11/09/12 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, enough of that.
Our next guest is Anthony Gregory, my friend and research fellow at the Independent Institute.
He's also a policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation and writes regularly for LewRockwell.com and many other great libertarian reading and writing places like that.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
It's going great, Scott.
It's good to be with you.
Well, good.
I'm happy to have you here.
I appreciate you doing it.
The topic is Murray Rothbard and, more specifically, his piece, Left and Right, the Prospects for Liberty.
So the occasion is that I was talking with an acquaintance, I guess, a guest on the show, actually, who's losing his old politics, and I thought, well, basically, he's a former Republican, and I thought, well, geez, before this guy becomes a Democrat, I ought to try to head him off at the pass and at least give him a chance to read some Rothbard.
So I sent him this because, to me, this is the case for why forget what you used to think.
Now you're a libertarian.
Left and Right, the Prospects for Liberty by Murray Rothbard.
And, of course, Murray Rothbard is a very important figure to American libertarianism, if not the single most important figure in that he's really the one, isn't he, who integrated all the different major aspects of libertarian thought, Austrian school economics and natural rights theory and revisionist history and all the different things into one big modern libertarianism.
Is that about right?
Yeah, that's about right.
All right.
So tell us about this essay.
I think it's even published in sort of a mini-book format, Left and Right, the Prospects for Liberty.
First of all, when was it written, and what's the point here, man?
He wrote it in 1965 in his publication Left and Right, which was an attempt to get some of the more anti-empire leftists and maybe some of the better righties and some of the libertarians together to kind of work for the realignment that you and I have been talking about ever since.
And it's significant, and I'm glad you asked this, because 1965, we must remember, LBJ had been re-elected, and he just took power, or I guess he was elected, because he hadn't been elected before, but he was elected.
LBJ, a great society guy, a guy who escalated the Vietnam War, we really haven't had a Democrat since that we can say was unambiguously worse.
I mean, LBJ was pure evil, as libertarians would see in the Democratic Party.
So it's an interesting time for him to say, actually, we're not part of the right, it's more nuanced than this, but if anything, historically, it was the left that libertarians would have more in common with.
All right, now I think you got people's attention with that, because people really do think, and I hate it when I hear this too, it just makes me cringe, but people say this all the time, that a libertarian is just a gay Republican, or a pot-smoking Republican, that's all.
Yeah, that's not true.
A pot-smoking Republican is just a pot-smoking George W. Bush.
Well, then he's a libertarian, right?
Yeah, well, the thing is, he starts off this essay, and nothing we can say can be in a substitution for people just reading the essay.
Everyone should read the essay.
But he starts off saying, you know, conservatives are pessimistic.
They have this long-term pessimistic outlook upon humanity.
And this is what leads them to their short-term obsession with every war or showdown with communism, or new law being passed, or election in particular.
So it's another good time to reflect on this, because we just saw these conservatives get completely, put all of their emotional investment into defeating Obama, and they lost, and now they're all dejected.
And libertarians, in the 20th century, were accustomed to seeing themselves as allied with this bigger conservative movement, and so would tend to share the long-term pessimism with conservatives.
But Rothbard says you can't do that.
You have to look, you have to take a step back and look at history, not the last few decades, when he was writing back to, like, the New Deal, when the statists left really showed how bad they could be.
You've got to back up and look at history over hundreds of years, or even millennia.
And you'll notice that the norms throughout history was power, oppression, authority, you know, militarism, theocracy.
The ASEAN regime, the regime of throne and altar, where total absolutist power was the rule.
And this was not leftist.
This was right-wing, if anything.
It was a conservative institution, all governments, throughout almost all of history.
And it was the classical liberal movement, and the abolitionist movement, and to some extent the American Revolutionary Movement, and all these movements that cropped up starting in the 17th century, perhaps, and continuing into the 19th century.
That favored liberty, that favored progress, that favored the common man against the establishment, that favored liberation of minorities, that opposed colonialism and imperialism, that opposed theocracy, that supported religious liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and yes, free enterprise.
Because for the longest time, it was libertarians, or classical liberals, who saw the state and the biggest business interests as in cahoots.
