12/05/13 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Jacob Hornberger's on the line.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Jacob, how are you doing?
Hey, fine.
Great to be back, Scott.
Good times.
Very glad to have you here.
Tell me, what's the Future of Freedom Foundation?
Well, we're a libertarian educational foundation that was founded in 1989, and our mission is to present an uncompromising case for the libertarian philosophy, the moral case, the economic case, the philosophical case.
So what we do is we take the burning issues of the day, both in domestic policy and foreign policy, and we integrate libertarian principles to show people that there really is a practical side to libertarianism.
It's not just a philosophy.
It's a real way that we can achieve a peaceful, prosperous, free society.
Yeah.
Well, that's very well put.
And the thing of it is that you've got such great content because people like fill in the blank right for you.
Yeah.
We've got some of the greatest writers in the libertarian movement, and they're people that have captured our way of thinking in an uncompromising manner.
We have a certain flavor, and anybody that comes to our website can see that.
There's just a tone here that just sets us apart.
And part of that is just this uncompromising perspective.
I like to tell people that reform is just a real bad word for us.
We don't like the idea of reforming the welfare state or reforming the drug war or reforming the NSA or the TSA or the military-industrial complex.
We want to dismantle these things because we want a free society, and a free society necessarily presupposes the dismantling of the impediments to freedom, which all these apparatuses are.
Well, you know, you have the plumb line Sheldon Richman writing for you there, but even from your minarchist, constitutionalist perspective, Jacob, I always am reminded when I talk with you about Murray Rothbard's article, Do You Hate the State?
, where he's talking about some other libertarian and saying, I prefer a radical minarchist to a conservative anarchist.
So in other words, if you give me a utilitarian argument for why the status quo could be held onto even longer if we had anarchy or some kind of argument like that, what he wants is fire-breathing rage against injustice.
That's what libertarianism is for, is saving the people from being the victims of aggression.
That's what is the bottom line.
So even though you don't go quite as far as Sheldon on your conclusions, every time I talk to you, no matter what, on the air or off, it's always 100% energy and attention directed at the most important things all along in this whole terror war long, on every part of every war and the torture and the lies and the media and the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay, and you go out of your way to include our friend Andy Worthington, author of the Guantanamo Files, since he's the best on that issue, and of course Anthony Gregory, who's competing with Sheldon Richman for the most libertarian person who's ever existed, and the great crusading journalist, the most successful libertarian journalist in history, and for a lot of future history to come as well, our friend James Bovard, and so many others.
So, to me, and here's the other thing too, is you get along with everybody and you don't play the sectarian game and play to all the splits inside the libertarian movement.
You get along with all factions and accentuate what's best and most important from all sides too.
And I just really admire you.
I always have.
I think that FFF is just such an important libertarian institution, such a great embodiment of who we are.
It's kind of like you read these liberal smears of libertarians by the likes of Mark Ames and Michael Lind at Salon.com and this kind of thing, and you think, yeah, right, yeah, Jacob Hornberger, the fascist, whatever, dude, you don't know what you're talking about, obviously.
If FFF is what libertarianism is, then what liberals call libertarianism is just, it couldn't be further from the truth, for one thing.
Yeah, I just think this is one of the most glorious movements in history.
I mean, it ranks up there with the movement that brought us freedom of religion and freedom of the press and due process of law and these other great principles.
I mean, libertarianism is about liberty, and part of that is confronting what liberty is.
And sure, there's debates and divisions within the libertarian movement over the anarchist position, the minarchist position, but this only reflects a vibrant movement, a dynamic movement, where people are discussing, debating, arguing, and so forth.
But where we come together is we want a free society, and unlike our fellow American statists, we know we're not free.
I mean, I often say that the quote that I think best encapsulates the plight of our fellow Americans, who are not yet libertarians, is by Johann Goethe, who said, None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
And I really believe that captures the plight of the American people.
From the first grade in the public schools that their parents were forced to send them to, and to a certain extent, private schools that are licensed by the state, they have been inculcated with this notion that you live in a free country.
It is a free enterprise system.
We libertarians have broken through that indoctrination, and that's what sets us apart.
And so we say, let's examine what should, well, as a minarchist, I say, what should be the role of government in a free society?
And I think that's where we come together with the anarchists, in terms of most of what the government is doing is illegitimate.
You know, the drug war, the welfare state.
Imagine coercing people to be charitable?
I mean, it even shocks me when I see Christian support in this thing.
Killing people on a daily basis?
I mean, you know, what kind of society does that and doesn't question it and say, hey, maybe there's something wrong here?
And that's what's always attracted me to libertarianism is this great moral principle that it's wrong to do certain things, and therefore they should be stopped.
They shouldn't be gradually phased out.
