trade with Cuba.
We libertarians would embrace that because it's dealing with freedom.
But the government itself has no business entering into partnerships, alliances, selling weaponry and that sort of thing.
They've got things, everything upside down, Scott.
They're they constrain the American people from traveling and in these in these countries and trading there, like with Cuba and so forth.
But they unleash the U.S. government.
Imagine a military official serving as our diplomat in North Vietnam.
I mean, why isn't the State Department over there?
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with you.
That's a great point to pick it up on on the other side of this break.
One sec, y'all.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I just got an email from Tiffany at Voices of Liberty.
I've been forgetting to mention I'm on Voices of Liberty now.
They're running just sort of best ofs, not everything, but that's kind of a cool deal there.
Ron Paul's new project.
Very happy to be a part of that.
I'm in the middle of talking with Jacob Hornberger about a libertarian approach to communist countries.
You know, China is obviously much more of a fascist dictatorship than a communist one now, but still run by the Communist Party, of course.
But, you know, Mao died and Deng took over back in the 70s and they've been much more mixed economy, a quasi free market like we have here in America, Jacob, since then, but still a one party dictatorship.
Vietnam, of course, is much more communist than capitalist, much more communist than than China is, I think probably.
And yet now when we talk about that distinction, I think I probably oversimplified it in my question to you in the first place.
But I want to kind of parse this thing a little bit further between the difference between, say, Nixon going to China and saying, let's end our Cold War and open up our trade and relations compared to in this case, like we're talking about directly arming the Vietnamese government, that they can be more effective, ruthless killers of their own people, etc.
But so but I'm also curious about the capitalists, too, though.
You know, the Chase Bank wants to build a factory so that Nike can get shoes made at way, way below US market rates.
Okay, I guess they're free to do that or whatever.
That's fine.
Except for the fact that the people of Vietnam, I think you would agree, aren't free.
They're captives.
Their wages are not set by any kind of market force.
Their wages are set basically by some commies that these American corporations are in effect hiring to bring them artificially cheap workers to do their bidding for them.
And it's doesn't necessarily have to be the same.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a communist country for the same scam to take place in other places where governments are very powerful and people are very politically weak.
And I know that it's capitalism that brings people up for nothing so they can have any power to fight back with at all to twist Chomsky's phrase, widening the floor of the cage.
So people got a running start.
They can actually do something about it and that kind of thing.
And I'm sure factory employment's a lot better than dying in the dirt.
But I think you understand what I'm getting at here, that those things don't necessarily absolve guilt of American corporations going and basically hiring these governments to bring these people who basically are exploiting these people rather than just hiring people who work cheap, if you understand what I mean, kind of thing.
Yeah, because you've got socialist interventionists, as you put it, fascist government programs in virtually every country on earth, including here in the United States.
But my position is that American businessmen, American people, the private sector should be free to go into other countries and operate under their systems.
They may do things that are unethical.
They may do things that are immoral.
But that should be a decision that lies strictly with them, that's no business to the U.S. government as to how American businessmen are conducting themselves overseas.
I mean, that's where we get into the area of moral suasion, where, let's say, American businesses are doing something immoral or unethical, that Americans can bring that to the attention of the American people and to the world, where there's boycotts and social ostracism and embarrassment of the company.
And that's a much better method to get people to do the right thing than to use the force of the U.S. government to act as the world's policeman that's going to start serving as an enforcer of what it considers to be the good and the just all over the world.
So liberate the American private sector, including the business community, to go into Cuba and so forth, operate under their system, and then leave it to the private sector to try to move people in the right direction, while at the same time doing our best here in America to establish a total free market society to serve as a model for the rest of the world so that the world can at least have a model to say, hey, that's the ideal.
And to me, that's what we libertarians should be doing, is trying to establish the free society here rather than using the government to try to do that overseas.
Yeah, and then of course, you know, my theory is, and I think we can see this in China, that force really comes from spoiled rotten wives of rich businessmen.
And you can see how when the Communist Party, they can do anything they want to anyone, but when they cross a spoiled rotten enough wife of a millionaire, billionaire Chinese businessman, then all of a sudden, there's absolute hell to pay.
And in a sense, like we are just humans, right?
And it's almost Madisonian in the like, we got us, we got to spread out, we have all these factions, we need to let them check each other.
