11/01/13 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you all welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Happy Friday to you.
I hope you don't have to work on the weekends unless you really like your job, in which case I hope you have to work long hours all weekend long.
Whatever.
Anyway.
Hey, guess what?
On the phone.
It's our old friend Doug Banda from the Cato Institute and Forbes magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How are you?
OK.
How about yourself?
I'm doing great.
It's very good to hear you again.
It's very good to read you.
It's always good to read.
I just love the stuff that you write.
And in fact, if it's OK, I'm going to ask you about elephants to start here, because once we start on the Saudi thing, we're not going to get a chance to talk about elephants.
But you wrote this brilliant thing that I wish everyone who cares about elephants in the world, which is I think all seven billion of us would read and translate it into whatever your local language is all about how to prevent the extinction or the near extinction.
This terrible current violent campaign against elephants to preserve this wonderful animal, the Asian and the African, too.
I guess the African more so are threatened by these poachers.
But anyway, could you please just give them the nutshell version of how to protect elephants so that they continue existing?
Well, elephants are fantastic creatures.
The problem is if you live around elephants, they're a real pain.
That is, they destroy your villages.
They destroy your crops.
And they have these fabulous tusks, which ivory is very valuable.
And it doesn't matter that it's against the law.
Lots of people, especially in Asia, want stuff made of ivory.
So there's this huge market where people will kill elephants and just take the tusks.
I mean, they care about nothing else.
And local folks, I mean, dozens of African farmers die every year trying to protect their farms from elephants.
And they're quite happy to have poachers show up and kill the things, unless you kind of infuse them with value.
And the kind of rhino runs against the grain of a lot of people I talk to, because these are kind of fantastic creatures.
I mean, they're very intelligent.
They're very kind of family-oriented.
Nevertheless, the best way to try to kind of protect them is to infuse value in them.
So the point is, if you have an ivory market, then it makes sense to kind of keep them alive.
You don't want to slaughter them all.
And what you want to do is elephants die naturally.
Some places, they're over kind of population.
They cull them.
You sell that ivory, and then you have to share those proceeds with local villagers, in a sense.
And what I tell people is, in the American experiences, we had buffalo and we had cattle.
Cattle never went extinct because they were owned.
People kind of had a reason to keep them and maintain them.
Buffalo were wiped out because there were just kind of masses of them.
Nobody could care less.
They just shot them all, left them all to die.
We have to be much more creative here, because we talk about poor countries.
They don't have effective militaries.
They don't have effective park systems.
Now, if you want to save the elephants, you've got to create some resources there and encourage especially local people to invest in them.
And right now, we're not doing that very well.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the whole public TV version of this would be, well, we just, you know, enlightened museum board of directors type liberal white people from the West should somehow, through the IMF or something, force these local governments in Africa to do as they're told and to carve out giant pieces of their land to keep them as nature preserves, because we like looking at elephants and monkeys and stuff on TV.
And so, you know, that's the end of that.
They need to create a collectively owned, a state owned area there.
And then just, that'll be it, right?
Hire soldiers to keep the poachers out or whatever and do it that way.
It sounds like what, you know, you Cato guys and your cruel, ruthless capitalism, you're saying that somebody ought to own these elephants.
And that's even worse than poachers killing them where they're supposed to be protected on public land.
Exactly.
I mean, I get responses.
I mean, people kind of say that, well, people should just stop wanting to use ivory.
Well, yeah, I understand that, but that doesn't work.
I mean, I even had one person who wrote me and said, well, the U.S. military should put its troops in to protect elephants.
And I'm trying to imagine, you know, President Obama announcing to the nation that we now are invading Zimbabwe to kind of protect the wildlife refuges.
I mean, it's just, it ain't going to happen.
I mean, we have to recognize kind of the fragility of these societies.
They're impoverished.
They're poor.
You know, local villagers have a set of incentives here, which we white international types don't really understand.
We don't live there.
We're not under those conditions.
So if you want to save the elephants, you've got to figure out something in the context of the reality where they're living.
And markets help us there.
And it doesn't matter that one may not, in theory, like markets.
Well, in this case, they'll help to keep the creatures alive.
Far better to have a lot more elephants surviving than to kind of be very pious saying, I love elephants, but we can't do this terrible thing and kind of have markets and ivory and then have them all killed.
Yeah, well, it seems to me, I mean, the economics of the black market dictate that you just can't stop it.
And it seems like except in the most extreme moral cases like human slavery, where it must be absolutely universally outlawed and that outlawing must be you must be ruthlessly enforced, ultimately enforced, you know, as much as absolutely possible to stop any human slavery ever.
You're still creating.
You're just driving up the price and giving even human slavers more reason to get involved in the thing.
Now, you can't make an exception there.
But in the case of animals, we're talking about animals here.
It's the same thing with birds.
You know, the guys on Free Talk Live did a whole thing all about exotic bird smuggling.