They should be stopped, because they're immoral.
And so I love this movement.
I just think we're doing something really, really grand, and it's exciting that a lot of people are joining up with us, Scott.
Oh, and by the way, let me mention that you're one of these great writers that are writing for us now, too.
And, you know, Sheldon, he joined the Future Freedom Foundation full-time about a year ago.
He had been editor of the Freeman over at the Foundation for Economic Education for 15 years.
He's brought a whole new stack of hardcore, purist writers, and you're one of them, and we're very grateful for that.
Well, thanks.
I've been honored to be published in there, and upon reading the printed versions of both articles I've written for the Future Freedom so far, I've learned that, man, I really got to pare it down a little bit next time.
But, no, I'm really happy that I was able to write for the Future Freedom, and I hope to come up with some more articles for you in the future as well.
But now, so tell me this.
What if somebody, obviously, subscribing to the Future Freedom is a really big deal, and I wish people would do that.
That's fff.org slash subscribe.
But how else might people help support the Future Freedom Foundation?
Well, the only way that we can do the work we do is with donations and financial support that people give us.
And our work depends on people's support.
Right now we're involved in our end-of-year fundraising drive, and this is, in large part, the resources that we use for the coming year.
And we've got exciting plans for the coming year.
We've got a great program that we're going to be doing at the International Students for Liberty Conference, and they attract about 1,600 students.
And we're right now getting together a fantastic program that's going to be devoted to civil liberties and the war on terrorism and the national security state, because we think it's important to raise young people's vision to how important the warfare state is with respect to freedom.
And I consider the warfare state a much bigger threat than the welfare state.
And most of us as libertarians got into this because of economics.
You know, we read Mises and Hayek and Bastiat and Hazlitt and Rand, and this is all great.
But, boy, the warfare state, where they got the power to assassinate us, cart us away to a jail without due process, torture us, kill us, I mean, that's a much more direct infringement on our lives and our freedom.
And so we've got that planned.
Sheldon and I have been taking our libertarian angle on the road.
We did that last month, where we went to five college campuses and conversed with students, the Young Americans for Liberty, another group.
And then, of course, we've got our FFF Daily, which we consider one of the best daily libertarian publications on the Internet.
We got the Future of Freedom.
We got the Op-Ed program.
And we got a lot of stuff out there, because we believe in the power of ideas and how ideas can transform a society.
But that depends on financial support.
And a lot of people support us by subscribing to Future of Freedom.
But others of them give us larger support, where we need that larger support.
We need both the smaller support and the larger support.
And so we'd be very grateful for that support.
And that's what we're doing right now.
We've got a fundraising letter that's on our website every day, explaining, you know, this is what we want to do.
This is what we're trying to do.
We're trying to achieve a free society through the spread of ideas on liberty, and we need your support.
Right on.
Yeah, I sure hope people do that.
And, you know, really everybody already knows all the great stuff we've been talking all this time about what it is you're doing over there.
This is just to remind them to try to get it back to the forefront.
But, you know, you can't say Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman and Anthony Gregory and James Bovard and Wendy McElroy and words like that without making people feel all good and warm and know that those are their allies.
Those are the people who are fighting for them.
And certainly I associate myself with you.
I appreciate your associating yourself with me back more than you know in supporting this show.
And I sure am happy to try to represent what you guys are doing as much as I can.
And speaking of which, and I hope at the end maybe we can mention again about how people can donate.
But I was hoping also we could talk a little bit about a couple of your latest blog entries and if we could, especially starting with Syria and the possibility that Obama is switching back from Al Qaeda back to the Ba'athists in Syria.
It's incredible, Scott.
I mean, sometimes I think I'm living in this Mizarro land, you know, where...
It's fun in a way, right?
It's a thrill ride, I guess, you know?
But it really is.
When I read this article in the New York Times yesterday, I just cracked up.
I said, my gosh, here they are.
They're preparing the ground for us to switch back to embracing Assad, the dictator of Syria, who until just recently is a grave threat to national security and we're going to bomb the country.
Now the New York Times comes out with an article saying, well, now U.S. officials are looking at this more carefully and they're saying the jihadists are spreading throughout the Middle East, Al Qaeda is still a force to be reckoned with, it's part of the Syrian revolutionaries, and so we might have to very quietly now realign ourselves with Assad.
And I'm sitting there, I'm laughing.
I mean, it's like, wow, is this crazy or not?
And everybody acts like it's normal.
I mean, that's what's so fascinating, you know?
But my feeling is they're just preparing the American people.
It's like I said in my blog today in Orwell's 1984, where the official enemy kept switching between Eurasia and East Asia, and everybody was supposed to forget every time they switched that there had ever been a switch.
