12/19/12 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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All right, and so with all of that said, our guest on the show today is my good friend, your good friend, Jim Bovard, the heroic Jim Bovard, the public policy hooligan.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
I really appreciate that.
Well, I appreciate you being here, and I really appreciate this book.
That's the name of it, Public Policy Hooligan, your new memoir.
Now, so for folks listening who aren't too familiar with Jim, I'm going to tell them about you here for a second.
Jim is the master of the investigative op-ed.
He does hard news, but he whoops ass in his hard news, and so they can't run it on just the front page.
They've got to sneak it in to the editorial section.
But he has spent the last 30-something years just absolutely smashing the reputations of pretty much each and every federal agency, and every horrible thing that they've done has been documented and has been skewered by Jim in his op-eds, his writings for the Wall Street Journal and for Playboy and for all over the place, and, of course, his many great books, The Farm Fiasco, Fair Trade Fraud, Shakedown, Lost Rights, Freedom in Chains, Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy.
And I've got to say, I want you all to read this memoir, but my very favorite is Attention Deficit Democracy.
I'm sorry, Jim, because I'm not sure if that's the one that you get the best kickback from.
Well, you know, I could make some comments on Palgrave, but I'll try and take the high road.
Yeah, you do that.
You should do that.
No, man, but that's the one that I want the things written in that book inside people's brains really bad.
So that's the one I really, really want them to read.
And then was there anything else I was supposed to tell them about you?
Yeah, that you're with the Future Freedom Foundation, of course, at FFF.org.
So far, the book, Public Policy Hooligan, this memoir, it's at Amazon.com for Kindle.
And what I learned upon getting this book here was that I don't need a Kindle.
You can get a Kindle for PC program for free, and then you can read the whole thing on your PC or on your Mac.
And it's only not very much money.
So go to Amazon.com.
Hopefully, Jim, I believe you said you will be coming out with a hardback that I can add to the collection on my shelf here where I got my dead trees.
Yeah, that's my plan.
I'm not sure the timing on that, but it'll probably be a while.
But the jokes are pretty good now, so, you know, in the e-book version.
All right, good deal.
So there you have it, Jim Bovar, the most important libertarian journalist of our time.
And his great memoir, Public Policy Hooligan, The Life and Times of Jim Bovar.
So, Jim, tell us again about that first-hand job.
You know, Scott, I knew I could count on you for a high-toned interview.
Well, it wasn't necessarily the first, but, you know, it's fun to write about public policy, but it's also fun to kind of spice things up a little bit and just kind of talk about some of the other, you know, adventures in my life.
And let's see, as far as the first one mentioned in the book, that was a lady I dated down in my city.
I was raised in the mountains outside of a small southern town known as Helltown, formerly known as Helltown, and then raised on actually a government research station, a beef cattle station that got shut down.
So my family moved down to Blacksburg, Virginia, where Virginia Tech is.
And for my senior year in high school, I was there.
And the women there were a little bit different.
One of my most memorable encounters was a woman.
She was a frizzy-haired, artsy type.
She was quite aggressive, bisexual.
But the thing that really stuck in my mind is it seemed like she learned everything she knew about hand jobs from yanking the starter cords on gasoline lawnmowers.
Oh!
And it was a little tricky thing because she insisted she was an expert, so she wouldn't take any suggestions from the peanut gallery.
So she was forever tagged in my memory as the lawnmower lady.
Ouch, yeah.
Well, you know, I figured I'm giving you basically a metaphorical hand job here with that introduction.
You might as well start the interview on that note.
All right, that's good.
Well, you know, sometimes metaphorical is much easier.
Yeah, well, I hope it didn't hurt that bad.
Well, no, I'm not going to make a new nickname for you.
So now early life lessons.
I've got a question for you.
I really, Jim, I wish I had taken notes while I was reading the thing, but I was just having a good time reading the damn thing.