And how many more of these awesome, the greatest birds ever evolved on Earth are completely destroyed because of the black market trade in them.
It just makes no sense, you know.
You know, it's really awful.
I mean, I think we share the objective.
It's a question of means.
And I say, hey, the current system isn't working very well, so let's look for something else.
Yeah.
And you can make that compromise when you're talking about elephants.
Even if they are genius elephants, they're still animals, you know.
We're not talking about little kids here or something.
No, that's right.
I mean, it's a different situation.
There are certain moral imperatives of humankind that you can't kind of make exceptions with.
Well, I think in animals you can.
You can still respect them very much, but it makes sense to say what's the most effective way to try to, you know, have the most of them around.
Right.
All right.
Now, I'm going to be quiet, and you just tell everybody for ten minutes why enough of the Saudis.
We don't need them to tell us what to do, do we?
Well, yeah, it's so tiresome.
I mean, these are, you know, the Saudi royals, you know, kind of are massively rich off, you know, their own people.
They run this, you know, kind of theocracy and authoritarian state.
And then they're out there lecturing America, and it turns out they're upset.
They're mad at us.
Well, because we won't bomb the Syrians.
Oh, my.
Now we want to negotiate with the Iranians.
Oh, that's terrible.
Oh, we don't like the Egyptian military because it's killing people.
How dare we?
Well, it's extraordinary.
On the one hand, they talk, you know, cry crocodile tears on, you know, the tragedy in Syria.
It is a tragedy, but these people don't care about tragedy.
You know, they supported Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons against the Iranians.
You know, they support the Egyptian military.
They support the Bahraini, you know, Sunni monarchy that, you know, kind of cuts down protesters, so they don't care about kind of, you know, human beings.
Everything's kind of politics, and they're mad because America isn't doing what they want.
And my reaction is, well, tough.
I mean, they need us more than we need them.
I mean, if they don't sell their oil, you know, what happens to them?
You know, they don't live the good life anymore.
You know, they're desperate to sell their oil.
You know, they need to sell it more than we need to buy it.
Well, maybe they can just sell it to the Europeans or the Japanese, though.
Well, the point is it's an international marketplace.
The more they sell to them, the more somebody else will send to us.
You know, and they don't dominate.
I mean, especially with all the changes happening in the energy marketplace these days, you know, with fracking and all these other things.
You know, the Saudis are less important than ever in terms of their role in the energy marketplace.
And if they don't sell it, what are they going to do, drink it?
I mean, come on.
The good news is they need us more than they.
I mean, talk about who'd be in trouble if they don't sell it.
You know, how are they going to fund all their little trips abroad?
How are they going to try to pay off their military to protect them?
Yeah.
You know, Michael Shorter, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, says that bin Laden himself used those exact words, that even if it was him and his guys running things over there, they're still going to sell the oil.
They're just going to charge you the market price instead of whichever one you're dictating this week.
I mean, whoever controls it, the only value is if you sell it.
I mean, if you try to keep it off the market, the place falls apart.
You know, we need to recognize that.
We have them over a barrel.
They don't have us over a barrel.
Well, why does America put up with it at all?
Well, there's that illusion of oil dependence, which we kind of seem to think that we are so vulnerable when in fact we aren't.
And I think part of it is Americans just don't pay attention to the fact that it's an international marketplace.
You know, our vulnerability has fallen.
Even things like boycotts don't work.
They just want to boycott America.
Well, it's no problem.
I mean, if somebody in the Netherlands buys the oil and then sells it to an American and the tanker changes course in the ocean, I mean, they've never had that kind of dominant power.
Everybody OPEC cheats.
And now with this kind of fracking and all the new oil discoveries, South Africa, Central Asia, you know, the importance of Saudi Arabia continues to fall.
So Americans are kind of behind the times who think the Saudis have all this power, and they simply don't.
You know, I think this was in Michael Moore's movie, the Fahrenheit movie back then.
It was some kind of poll where the American people just assumed that Saudi Arabia was a modern democratic country, much like ours, because otherwise how come we're such bosom buddies with them?
You know, people just rationalize like that.
And you talk about the licentiousness of the leadership and their oppression of the regular people of Saudi Arabia.
But, you know, I have to tell you, I think that story is pretty much a black hole here in America.
I don't hear that narrative very much about what life is like for Saudis there.
And by the way, Charles Featherstone was on the air just last week, was on the show, and he was saying he did journalism out of Saudi Arabia for a while, and he said it's not a totalitarian society.
There's still a lot of freedom if it's not total freedom, whatever.
It's not quite a nightmare, but what is it, Doug?
Well, look, I mean, it's very hard to have a true totalitarian state.
I mean, what they do is it's certainly not a democratic place.
There's no kind of genuine elections.
You know, the higher you are up within society, the more opportunity you're going to have.
But, I mean, bloggers who criticize royalty get in trouble.
There are no elections.
You know, there basically is no religious freedom.