And I think that's what's happening here, because remember, Assad was our ally and friend, just like Saddam Hussein was.
I mean, you'll recall the famous torture case of Mehar Arar, the innocent man from Canada who the CIA renditioned to Syria for the purpose of torture.
Well, that means that Syria and the U.S. had a little rendition-torture partnership.
And then we turned against them.
I'm not sure exactly why.
And now we've gone full circle.
It looks like they're going to start re-embracing him and bringing him back into the imperial fold.
It's crazy, Scott.
Why do Americans put up with this?
It's like Bender the Robot said on Futurama, comedy's a lost art form.
Tragedy.
Now, that's funny.
We've been backing the suicide bomber, prisoner beheader brigades for two and a half years now, and the answer, of course, is because that's what Israel wants.
Oh, yeah, that's a major part of foreign policy for the United States.
I mean, they always have to check with Israel to see if something, if what they're going to do is permissible or not.
Right.
Not that it has to make sense for Israel, right?
Like, if you were Israel, would you prefer to have the Ba'athists or Al-Qaeda on your northern border?
You know what I mean?
To ask the question is to answer it for a reasonable person, but not when it comes to the foreign policy of either nation.
No, and you know, the thing is that we can pick out all these things that are debacles in foreign policy, just like we can in domestic policy.
The drug war, the welfare, the bailout, the out-of-control spending.
But that's one of the things I find attractive about libertarianism, is that we're trying to raise people's vision to a higher level, so that it's not just a question of, well, should we support Syria or not, should we get out of Afghanistan or not, should we invade Iraq or not, should we give foreign aid to the Egyptian dictators or not.
What we're trying to do is raise people's vision to reject this entire concept of foreign interventionism, where you just rein in the federal government, you bring all the troops home, you discharge them into the private sector, you dismantle the entire national security state apparatus that was brought into existence to fight the Cold War, which of course is over.
And so, you know, all of a sudden now you're thinking at a higher level when you start doing it.
You start saying, oh, well, this isn't just a matter of, you know, reforming this particular program or reforming that particular program.
We're talking about a wholesale reevaluation of where the state is to take in America.
And that's one of the real distinguishing characteristics.
I think everybody wants out of Afghanistan now.
Well, except for Obama, I guess, and maybe the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But, you know, most people want out of Afghanistan.
They're glad to be out of Iraq.
They don't want to go to Syria.
And that's not good enough, because we live in these lives of constant crisis, constant chaos.
Look how they're stirring up trouble over there with China now.
And that's going to be the new official enemy, I think.
The communism, the Cold War, all over again against China.
This is the way to live, Scott.
I mean, look at the Swiss.
They don't deal with this, because they don't have a government that's buttoning into the business of everybody and acting as the world's policemen.
And that's where we've got to keep aiming.
Right.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We've got to take this short break.
We'll be right back with Jacob Hornberger from the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org.
Look for the big red donate at the top of the page there.
We'll be right back.
All right, you all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jacob Hornberger, the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And, yes, they sponsor the show.
And, yes, I interviewed them all hundreds of times before they ever did, too, because, you know, that's kind of how it already was.
That's how they came to sponsor the thing.
So it's not a conflict of interest.
It's an alliance of interest.
So we're talking about the greatness of the Future Freedom Foundation and its wonderful stable of writers and why you should support it and also some of the most important issues, especially concerning American support for the revolution, as it's been called anyway, the civil war, civil warriors in Syria over the last couple of years now possibly coming to an end because, as Jacob was quoting out of the New York Times there, U.S. officials are now sounding like me and saying, hey, al-Qaeda guys, why are we backing them?
They're our only actual enemies in the world at all.
And, really, they are al-Qaeda guys.
They're not really focused on us, as Patrick Coburn was saying on the show the other day.
They're focused on killing Shiites.
The only thing we could do here possibly is direct their attention toward us.
We ought to be backing out of this hornet's nest as quietly but as quickly as possible at this point, right?
Well, yeah, and let's not forget that the reason that al-Qaeda is focused on the United States is because of what the U.S. government, the national security state, the U.S. military, the CIA has been doing in the Middle East for a long time and especially since 9-11 because, as you recall, after 9-11, they lost their official enemy, which was the Cold War, anti-communism, the Soviet Union, and so forth.
And then they went into the Middle East and they started stirring up a bunch of hornet's nests.
And then we get the terrorist attacks, not just on 9-11.
We got it in 1993 at the World Trade Center, the USS Cole, the embassies in East Africa, and every one of these things.
I mean, the Fort Hood, the Detroit, you can go on and on.
Boston, they've always said it's because of what the government is doing over there, the U.S. government.
And so, you know, it's amazing to me, Scott, after 12 years, that they're still worried about Al-Qaeda.