To be anti-monopoly in the 19th century was to be free market.
To oppose the big corporate plutocrats in the 19th and 18th centuries was to be a free market, let's say, fair guy.
And in showing this, he shows how, you know, you go back to 19th century politics in France, and the social radicals like Proudhon and Bastiat were allies, more or less, with the classical liberals, like Bastiat, against the old established order.
And so if you look at things in this long term, what happened was the left, or liberalism, became corrupted.
It became corrupted by the attempt to use conservative means, which is state violence, and consolidated power and regimentation in the military, to achieve liberal ends.
To achieve democracy abroad, to achieve liberation and egalitarianism at home.
And so he reorients the whole political spectrum, Rothbard does.
And he says, libertarians aren't on one end of the spectrum on the right, with conservatives to our left, and then moderates, and then leftists, and then socialists.
He says that modern socialism and left liberalism are, if anything, a middle of the road movement.
Between us on one end, the libertarians, and the true conservatives, the true right-wingers on the other end.
Today, of course, things are more muddled, right?
So it's not like every republican is more fascist than every democrat.
But the true right-wing conservative orientation is pro-monarchy, pro-absolutism, pro-theocracy, pro-state, and pro-war.
And that's on one side.
And in the middle were the socialists, who attempted to use those means to achieve the ends that we share in common with the socialists, which is liberation for the common person, equality before the law, industrial progress for workers.
We share those goals, but they're the ones who sold out to the right.
And in doing so, of course, we've seen that state socialism can be just as bad as anything else.
I mean, some of the worst stuff ever.
I have my own theories for that, but Rapport doesn't go that deep into it.
But he points out all of these historical examples of why we should not think of ourselves as naturally allied with conservatism, but rather with a youthful, optimistic, idealistic hope that we see more on the left.
Yeah, you know, people say – oftentimes I think it's sort of even a conventional wisdom that, well, the parties switch sides and people – things flip back and forth and whatever.
But nobody can keep track of it, really.
But the way that you say it, I think that makes it pretty simple, right?
The liberals became very conservative, and in their conservatism, they were so statist that they made the conservatives look like liberals compared to what conservatives they were, and so that's how everything got all screwed up.
And that's why, you know, when – like you're saying, this was written at the time of LBJ, when the liberals wanted an even bigger state than the conservatives had always wanted.
So then to someone who was looking at the era through a soda straw and not understanding the larger context, but who was a libertarian at heart, they figured, of course, they had to side with the conservatives because at least, you know, they didn't want to centrally plan the entire economy and et cetera, et cetera, right?
Right.
In fact, there's a great old essay at the Independent Review by Sheldon Richman about the old right that really gets into this.
Because the old right helped define what libertarianism in the post-war era came to mean.
But the old right, which grew in reaction to FDR's New Deal and his desire to end World War II, was not just a bunch of right-wing reactionaries.
There were some kind of people we should consider conservative, who thought FDR was going too far, but they ended up allying mostly with people who, before the 1930s, were almost universally regarded as people of the left.
They were liberals.
They were even progressives.
They were even socialists.
All these people, you know, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Patterson and H.L. Mencken and Garrett Garrett and John Flynn, those were not people of the right until FDR redefined the left to being something right of the right.
And so, yeah, there is something to conserve when the government is going full-blown in the direction of total collectivism in the name of liberalism.
Heck, I would even, you know, if Pol Pot took power, I might even side with Karl Rove to stop that.
But it would take something like that, and as soon as we defeated Pol Pot, I'd be against Karl Rove.
Well, of course, Karl Rove would have supported Pol Pot.
Well, Carter and Reagan did.
No, no, but I was just trying to think of the worst example of a right-winger.
But, of course, the right-wingers and the old right weren't as bad as Karl Rove, so that's really unfair.
I mean, you had these, like, Herbert Hoover, actually, was a progressive, because he did all these things to expand government to try to stop the Depression.
They didn't work.
But he was the one who increased taxes and started the New Deal, really.
But Hoover, compared to FDR, was a classical liberal, and especially on war.
Hoover was anti-war.
So you had this coalition of conservatives of a certain type, but it was mostly liberals of the old type, and not a few radicals that opposed the New Deal.