So I had to go back and jot down some notes about stuff.
But one of the things that I wondered about was what you think of Jeff Rickenback's theory that libertarians are born and that really it sort of seems like you're building the case for the causal determinism that led to your belief in free will or something like that.
But I just wonder whether maybe you just came out kicking and screaming libertarian in the first place.
Don't know.
I mean, I was I was raised in a conservative household.
My father was a scout master.
I spent some years in Boy Scouts.
There was there was a lot of heavy handed authority where I was raised in the schools and elsewhere.
And that had a shaping influence in the sense that I recoiled from it because it seemed like I was surrounded by it seemed like there was a lot of BS around.
And I just and once my mind started to finally percolate a little bit late, it just was very hard to reconcile.
Well, you know, why does this make any sense?
And as my doubts grew, my my faith in the need for personal independence rose.
So that was part of it.
I mean, there were you know, there were lots of twists and turns on the way.
That makes a lot of sense, that power itself in order to get away with what they're getting away with all the time.
It's soaked in dishonesty.
That's the part that you object to in the first place.
Wait a minute.
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, yeah.
And not only that, but why is it that some people should have authority over me?
I mean, to have arbitrary power over me.
And I was seeing that more and more with each year that I age.
And it was just like it wasn't you know, it was a lot of encounters in many different directions.
I think I was fairly cheerful by nature, but there was an acid rip of doubt from so many of the different folks.
I kind of was one of the first jobs I had was in the working when I was 15 in the peach orchard one summer, two summers, actually.
And my foreman and my boss was a retired 20 year Army drill sergeant.
And he was always, always, always in a bad mood.
Always cussing and would never explain how to do something because he preferred to cuss you up and down afterwards.
And he always talked like he had a mouthful of peach pits.
And he was always like, Red, you get the hell over there.
And I'd say, what?
He'd say, what the hell is wrong with you, Red?
You get over there right now.
So, you know, spending a couple of summers listening to that part of my life, you know, this doesn't seem good.
It certainly persuaded me on the value of being self-employed.
Right.
And, yeah, you really, it sounds like from the time you were college age, at least, you had a few like kind of temp jobs.
Oh, man, I need to type up some things, make a little scratch on the side.
But you've really been writing for a living almost this whole time, huh?
Well, from the late 70s, 1970s onwards, you know, I was able to pay the cost of living by writing basically as of, I guess, by my mid-20s.
But before that, there were all kinds of different jobs.
And which, you know, which gave some good experiences and made for a few good jokes decades afterwards.
And now, so I notice also, well, there's so much to go over in here.
I guess it seems like, you know, what always struck me, even back in the 90s, long before I knew you, I think I read Feeling Your Pain back in the Clinton years, or one of those.
Anyway, that one is a chance.
And it's really engaging stuff.
You know, there are some people, well, like me, I can make paragraphs exist if I try hard or whatever.
But there are people who you can tell have a natural gift for writing.
You're really talented at writing and keeping it interesting and all that.
But what's fun to read in your book is just how hard you work to refine your craft, too.
You never started off with, hey, I'm a pretty good writer, so good.
You basically had to reinvent your style and go back over and throw out what you've been doing and kind of start over again quite a few times in order to get where you really wanted to be, right?
Yeah, there's a wonderful old English saying that easy writing is cursed hard reading.
And I thought I was a pretty good writer when I was 18 or 19, but I wasn't.
And part of what really woke me up was someone gave me a copy of the University of Chicago Great Books List.
And I was fascinated by the philosophers, by the historians, and maybe the other writers.
And that was what kick-started my mind because before that I'd been interested in a little bit of sports, interested in making money, interested in sex.
But aside from that, there wasn't much percolating.
But once I got that list, it was like all of a sudden it was one writer after another.
I was fascinated by the ideas and there was a passion that came from that.
And that also had a big effect in shaping how I developed as a writer because I was interested in ideas before I was interested in writing.
