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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest today is Wendy McElroy from the Independent Institute and ifeminists.com.
Also wendymcelroy.com.
She's the author of a great many books including The Reasonable Woman, A Guide to Intellectual Survival, The Debates of Liberty, An Overview of Individualist Anarchism 1881 through 1908.
Wow, that sounds interesting.
Freedom Feminism and the State and I believe the latest is The Art of Being Free.
You can find what she writes oftentimes at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org, as well as Lausanne Fair Books.
Welcome to the show, Wendy.
How are you?
I'm doing fine.
Thank you for having me.
Well, thank you very much for showing up.
I appreciate it.
I'm very happy to talk with you.
So, I wanted to start with this piece that you wrote for the Future Freedom Foundation.
I guess last week, the Malala's you will not hear about and that's a reference to this little girl who apparently was shot in the head in Pakistan.
Can you, I guess, give us the background on the story first of all?
Well, the little girl Malala was shot because she was targeted.
She was a radical and has been for a long time.
She started a blog post with the BBC when she was 11 years old describing her life under the Taliban in this particular region of Afghanistan, as a Pakistan that is particularly dominated by the Taliban and her struggle to simply go to school and get an education.
And because of her prominence, she was targeted by them and was shot in the head twice.
It's a very tragic story and there's nothing but you wish the best for her and she's a very inspiring and courageous person.
The thing that I highlighted in my story, the other Malala's, is that the United States without a declaration of war, no one's at war with Pakistan and in America.
It's not even like Afghanistan or Iraq or no one considers them to be a hostile power.
They've gone in, they've targeted a great many civilian targets with drones.
When I say targeted civilian targets, the idea is always that there is a terrorist leader or there's some justification but in fact it's predictable that civilians will be targeted.
A great many children have died.
The best study that I've seen on the subject is 176 in the last few years.
And without diminishing Malala's tragedy and the brutality that goes, I'm a bit outraged that Americans and American military can go in and with no media attention, with no backlash, kill children and predictably children and civilians will be killed and no one is doing an international human cry about that.
Yeah, well it really is amazing isn't it?
I remember Tom Woods said in a speech in Los Angeles about how, you know, we'll get all worked up if there's an earthquake.
Oh no, let's help out.
But then we'll turn right around and the same people who send money will be for bombing a country off the face of the earth.
I guess he was talking about Iran in that circumstance but it's the same thing with Pakistan where we send all this flood aid and our military says and the politicians say they want so bad and they love to highlight stories, right, of like a little kid with a toy Chinook.
See, the Pakistanis love us because we help them so much when there's a flood or whatever.
But at the same time, sit around and kill them all day long.
The very same people we save from the flood maybe.
And everybody just shrugs.
It's no big deal at all as long, I guess like Giuliani said, it all depends on who's doing the torture and who's doing the killing.
America is this very strange place.
I'm Canadian, by the way.
I've spent a great deal of time in America and I basically, you know, I think I know the culture very well.
It's a very strange place.
After 9-11, I remember being struck by the fact that all the headlines in the world were basically saying we are all Americans now and there was such an outpouring of goodwill and such and sympathy and empathy and support.
And I don't know why they had to, but why the military basically had to go and take what was a bridge and explode it and become an attack dog across the Middle East.
But that's what basically what I was trying to get to with the other malalas you'll never hear about is that I have seen so many times in discussions online and discussions with people, all they seem to really care about is the American death.
You get the Americans who are the civilians, the American soldiers who've died.
You know, the people who die who are Iraqi, who are Afghanistan or Pakistani, they're every bit as much a human being as an American and every bit as important.
Yeah, I think what it really comes down to is just the TV, right?
They just won't show the dead bodies.
They won't ever show or even they won't show like a profile view of a crying grandmother.
Nothing.
They just will never bring the grief to your living room.
They won't even bring the bodies of American soldiers to your living room.
One of the things that happens in Canada, for example, and Canada is withdrawing from those places so it doesn't happen so much now, is if a dead soldier comes back they stop the freeway and they have a procession down the freeway with the funeral parlor's vehicle carrying the casket and is given honors.
In America, you're so afraid of making the war real that you don't even show your own dead.
Yeah, it really is something else.
I mean, and it's so blatant too, right?
It's just like having, you know, the politicians giving their speeches with the three-word slogan brainwashed behind them or something.
It's pretty blatant that if the slogan might as well say we're trying to manipulate you or whatever, but they still just keep right on anyway.
Nobody calls them out, not very often anyway.
I think there is, there may be a sea change happening.
I think America, what I'm seeing is I think people are so tired of the war and they're seeing the Benghazi thing that just happened, the lies and the manipulation.
One of the things that, I was a good friend of Murray Rothbard's and one of the things that Murray used to always talk about was he loved crooks from the politicians from the 19th century because they were crook crooks.