I thought that when they killed Osama bin Laden that was supposed to be the end of it.
And instead, they always need an official enemy because they want to keep this Cold War-era national security state in existence with its ever-growing budget, where it's causing fear among the populace.
And they know that if libertarians were to prevail and we get the empire dismantled, come home from Korea and everywhere else, Europe, that then all of a sudden there's no more anti-American terrorism.
Because that's the root of anti-American terrorism, the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and before that the sanctions in Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of children.
If you dismantle that, then all of a sudden you don't have anti-American terrorism anymore.
And, oh, what do we need this big Cold War-era apparatus all about?
And so that's what this is all about.
How can they stir up new official enemies that they can scare the American people with and then say, oh, we're here to protect you.
Oh, by the way, we have to surveil your telephone calls and your e-mails, and we have to have the power to assassinate you and your 16-year-old children like they've done before.
And this is just no way to live.
And this is why libertarians say that the warfare state is such a great threat to our freedom, our prosperity, our well-being.
Well, you know, it's just undeniable what you say there.
I mean, you look at the jihadis currently fighting in Syria and in Libya and spreading all over.
This whole generation came from the Iraq war, just the same way that bin Laden and his generation came from the Afghan war back in the 1980s.
So if they had taken the most minimalist approach after September 11th, even taking into account the whole Clinton years and all of that, but if Bush had just played the September 11th card exactly right and sent, you know, say, you know, this is a fantasy, right?
But what if he'd done what the American people actually gave him permission to do?
Hunt down, send the Delta Force guys, hunt down and kill bin Laden and then stop all the rest of it and not go occupy Mesopotamia for eight years, spreading fire in all directions.
Just think how many fewer jihadis there would be in the world right now.
You know what I mean?
They've been, when you say shaking up hornet's nest or whatever, there's almost, there's no way to overstate it really.
They caused a civil war that led to the Shiites taking Baghdad.
The first time the Shiites have controlled the Arab capital in a thousand years.
They destabilized every nation in the region.
They created a hundred more excuses for further intervention in all directions with that thing.
And just the very simple how it could have been instead is so obvious, you know?
We've said it from the very beginning.
Don't invade Afghanistan in retaliation for what happened on 9-11 because you're going to end up killing and maiming many more innocent people than were involved in those attacks.
And it's just not worth it to kill all those innocent people just to retaliate against this gang.
And, you know, we strongly advocated, you know, going after them the way they went after the attacker on the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
This was a guy named Ramzi Youssef.
And they waited him out about two or three years.
They couldn't find him, but they had Interpol and so forth.
And they ultimately found the guy in Afghanistan.
They go in there, arrest him.
They bring him back to the United States.
They put him on trial.
They convict him.
He's now spending a life term in the federal penitentiary.
And they didn't have to bomb the country.
They didn't have to kill a bunch of wedding parties and babies and children and wives in the process.
And we kept saying that's the solution.
A military solution to this gang was going to redound to the detriment of the United States.
And we've been proven right.
I mean, Afghanistan's an absolute mess.
It's run by a crooked, corrupt dictator who's really no different from any other dictator except that he's funded by the CIA with bags full of cash that are carried into his office.
New York Times reported that.
And it's violent.
You never see people going on vacation to Afghanistan or even Iraq.
You don't see congressmen going on junkets or taking their wives and children to Iraq.
They're hellholes.
And this is what U.S. interventionism has done.
This is the whole testament to the U.S. empire.
It's a negative testament.
And, yeah, you're right.
Imagine what life, how different life would have been if we had not invaded Afghanistan and killed all those people.
There wouldn't be this terrorist-producing machine where they kill five people and they produce ten more terrorists because of anger out of it.
And we would have been still, Osama bin Laden, even if they wouldn't have caught him, would have been isolated in some house where he couldn't do any more damage.
And then we could be reevaluating the whole role of the empire.
But my hunch is that they knew exactly what they were doing, Scott.
When they invaded Afghanistan and they invaded Iraq, they knew that it was going to be a perpetual terrorist-producing machine that they could then say, oh, well, you have to keep us in existence indefinitely into the future to protect you from this menace that has now replaced communism.
All right, everybody, that is the kind of libertarianism you get when you support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Please support the Future Freedom Foundation.
It's www.fff.org.
And just look for the big red donate right there at the top of the page.
It's got a new and improved website and a stable of the best writers in libertarianism, including, of course, Jacob Hornberger, who writes almost every day there.
The latest is, Will Oceania, I mean, America Reembrace Syria?
Oh, God, I love that headline.
I can't even read it without laughing.
Thank you, Jacob.
I appreciate your time again on the show and your support.
It's always an honor, Scott.
Thank you.
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