And so it took a little while before I decided to become a writer.
But by the time I did, I knew I wanted to write about ideas and not simply pulp fiction.
Not that I had any talent for pulp fiction, which is one of the other things which I discovered.
Because as you said, the first few years I was doing this, there were a number of different literary modes which I tried.
Well, that didn't work.
This didn't work.
Oh, that failed.
All right, well, what else do we have here?
Well, it's good, too, that you didn't listen to the people.
Oh, my God.
You mentioned there's at least, I guess, one girlfriend in the book who just said, Jim, give it up.
You're just not going to be a successful writer.
Get a job, man.
I'm glad to know that you didn't listen to her.
It seems like, you know, people can only take so much rejection sometimes.
You might could have quit.
Yeah, well, she was actually someone who I lived with off and on for several years.
A very sharp lady.
I mean, good hearted lady.
But, you know, she just but that was the same thing I heard from my freshman English professors at Virginia Tech.
It's the same thing going to high school.
Hell, I mean, there were a few papers which showed some ability, but it was like, you know, barking, you know, barking at the moon as far as having it recognized or nourished.
So and it wasn't until I got out on my own.
I was like and a key was was to find much better writers to read as models and say, OK, this is how they do it.
This is, you know, this is how to structure an argument.
This is how to make your ideas far more precise.
So.
So.
And now you you quote a lot of Henry David Thoreau in here.
Obviously, a lot of this is trolling three year old journals and figuring out, you know, what's the important stuff to bring up.
And apparently he really meant a lot to you when you were younger.
He had a big influence for a while.
I was Thoreau, Emerson and helped inspire me to move to Boston where I lived for about eight, nine months.
But the more I lived in Boston, it's kind of like, you know, gee, you know, kind of it was not the most pleasant environment.
Let's put it like that.
I was actually there for the great storm of 1978 and actually actually at the time that storm hit, I was literally down to my last dollar.
And then someone told me that the Harvard Business School was hiring snow shovelers.
So I paid four bucks an hour.
So I hustled over there and worked for 43 hours over the next two days and caught up on rent and had some spare change.
But the thing that was was really good about that was I was able to add a line to my resume about how I'd done path breaking work at the Harvard Business School.
Say what about the Harvard Business School?
I missed the last part.
Go on, Scott.
Come on.
I missed the last part, man.
All right.
The thing that was really good about I was listening, I just couldn't hear you.
All right.
And OK, the thing that was good about that snow shoveling gig was that I was able to add a line to the resume that I've done path breaking work at the Harvard Business School.
I got OK.
Well, you know, it sounded better the first time.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, no.
It's totally my fault.
I got the window open and now it's windy.
It wasn't windy, but now it is in the trees.
Well, you got wind from me, so hopefully it balances out.
Well, the next time you start going on and on, I'll get up and go close the window.
All right.
Well, I will.
I will.
I will try to tighten my answer.
No, I'm just kidding.
So listen, this is completely an aside and it's stupid, but I'm curious about this and you bring it up in the book.
There's this thing in the 70s where for some reason I never understood.
Gerald Ford, in his debate with Jimmy Carter, said that the Soviet Union doesn't dominate Eastern Europe and certainly not Poland.
And I wondered, is he really that stupid or was there an explanation to like a thing that he was doing?
Or was the president United States really not understand that the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe?
Or what was going on there anyway?
You know, with Gerald Ford, it was always difficult to tell just how stupid he was.
I mean, because there were so many things which he had said and done that were just mind boggling.
I had actually volunteered for the local college Republicans and I was doing some passing out some leaflets and stuff like that.
And a bunch of us went to a bar that night to watch that debate.
And I was sitting there and we'd put away a few pizzas and several pitches of beer.
And I was sitting there and the first time that Ford said that, I was sitting there thinking, oh, shit, I have got to stop drinking.