It was before PR came along and they were blatantly what they were, you know, and they blatantly wanted to your money.
They blatantly wanted power and what's happening, for better or worse, is I think that what's happening in politics right now is so blatant.
It's so corrupt.
It is so much based on lies and a grab for power that people are seeing it and I don't know where the anti-war movement is right now as opposed to the 1970s, but I think there's a backlash that's going on whether it's an anti-war movement or just people are tired and they want out of this 10-year, 11-year long war.
All right, now as an I-feminist, I wonder what's your position on, you know, America, well, I don't know, let me be more metaphorical than literal.
If America's empire was not this corrupt empire that had done all these horrible things and lied to you so often and whatever, but they really just said, you know, we have to keep the Taliban down to protect freedom for the young Malalas of that region of the world or whatever, is there a point where you would trust them to do it?
I mean, if the Taliban was a certain level of vicious against females and the American government was a certain level of genuine in their pronouncements, would you ever send them to help the Malalas of the world?
I think my answer is hell no, and that does not mean I'm not sympathetic to the Malalas of the world.
First of all, I'm an anarchist, so I'm not going to send any government troops anywhere with guns to point at anyone else.
The other thing is that even if I were limited government, even if I believed that there was a night watchman role that the government would play, including foreign policy and military, there's nothing in libertarianism or within me that says that you go over to another country and impose domestic policy.
I know that there are terrible things going on in the world, believe me.
I know that people, that there are tyrannies and there are dictators who are treating their people brutally and hideously, but if you make it the business of one government, one area of the world, to police, to impose justice, to impose their standards of justice, by the way, because we are talking about our standards of justice versus their standards of justice, and I'm totally convinced mine is right, but that's irrelevant to the idea that we're imposing different standards of justice, then what you make is every single local problem becomes an international problem.
Every single conflict in the world becomes something that is internationalized and globalized.
I will defend myself if someone attacks me.
I will go to the defense of someone if I'm walking by and there's an alley and someone's being raped and I have a gun, I will go and I will defend that person.
I will not seek out people to pull a gun on.
My primary duty is to live my life as decently and honestly as I can, and if someone is in my venue and I can defend them, I will, but I will not go around the world, spending my life finding places where I can pull out a gun.
Right.
Well then, on the other hand though, I'm anarchist too, so I think that means we both deny the legitimacy of any of these countries borders at all, right?
So these aren't even Pakistani girls, they're just girls and so, you know, aren't you kind of walking by?
It's a small world after all.
No, no, I'm not just walking by.
I know where I live.
Basically, I would have to go to a great deal of trouble to go over and and, you know, pull the gun and defend them.
And eventually, the bottom line is, if their rights are dependent on people flying into their country, into their culture, and defending them by force remotely, then their rights are not secure at all.
What happens is, happens, needs to happen in order to defend them is a total cultural revolution.
Now, I will contribute to that cultural revolution as much as I can, but the drawing of a gun, which is what's happening right now, is the very last thing that should happen, and it's become the very first thing that happens.
And it is, you know, we're talking as if this is something that actually defends them.
I actually think it makes their rights more tenuous.
It makes their safety less viable, because it strengthens the people who are having the guns pointed at them.
They become objects of sympathy and objects of resistance.
Well, and I'm sorry for such a ridiculous hypothetical.
I mean, the fact is, everybody knows that the American government is the most violent institution in the last 60 years anyway, and it's horribly corrupt, and never means well, and only uses...
You know, I saw a conspiracy theory where this Malala girl wasn't even shot, and who knows?
I don't know.
The point is, it might as well be a hoax, right?
Because it is a hoax in the sense that the media want to use her as the poster child for whatever it is their agenda is.
Well, she advances the narrative that the White House wants you to hear, and I'm totally sympathetic to her.
I really wish the best for this girl, this woman.
I'm actually thinking of her as a woman, because my goodness, she's so admirable.
I mean, I wish I'd had her courage at her age, but she's in our faces, and we know of her because it advances the narrative that the American military and the American White House want us to hear.
Yeah, I mean, I see her face on CNN all the time, and I just think, what is she saying?
That she saw Iraqi soldiers throw babies out of the incubators just to steal the incubator?
I've seen this before, where all the PR firms get around and say, hey, listen to this poor victim girl from this other country that we want to intervene more in.
You know, and Scott, I've been in libertarianism too long, because I didn't even think your question was ridiculous.
I've just been around too long and talked to many people.
It seems like a good question to me.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, any question starts with, well, you know, if the government of America truly meant well, then what?
You know, like, come on, we're way off in la-la land now.
All right, well, okay, so I want to ask you about this article, because this is as well said as I've ever read anybody ever say anything like this.