And it really makes sense.
I mean, when you think about what libertarianism is, the ideal of libertarianism is non-aggression.
And its most ideal form is anarchism.
It's anti-statism.
It's anti-establishment.
I don't know.
I mean, I guess I do know, because I studied it when we talked about it, how we've come to be associated with the right.
But when you really think about it, there's no reason to think that libertarianism has anything to do with Mitt Romney.
He doesn't want to overthrow the established order.
We're revolutionaries.
We're not reactionaries.
Right.
In fact, the biography of our movement, Radicals for Capitalism, is not called Conservatives for Pot Smoking.
It's called Radicals for Capitalism.
That's right.
That's right.
And Pot Smoking, but still.
Sure.
Now, tell me, who's Dr. Gabriel Kolko?
Well, Gabriel Kolko, he's still alive, isn't he?
Or did he...
Yeah, yeah.
He writes for Catapunch.
I've interviewed him here and there.
Ah, here and there.
Yeah, and that's awesome.
Well, I believe he started writing in the 60s, or maybe before that.
He's a historian, typically associated with the so-called New Left, which, to understand the New Left, just real quick, you have to understand what the Old Left that the New Left was reacting to was.
And the Old Left was basically the New Deal so-called Left.
And then the New Left, in the 60s and the early 70s, I suppose, was concerned with anti-imperialism, with decentralism, with exposing the problems with the corporate state.
It was basically a mix of Marx and Henry David Thoreau.
It was basically...
Well, it's civil rights for minorities, too.
Oh, yeah, civil rights for minorities, sure.
And so the New Left was, in some ways, I'd say problematic, to say the least.
But it was like the last hurrah of real, real radical anti-war leftism in this country, unfortunately.
And Gabriel Kolko...
Because after that came Bill Clinton, right, and the just DLC-style Obama Democrats.
Right.
They might talk a game like they care about any of those things, but they sure don't act like it.
That's right.
And Gabriel Kolko was a historian.
His most famous work is probably The Triumph of Conservatism, but he's done a lot of other great work, too, where he showed that the Progressive Era was not an era...
The Progressive Era you mean 100 years ago?
Yes, the Progressive Era, approximately, let's say, from 1890 to 1920, the end of the Gilded Age up until World War I, and including World War I.
That the Progressive Era used to be characterized as this period where do-gooder, social agitators, and reformers worked hard to create laws and regulations to restrain predatory corporations, big business, and monopolies.
And what Kolko shows is that actually in the late...
And he's some kind of...
I think he might even be a Marxist.
I'm not sure.
He's Marx-influenced.
But he shows that in the late 19th century, big businesses were losing their market share.
That the economy was becoming more egalitarian because there weren't that many laws protecting big business.
The relative, not perfect, but the relative free market America had before the turn of the century was hurting big business.
It was helping the small businesses compete.
And it was the big business interests that got together, and they're the ones that supported people like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
And they're the ones who wrote a lot of the laws, and pushed through a lot of the laws, and tricked the public into thinking they opposed these laws.
When in fact, all these regulations that were passed in the Progressive Era served to consolidate and protect corporate power against competition.
And it makes sense, right?
I mean, the narrative we always hear is that we had the Progressive Era to stop corporations.
And then we had the New Deal, and then the Great Society to stop corporations.
And then we had Barack Obama for four years to stop corporations.
And then in the next breath we hear that corporate dominance is greater than ever.
Well, I'd say the quibble I have with that narrative is I don't use the preposition but, or the conjunction but.
Sorry, the conjunction.
I'd say that the problem is that we passed all those laws, and that's why there's so much corporate dominance.
That's why corporations and oligarchs seem to dominate so many industries.
And the more regulated the industry, the more dominated it is by oligarchs.
And that's not a mistake, that's the whole point.
That's the thing too, is if you wanted to find out about the process of regulatory capture, or the effects of it.
Or even, I don't know who exactly coined that phrase, but I'd be willing to bet it was a progressive who coined it.
Anybody could tell you, anybody who's a student of public policy, which people like that tend to be progressive, right?
They can tell you that, well, what happens is you have this government agency that really means well, because it is a government agency ensconced in white marble, after all.