Because I thought I just heard Ford say, and then he said again, and I said, oh, shit, Ford is drunker than me.
It was appalling.
But, I mean, presidents have said really dumb things.
George W. Bush said a few things that were almost as stupid.
Ronald Reagan had a few things that were jaw dropping.
So, I mean, it's not unusual for presidents to sound like idiots.
Ford had some explanation afterwards that the Polish people had the spirit of freedom or that they were unbound.
But Ford sounded like an idiot.
And Ford did a lot of other things that he sounded like an idiot on.
This is part of the whole book, really, Jim, is that all these people you say, they're all smart, but they don't know anything.
They're not wise at all.
And they're not even interested in the stuff that they're dictating to people either.
It's all just simply, you know, a bunch of job holders, I guess, like Mencken would have called them, just getting paid in order to shift resources this way or that, but not because it's the right thing ever.
Yeah, and that's one thing that struck me in the times where I've interviewed people or run them in social events.
You just try and tap them to see what their knowledge is, and often it's utterly shallow.
And they don't know even the newspaper headlines.
And there's such a lack of intellectual curiosity among so many of the policymakers.
That's part of the reason why the policies don't get better, because they don't learn from mistakes because they don't care.
Yeah, they're not even interested at all.
This is something that was really hard for me to learn.
I thought, well, even I know all empires fall.
So if these guys are building an empire, maybe the birchers are right, that they're doing it on purpose.
I mean, when I was younger, I didn't really realize that.
No, this is the reason all empires fall, because they're all run by a bunch of Richard Perls and dingbats and goofballs, and they ruin everything.
Well, but keep in mind, someone like Richard Perl makes out very well, you know, during the time that the empire is being built up and expanded.
And it's the same with so many of these politicians and government officials who have been at the helm when the policies were horrible and did lasting damage.
But, you know, they were hailed as saviors.
I mean, just look back 10 years ago and look at all the praise that was heaped on the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government agencies that helped wreck the housing market.
Right.
Well, yeah, and even Bob Woodward wrote that book about Alan Greenspan.
He's the maestro, just because we're at the height of a bubble at the time.
That's all.
Yeah, well, and Bob Woodward has made a career out of burnishing Washington's boots.
Yeah, certainly.
All right, so now let me see what else I wanted to talk to you about here.
Oh, this is the thing that comes across, too, and there's something different about this.
I don't know if you can really break it down and help people understand, help me understand.
Why is it that in government, whether we're talking about, and let's use as an example, something seemingly innocuous to most people like HUD or something like that, it just seems that there's no accountability for any decision.
We all know the phrase, well, close enough for government work.
But why is that?
Well, basically because the government agencies and the politicians acquire so much power that it's like a heat shield.
It's also very difficult to find out what the agency has actually done.
I've always been amused at the folks that talk about how we have self-government because people can find out what the government does and the government's going to respect what people believe and all that.
But every now and then that happens, not often.
And so much of the work I've done has been fighting government agencies to find out, okay, where are the actual numbers?
What actually happened here?
Show me the documents.
I've used the Freedom of Information Act many times and often gotten screwed with it, which happens to most people who use it, I think, because the Freedom of Information Act offers a facade of openness that doesn't really exist.
Yeah, it seems like some of your best scoops in the book, you had to break in there and take it.
Those were some of the stories that were in the book, and there were some other stories.
Yeah, I mean, there were some times where I knew an agency was lying, and I could just find a way to slip inside and get the actual documents.
All right, so now talk to me a bit about your trips to the communist nations of Eastern Europe and what you learned there.
And specifically, the part that I like the best, of course, is about what the American establishment was saying about the countries that you were in actually documenting the truth about, and just what a discrepancy there was there, you know?
Well, starting in late 1986, I did several trips behind the Iron Curtain, basically trying to expose how the Eastern European countries were in a state of near economic collapse.
At that point, the Washington Post, New Republic, and others were talking about Hungary, almost as if it was a model of a successful mixed economy.