It's paper money equals despotism, and I think, well, I wanted to mention as the intro to this question that you write all the time about the police state, about court decisions like the Supreme Court on the sniffing dogs, and Amtrak, homeland security, outrages, constantly we can read these things by you at fff.org, for example, but then this one is at lfb.org, Law's Eye Fair books, paper money equals despotism, and this is about how that evil empire that we were talking about, and that police state that you're always writing about, is all made possible by the paper money, and I think a lot of people, well, geez, they've just never had a chance to hear somebody explain that right before, so I was hoping that you would explain it to them right, right now.
Absolutely, if I may, I will start by, I want to read a quote by one of my idols, Ludwig von Mises, who says, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of this idea of sound money if one does not realize that was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic in-laws on the part of governments.
Ideologically, sound money belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights, and one of the things I love about that quote is that it makes sound money into a civil liberties issue, and I believe that it is.
I believe that it is for a number of reasons, one of which is that government can oppress you and can afford totalitarianism only to the extent it can afford to pay for totalitarianism.
It can bleed you dry, and it's bleeding people dry right now.
Believe me, I think there's much more bleeding to be done in America because there's a great deal of ruination in a nation as rich as the United States, but one of the main reasons it affords its own despotism is by the inflation of the currency, and it can inflate the currency only because, you know, with Nixon, the last vestiges of ties to a gold standard just went out the window.
It does a number of other things with the currency, including it tracks people through credit cards, through the banking system, and it punishes people through the IRS, through tracking of money and the punishment of dissidents.
If you cannot get a bank account, then you cannot function in society.
If your bank accounts are frozen, you cannot function in society.
So it's a form of social control, but it's also primarily a way to finance the despotism that people will not pay for.
If people were taxed to the degree that they are being oppressed, they probably would rise up, but they aren't taxed, or at least they are, but they're taxed through the inflation and they don't see it that way.
They don't understand it.
You know, it's funny because, and I'm just thinking about my own life, especially, you know, as I was younger, they taught us in first grade how to count with currency, you know, and it's all got George Washington on it, and that's what makes it legit, and in fact I think people rightly are so cynical about corporate power that the one thing that they trust is the money, because at least it has George Washington on it.
At least you know that it's the great impartial referee in the sky, the U.S. government that's in charge of the paper money, and thank God for that.
What if some evil banker was running things?
But, you know, America was born in free money.
It was in private issuance.
I mean, the colonies were awash in free money.
It's strange because only recently has government usurped the whole idea of issuance of private money, and it's made a lie of by the whole precious metals and the hard currency that's going on.
I mean, that's not private money.
That's private money.
It's not government-issued money, and so, yes, the blood that flows through the American economy is money.
It's not merely blood in terms of economics.
It's blood in terms of civil liberties, and the government is desperate to keep hold of it.
That's why currency violations, you know, counterfeiting and other currency manipulations, that's why they're punished many times more than murder is punished, because the states really, really understand how important it is to control money.
Right now, so when you quote Mises talking about, you know, the gold standard, basically, or sound money, meaning money without a fractional reserve inflationary system, that that's just like having the First Amendment.
This is the, you know, at the core of people's rights to their property and that kind of thing.
I think a lot of people would be puzzled by that, I guess particularly on the left, and they would just think, come on, everybody knows the golden rule is he who has the gold makes the rules, and you have a gold standard, and that just means whoever's already the Rockefellers, they get to control everything, and that just can't be right, and after all, it's been so long since anybody was on a gold standard, it seems pretty backwards to go back to something backwards like that.
I'm sure you're familiar with these kind of arguments.
What do you say?
I understand those arguments, and I understand that the fact of the matter, it's not been a long time since we've been on a gold standard.
We're on a gold standard right now, to some degree, in terms of money must compete with gold.
Gold and silver and precious metals and commodities, just commodities in general, are what are the benchmark that money must compete with, and when money goes down, it goes down because those things go up, because commodities, roughly speaking, whether you consider corn prices or gold and silver, are a benchmark and a check on the price of money.
There's also one of the things that I consider to be one of the most heartening things in libertarianism, and I'm very, very enthusiastic, and I'm behind it 100 percent, are alternative currencies that are going on right now, and interestingly, left libertarians and left anarchists and such are actually very interested in these things, because they are absolutely, absolutely free.
I call it free market.
I'm sure that would irritate people who are on the left, but I call it free market.
They call it, you know, like stateless or whatever.
Things like bitcoins, things like, and various other alternative currencies, they are exploding, and I don't know their future.
I cannot tell people that they should get involved with this, and it's a good investment, and things like that.
I never make that kind of statement anyway.
I do know that I'm very excited by the possibility that there are ways that people are trading and dealing with each other economically, that my good friend Sam, Samuel A. Conkin III, and I was good friends with Sam when I lived in Los Angeles, and he lived in Anarcho Village, which was a little motel that, actually an apartment building that looked like a little motel, that a bunch of anarchists lived there.