However, what happens is, unfortunately, the evil corporations end up having the most influence over how the regulations are written and enforced.
And they end up using the regulations to protect themselves from everybody else, instead of the government protecting everybody else from them with the regulations.
And then, so all you're saying here, is that all Rothbard is saying there, is that all Kolko is saying there, is that the conservative corporations invented the regulatory state as a method of regulatory capture in the first place.
That's not too difficult.
Yeah, the progressives were conservative.
That's basically the point.
And it wasn't an accident, and it's inevitable.
You know, I said it somewhere, that the party of privilege cannot be separated from the party of power.
The minute that the most powerful people are no longer in control, they're no longer the most powerful people, and now the people in control are the most powerful people.
And that's why, whenever anyone does displace the ruling class and take over, it ends up being so bad.
Because the ruling class is the problem.
And Obama is the ruling class.
He's not just someone who means well, but he's being duped by big business.
Now, on some level, maybe he means well.
On some level, maybe those CEOs mean well, too.
But the point is, you know, you can't separate a multi-trillion dollar institution of coercion that has the ability to tax and regulate and imprison and bomb.
You can't turn that into an egalitarian institution.
I was talking with Sheldon Richman about this, and we were talking about – and I forget.
Now, this actually may be in Left and Right, the Prospects for Liberty.
But certainly, somewhere or another, I read Rothbard talking about the turnover rate in the private market and how the only real – I think it was Rothbard that wrote this.
Maybe it was just me.
The only real private monopoly that ever existed in American history was AT&T.
And that's just because it was a federal law that it was a felony to try to make a telephone company or whatever, right?
But other than that, Rothbard – and I know this is Rothbard talking – says there never really was a steel king or an auto king or a this or that king in America.
There's a much faster turnover rate of private power than of government power.
In fact, when you look at it that way, the Democratic vote to turn over who exactly are filling the chairs in the House and the Senate at any given time is like a pathetic and cruel joke of accountability and transparency and turnover rate.
Especially look at the reelection rates in the Congress.
Even at their very lowest, it's like 92% instead of 98% or something like that.
It's ridiculous when you look at it that way, at least to me, to think that the Congress and the Democratic process, that that is how people through their one man, one vote can use the Democratic power of the state to control and regulate the richest and most powerful corporations among us and that kind of thing.
It seems like without – just on its face, come on – without the Congress doing all the favors for these people, it'd be a lot easier for the rest of us to just put them out of business.
Like, for example, look at the banks that got bailed out.
They would be gone.
We wouldn't even have to hate them because they wouldn't even exist anymore.
That's absolutely right.
You know, even in a hampered, regulated corporate state that we have, it was market forces that brought down Enron and Lehman Brothers.
It was the government that bailed out AIG.
It's the government that props up the auto industry and all of these business interests.
And, of course, the modern kind of squishy left, they want to have it both ways.
They want to say they oppose the plutocrats, but then they kind of like the bailouts because then that makes them feel like the state is on the side of keeping the economy going.
I even read Matt Taibbi saying, well, of course, all reasonable people agree that you had to have the bailouts.
They just should have been structured differently.
I mean, are you kidding me?
That guy?
Talk about Stockholm syndrome.
The American people are just, they're like the Symbionese Liberation Army captains, man.
Right.
Yeah.
No.
And, you know, Occupy Wall Street, there was one unscientific poll that showed half of them supported the bailout.
And, again, why is that?
Because they get to feel like, oh, their side, the state, is better and necessary.
Right.
When really we need a breakdown.
You know, we need a, the true liberal movement is anti-bailout, anti-corporate privilege, anti-state, anti-police state, anti-war.
It supports individual liberty and free markets and peace.
Well, there you go.
Now, let me ask you something.
I talked with Walter Block, and he said that when he gives a speech, and this isn't necessarily a scientific random sample kind of a thing, I know there's a whole brand new Ron Paul revolution in the world, and I don't know what all that means to you here, but Walter Block said when he goes and gives a speech, he likes to say, you know, how many people here are libertarians?
And of you who are libertarians, how many of you came from the right, and how many of you came from the left?