But that was the furthest thing from the truth.
I mean, if you look at the hard numbers there, and if you go there and look around and don't look at just the private taxi drivers, you could see that things were getting so much worse year by year.
But the country that was really striking was Romania.
In 1987, I took a trip on the Orient Express, the communist version, from Budapest to Bucharest, Romania.
And it was an eerie trip, because as soon as you crossed into Romania, it was like you were going back into an old Dracula movie, because the train stopped at a border station in Transylvania.
It was around midnight.
There were these heavy clouds across the landscape.
The military guards kept circling the train with German shepherds.
The car I was in got searched four times by the customs officials.
But part of the reason that the Romanian government survived was because it was deluged with money from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, I think.
But the World Bank was especially keen on Romania and thought it was one of the most successful developing countries in the world.
Robert McNamara, the bank president, who was later a Washington Post board member, cited Romania to vindicate his faith in the financial morality of socialist countries.
The same Bob McNamara that killed five million people, right, in order to prevent the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, supposedly?
Yeah, I'm not sure about five million, but it was a lot.
It was a huge number.
Yeah, they say somewhere between three and five, because nobody even knows.
So many people died that nobody even knows how many died.
Yes.
There was nobody left to count them.
Yeah, and it was just fascinating to me to see the attitude that the World Bank had.
I mean, one of the things that the World Bank was praising, the communist Romanian government, for its human resource policies.
And part of that was that the bank was, was that the Ceausescu regime was prohibiting all abortions and also compelling women from, like, age 18 to 40 to get a gynecological exam every month to make sure that they were not stealing babies from the state.
Because there was a saying that Ceausescu had, that the fetus is a socialist property of the whole society.
Those who refuse to have children are deserters.
And there was a degradation of women there that was utterly appalling.
And yet the World Bank kept funding these rascals.
Well, and then, sort of like that housing bubble we were just talking about, they just cite the effect of their infusions of massive amounts of cash as proof of the economic prosperity and say, look, it's working.
Yes, I mean, this has been a huge bait-and-switch element for judging foreign aid going back 60 years.
A huge amount of money dumped on a country, and it creates a bubble of prosperity, and the government says this is proof that we've turned this nation around.
But we've seen that with the QE 1, 2, and 3 here.
It doesn't work.
And, in fact, you did groundbreaking work on the fact that it really, in the poorest countries especially, it oftentimes causes famines because it completely destroys their local markets and distribution networks of their own food that they grow.
Yes, there was a program that was called Food for Peace in which the U.S. would dump its agricultural surpluses on third-world countries and wreck their farming markets that was known to have horrendous effect on the self-sufficiency in those nations.
And yet there were all these levels of lies in AID and elsewhere to try and cover up the damage that they'd done.
Now, back to the World Bank, really United States, bailouts of the Soviet Union all the time and that kind of thing.
Would you, is it a choice or is it a false choice between the brinksmanship of Ronald Reagan versus the detente of Nixon and Ford, and wouldn't it be better to go ahead and ship them some grain in order to have some peaceful coexistence until they finally unwind anyway?
Was there a third way?
Well, yeah, I mean, a third way would have been simply to focus on maximizing American prosperity and keeping up enough military strength to deter an attack, but not thinking that the U.S. had to dominate the world in order to be safe.
Yeah, it always seemed to me like, oh, geez, I guess if that's our choice is we go with shipping them grain, but why not just hands-off?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, it was a horrible policy because at the same time the U.S. was shipping subsidized grain to these nations, those nations were busy building up their own military.
So it was the same as giving them resources to better target their missiles on American cities.
Yeah, and their paramilitary and secret police agencies against their own people too.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, part of what exasperated me the most about the foreign aid policies, especially the World Bank was giving U.S. tax dollars to these East Bloc regimes, was there were very powerful movements, grassroot movements, trying to overthrow and resist those governments.