And and you have to let, you know, independent power has to be able to grow up to compete with the power that's already there somehow.
And that's, you know, sometimes that's the best hope we got is that, you know, pretty soon we'll have the upper middle class Chinese will be just as stuck up as the really rich ones.
And they will absolutely stop putting up with the nonsense of the local police anymore.
That's it.
Because, you know, they feel good about themselves.
And they don't have to put up with that kind of thing anymore.
And that's progress.
It's kind of a slow and ugly way to go about it.
But you can see that kind of thing happening.
Well, you know, a wealthier society serves as a counterweight to the tyranny of government.
And now our ideal is that people make their money by providing goods and services that people want to pay for in a totally unhampered market economy.
The problem with China and as well as here in the United States is all too many people make their money out of government largesse or government privileges.
And that's an illegitimate form of government.
And that's why we sometimes people say, well, America is a capitalist system.
And they try to put us libertarians into defending the kind of system we have.
Well, we don't defend it.
This is a corporatist system where the combination of business and the state serves as the means of income for all too many businesses, especially with the military industrial complex and all the people that furnish soft drinks and clothing to the military.
And I mean, that's not the kind of system that you and I defend as libertarians.
We want a totally unhampered market economy where the only way you can make money is by providing goods and services to people who are willing to pay for it.
Consumer sovereignty.
Right.
All right.
Now, I kind of wanted to ask about Ferguson, too, but I think I really rather hear you talk about Cuba for a minute, even though it's not in the headlines right now.
It's maybe not the sexiest topic for people to get into.
But you have a great advantage at really knowing a lot about American Cuban policy.
And it's already 2014.
And that means that there are kids.
There are people listening this show who are born in this century.
Jacob, there are people listening to show who are born, you know, at least in the Seinfeld era, that kind of thing, too.
And I think, you know, probably they just have not had much of a chance to be exposed to this kind of history.
So I was wondering if you could, you know, give us a good summary for a couple of and a half minutes, if you could, of what America's policy has been toward Cuba since Fidel Castro came to power and what can be done about it, maybe.
Yeah.
And it is a sexy topic.
I mean, it's an ongoing topic.
It's an important topic for for young people and old people alike, because it really demonstrates that the system that we're living under here in the United States.
I mean, here we have this general going over to Vietnam and making nice with the communist regime there, while at the same time defending an embargo that really squeezes the lifeblood out of the Cuban people and has for some 45 years, along with, of course, their socialist system there.
But what's the point of this?
I mean, it was always justified under the Cold War that, oh, the communists are bad.
Well, here's this general over there making nice with the communists and trying to enter into a partnership with them, a partnership with them.
So it really goes to show the whole sham of this thing.
This embargo is cruel.
It's brutal.
And they're still obsessed with regime change in Cuba.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the government was discovered having young people from Latin America risk their lives in order to foment dissent within Cuba.
And then they had this other Twitter campaign, which is ridiculous, to try to, again, foment dissent.
I mean, they've got this obsession with Cuba that's been there for, gosh, decades.
And we libertarians say the U.S. shouldn't be involved in this type of thing.
Just liberate them.
Don't do what you're doing, like with Vietnam.
Don't go over and try to make a partnership with Castro.
You don't need to do that.
You don't need to enter into a partnership with China or North Korea.
Just leave them alone and lift the embargo.
Leave the American people free to travel to Cuba and trade and so forth.
That's the best way to counteract a communist regime, by using principles of freedom, not principles of communism.
Hey, can you estimate for me real fast, just, I mean, and communism sucks anyway, Jacob, no doubt about it, but could you, is there any way to estimate a percentage of how much worse the average Cuban's life has been, materially at least, due to America's embargo there?
Impossible to say, but I would say that I'd put their socialist system at maybe 60% and the embargo at 40%.
They're like squeezed between a vice, an economic vice.
Yeah, it's horrible.
And meanwhile, we could have been the good guy.
We could have been the only saving grace in their entire system this whole time.
Well, at least we can trade with the Americans.
But no, we won't even give them that.
Oh man.
All right, listen, thank you so much for writing and for running your foundation and all that you do, Jacob.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
It's a pleasure and an honor.
Bye-bye.
That's the great Jacob Hornberger, everybody.
FFF.org.
Check out his article today at antiwar.com.
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