And he said that, I don't know if he said almost never or something, but at least it was always more people came from the right.
I think vastly more people, and I think he did use some kind of term like almost never did they say I was a lefty, but now I'm a libertarian.
Now, I know I probably would have been some kind of lefty if I hadn't been a libertarian first, although I can't really see how that could have played out.
I don't know.
Maybe it was my destiny to believe in free will.
But anyway, I do know some left-wingers and liberals who have become libertarians, but what do you think is behind that, Anthony?
Well, I know Walter Block himself came from the left, but putting that aside, I think it's true that for most of the late 20th century, more right-wingers than left-wingers became libertarians.
That might partly be because they were more libertarian to begin with, and they were attracted to the right thinking they were on the right when they weren't ever really on the right because of the right's rhetoric.
But I'll say that the flip side of that is having a lot of libertarians who came from the right has led to a slight right-wing orientation of the libertarian movement, at least in its rhetoric.
And what defines the left and right change?
And I'm not saying that the modern left is libertarian or anything like that, but there's no reason that the libertarian movement should continue being seen as some sort of adjunct of the right.
So what do you think the effect of this recent election is going to have on that?
Because on one hand, I could see where, yep, the libertarians are not part of the right, and they didn't help support the Republican Party at all, and so that helped the Republican to lose.
So, you know, good riddance to us from their point of view and vice versa kind of thing.
On the other hand, if the Republican Party wants to survive, then that means here comes the outreach and all the pretend Ron Paul schtick coming from the Karl Roves of the world to try to get the Ron Paul fans to climb on board, you know?
Yeah, and, you know, we have a lot in common with them except on economics and personal liberties and foreign policy.
Right.
But, you know, we do share a lot of the same kind of cultural disdain for what's commonly called the cultural Marxist.
And I'm in favor, as I know you are, of all the liberation aspects of left liberalism.
But there's kind of a lot of heavy-handed authoritarianism, too, you know?
Of course.
There's that piece in Reason, did you see about – I had missed it in the New York Times originally, but the Democratic do-gooder that says, no, don't legalize weed, because then how will we force everyone into my treatment program?
Right.
No, no, the left, the statist left is not just the opposite of what we believe.
But they're really – I mean, I grew up as a hardcore anti-communist, and, you know, nothing is really worse than state leftism.
And part of it is because – this is the point that I don't think Rothbard gets into that much, maybe somewhere – but one thing that I've come to believe is because the left claims to support our liberal goals, and because those goals are less achievable through the state than, say, theocracy or oppression or patriarchy or war, taking leftism through the state, you end up having to kill more people, having to expand the state more, because you can't achieve equality through the state.
Right, and then you have to abandon all your principles that that was even what you were going for in the first place, right?
In fact, there's that great quote where Glenn Greenwald was fighting with some of the other liberals, and the other liberal is saying, look, I'm just fighting for the middle class anyway.
I don't care about poor people here or in some other country.
He's redefining the goals of Democratic Party liberalism as narrowly as he possibly can so he doesn't have to mind the slaughter of poor Pakistanis or the suicides of poor Southerners.
Well, there's that, but there's also the fact that if you actually took over the state and tried to do with it what you and I want to see, which is liberation of everybody, you're going to end up causing totalitarianism, because the conservatives understand the nature of the state better than the left.
The nature of the state is the nightstick and the atom bomb.
The state is good at cracking skulls and beating people into submission.
That's what it's always been about, and when you try to turn that into a caretaker, you actually advance totalitarianism even more, because it's still beating people, it's still cracking skulls and subjugating people and going to war, but you've given it an impossible task to achieve.
The state is the exact opposite of liberalism, and so to try to use the state to achieve liberalism, you end up with gulags.
All right, everybody, that is the great Anthony Gregory.
He's a research fellow at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org and, of course, is also associated with the Future Freedom Foundation, lourockwell.com, and writes for a great many other things and places.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Oh, and once again, the essay we're trying to recommend to you here, read, read, read.
It's called Left and Right, the Prospects for Liberty by Murray Rothbard, written in 1965.
You can find it, of course, at lourockwell.com and at Mises.org, your favorite search engine.
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