I mean, if you're a foreigner kind of worshipping at home, you know, you're probably not going to get caught.
But any kind of a gathering of people, even at a private home, Christian or otherwise, at least if you're not in a kind of a real foreign neighborhood, you can get arrested.
You know, it's a nasty place in the sense that the freedoms we would normally assume, I mean, one that's gotten a lot of attention is women driving.
You know, women are, I mean, in a very different place there in terms of what they can do, a very male-dominated society, very rigid.
So, you know, the question is, do you want to be there or in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union?
I'd say, sure, I'd be in Saudi Arabia.
The question of Saudi Arabia, frankly, and any other Gulf state, you'd much prefer to be in Kuwait or Oman or Bahrain or any of the others, because, I mean, they're all better in the sense of giving much greater space to private thought, you know, to private media, that sort of thing.
So, I mean, Saudi Arabia really doesn't share American values.
A lot of the people are very nice.
They have a real culture of hospitality.
There's a lot of things there you can appreciate individual Saudis.
But the system, you know, it's a very authoritarian monarchy.
An elite, you know, depending on how you count it, 7,000 or more princes who basically dominate.
You know, most of the money goes to them.
You know, who gets to spend it all?
I mean, a lot of Saudis aren't that well-off, because, I mean, the money doesn't get to everybody, especially the Shia minority.
So it's not the kind of place that I think we would normally celebrate as being somehow consistent with American values.
Yeah.
By the way, speaking of the Shia minority, that's basically up there in the northeast where all the oil is.
And so, is it their property?
And the government just, you know, collectivizes their property and steals all the oil out from under them?
Well, that's a good argument for that.
You know, it's declared to be national property, so it's being, you know, developed for the nation.
But, of course, who actually controls it?
Well, it's, you know, the Sunni monarchy as opposed to the Shia who live nearby.
Yeah.
And then how bad are they treated compared to, say, you know, I don't know, draw like a Jim Crow parallel.
Better or worse than that compared to the Shia?
Well, I mean, you know, they're clearly second-class, I mean, especially in terms of religious.
I mean, the division between Sunni and Shia is very sharp.
So, I mean, I hesitate calling it, you know, the uniqueness to Jim Crow where it's your skin color that causes everything.
But they clearly don't have, you know, any political influence commensurate with their status, you know, their ability to worship and have their own kind of imams, you know, and kind of their own preaching.
I mean, all of that is circumscribed because the Sunni state is very nervous about what might be preached and what, you know, they don't want to have extremism, they don't want to have people threatening them.
So, you know, all that stuff is pretty controlled.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the worst kind of tyranny, too, over people's most sincere beliefs and that kind of thing, their basic conscience, what they think in their own mind, what they believe in.
That's right, exactly.
It's horrifying.
And also, stealing their oil.
Imagine that.
You shoot at the ground, up comes some bubbling crude, and down comes the government.
Sarah Palin comes and nationalizes, takes it all away from you.
That's right.
Like they're communists or something.
Oh, that's fairly common.
You look around and you try to find the source of money.
So, you know, in the Middle East, you know, oil is the real source of wealth for these people.
So you can be sure the government's going to do its best to monopolize the control.
And they do that quite well in Saudi Arabia.
All right, now, so we got this whole, you know, you talked about the Sunni-Shia divide, just in Saudi Arabia, and obviously a big part of the American policy, at least in effect, is divide and conquer, although I don't know how good of a job they're doing at conquering.
They sure as hell divide everybody pretty well.
But it seems like right now, at least part of the establishment, because it ain't just the president, part of the establishment wants some kind of rapprochement with Iran, which seems to me like it could be a huge deal if they wanted to turn it into a real warming and normalization of relations.
And then that would really defang the entire, what I think is probably really a fake boogeyman anyway, this so-called Shiite crescent that has the Israelis crying all day, Hezbollah as backed by Syria, as backed by Iran, with a little help from Iraq on the side.
No, obviously it would be a huge reduction in tension if we could come up with some kind of a peaceful resolution with the Iranians.
You know, the potential of war there, I mean, everybody's very nervous.
The Kuwaitis, you know, it's a monarchy, but it's a relatively liberal place.
This is a place where women are in business.
I mean, you go there, you'll find Kuwaiti women who are dressed like Westerners.
I mean, this is not nearly as repressive as, say, Saudi Arabia, relatively free media, an elected parliament, assembly.
They have some political problems, but this is a place much freer.
I mean, they're very nervous about Iran.
Now, they're nervous about Iran in terms of what it could do, but they're even more nervous about the idea of war with the U.S. and Iran, that they would get drawn into something like that.
So if you could kind of diffuse those tensions, it would be huge.
And a lot of what we see, the potential threatening behavior of Iran, well, of course, we're threatening them.
I mean, if you do that, you can't be surprised if they threaten others.
Thanks, Doug.
Appreciate it.
Doug Bandow, everybody.
Bye-bye, now.
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