It was called Anarcho Village, and it was kind of charming, and he would always talk about agorism, the idea of an underground economy, that you don't oppose the state, you avoid the state.
You just act like the state doesn't exist, and bitcoins and alternative currencies are doing that, and I see people on the left being rather enchanted by that idea, too.
You know, I've always wondered about, well, as an economist, I'm a great anti-war guy.
I don't really understand all this stuff that well.
Yeah, you.
Yeah, you.
Well, it seems like somebody's law says that bad money chases out good money, right, because everybody would rather hold on to good money, so isn't it a problem if people are creating sound alternative currencies?
Isn't there disincentive for people to use them?
They're more inclined to just save them and spend the crappy Federal Reserve notes that they have?
Well, it's interesting.
One of the recent studies, which I was really kind of surprised by on bitcoins, is that far more bitcoins are being saved than they're being spent.
When I first got into bitcoins, they were five dollars for American, and one bitcoin cost five dollars U.S., and now they're about 11 dollars U.S., and I'm talking about a period of about six months.
And there are many, many more being saved, but I don't see that as a problem, because one of the purposes of money, one of the very valid purposes of money, is not merely as a medium of exchange, but a store of value.
And so if people are deciding to use it as a store of value, good for them.
Everyone has to decide for themselves, and I'm sorry, I spend mine as soon as I get them.
That's my choice, but if other people decide to use them as a store of value, good for them.
Well, you know, I actually, so far, I have six bitcoins that have been donated to me.
You can donate bitcoins to the Scott Horton Show over at slash donate, but I don't know what to spend them on or how to.
So they're just sitting there.
That's why, that's the Horton's law.
The first one was Gresham's law.
Horton's law is, I don't know what to do with these things.
Spend them.
I mean, one of the things I do with mine is I go to, I turn them in for GCs, for gift cards.
I turn them in for Barnes and Nobles gift cards.
My husband is a computer programmer and software and hardware, so we go to Newegg, which he loves, and we turn in for gift cards for Newegg.
So you, these, all these places take bitcoins.
You turn them in for gift coins, and then you defray your, I mean, all my Christmas products this year is coming from Barnes and Noble.
A lot of them are coming from bitcoins.
That's cool.
And then now, how much are they trading for a dollar right now?
Ah, the last time I looked, and it was probably last week, it was something like $11.20 per bitcoin.
Right on.
You know what, I think when I got my first one just a couple of months ago or something, they were $9, $8 or $9 per bitcoin.
Yeah, and I got mine like six, you know, the thing, one of the things that's happening is currency is just crazy right now.
Money doesn't know where to go because it's just, and the dollar is going to collapse.
It really is.
I don't know whether it's going to, because China turns in, you know, basically redeems so much, but the dollar is going to collapse.
And if you're in Canada, 10 years ago in Canada, the Canadian dollar was $0.60 versus $1.00 US.
It is now trading above par.
It basically, and the Canadian government is trying like crazy to drive the Canadian dollar down because U.S. is our biggest trade partner, and it really is wretched for Canadian goods to cost so much vis-a-vis American dollar.
So it's like pounding with a hammer to try to get it down, and it can't because the American dollar is that weak.
Now people don't see that because they live in America, it's like a frog boiling, and you know, the water gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and you don't notice it over time, but the American dollar is going to collapse, and currencies all over the place, including bitcoins, are responding.
And what you're saying right now, a few months ago was $9, and you sat there and you did nothing, and now it's $11.
What kind of a return on an investment is that?
Right.
A pretty good one.
Yeah.
Canadian bitcoins.
I mean, that's the thing about a boiling frog in the pot, uh, that's lunch.
That's why they're boiling.
That's what they're cooking the frog for, is for eating later.
Somebody's gonna gain off of this thing.
Oh, don't, don't invite me over to your place for lunch, okay?
Oh, well, actually, I don't think I've ever had a frog leg myself.
Maybe when I was a kid or something.
Nah, I don't know.
Anyway, um, but you know, them French people, you can't trust them.
All right, now, uh, we gotta go.
Thank you so much.
You know what?
I've read probably, I don't know, at least tens and tens and tens, maybe hundreds of your articles over the last 10 years, and I have no idea why I've never interviewed you before, uh, because you're so good on everything.
But anyway, it's very nice to meet you, and very nice to have you on the show, Wendy.
Well, thank you very much for having me.
Do it again.
All right, everybody, that is the great Wendy McElroy from the Future Freedom Foundation, and, oh, I meant to ask whether she's still at the Independent Institute.
I think so.
Uh, the latest book is The Art of Being Free, although I'd suggest you type in Wendy McElroy and Amazon into your favorite brand of search engine, and check out, uh, or whatever your favorite bookstore is, and check out all the great books that she's written, because there's a whole bunch of them.
All right, good.
We'll be right back after this.
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