But the World Bank and indirectly the U.S. government was siding with the oppressors, and that was such an obscenity to me.
Yeah.
Well, of course, there are so many examples.
In fact, the trade and farm policy, it's really that too.
And you know what?
Before people don't click that dial off when you hear trade and farm policy because the whole thing about Jim Bovard here is he makes it interesting, and what's interesting is it's outrageous.
It's mad.
If it wasn't the constant threat of Israel getting us into a war with Iran or something, this would be the crisis, for God's sake, man.
I mean, talk about the farms, for example, and the U.S. government's agricultural policies, Jim.
Well, this is something which I started to follow shortly after I arrived in Washington, and part of the reason why what struck me on this is I'd been interested in free market economics from the time I was mid-teen years, and then reading more.
There were some really good books, really good articles in the 1930s at the time that Roosevelt carried out the takeover of the agricultural policy, and some folks understood it very clearly, but with each passing decade, it seemed like people had less recognition of the B.S. underlying the government programs.
And so what I tried to do was walk people through the mechanisms by which the government was ruling and ruining agriculture because, for instance, in 1983, the government did something called the PIC program, payment in kind, which compensated farmers for shutting down 77 million acres of farmland.
Seventy-seven million.
That was equal to shutting down the entire states of Ohio, Indiana, and half of Illinois.
And the main reason that there was a surplus which justified the shutdown was because the government price supports were so much higher than market prices.
It was an obvious contradiction, and yet people in Washington pretend like, well, you know, there's an emergency.
We have to act.
But it's like nobody wanted to look at how the government caused the problem the government justified seizing almost unlimited power over the farms for.
It's like a Joseph Heller novel, right?
Yes.
It's a long series of catch-22s, and part of what fascinated me was just to see how they did the same foolish policies decade after decade.
You had the same thing in trade policy.
You had the same thing in job training.
Same in housing.
It's just like as long as the politicians have power and they have the mind to spend, the program is a success for them, and you cannot trust them to change it.
All right.
Now, okay, so basically what you describe in your book with all these agencies and their interventions and every aspect, and hopefully we can talk a little bit more about foreign trade, too, and all that, but it seems like this quasi-mixed economy, whatever the hell they call it, especially since it's a permanent state of war, I think it's fair to go ahead and call it some kind of fascism.
I don't know if you ever use that term exactly, but the question arises, even in whatever you want to call it, type mercantilist system sort of thing that we have going on here, is who's zooming who, and whether it's really the state in the driver's seat here or whether this is all just what business wants, is for government to do all this intervention.
Really all the horrible, stupid things that they do are all just because somebody's business got smart and figured out how to get the government to do what they wanted.
Well, yeah, fascism is a term which I avoid using.
I can understand why the people would use it.
It's certainly just a mixed-up authoritarian mess.
It's interesting as far as the corporations.
There are so many corporations like Archer Daniels Midland, which have expanded and benefited massively from ethanol and some of the other government subsidies.
But the flip side is, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, you had Cargill, which I think at that point was the world's largest grain trader, which was an outspoken opponent of the U.S. export subsidies for grains because the folks at Cargill would explain, well, the government did this deal and it messed up this market, and they gave all the subsidies for wheat, which is now making it more difficult to export corn or vice versa.
And so they were very good sources on some cases, which I was digging into.
And there are lots of principled – well, principled might be the wrong word here, but there are lots of businesses that recognize how the government is dragging the economy to ruin.
Yeah, but it seems like so often there's this false dichotomy, too, where it's just government versus business, and business is always just trying to resist regulation.
And that doesn't seem quite right either.
You know, that's obvious BS.
And it was obvious BS in Franklin Roosevelt's first term when he had all the price controls that were dictated by the dominant businesses.
It seems like even Archer Daniels Midland types would end up screwing themselves over in the same kind of way that their competition that you're citing there is complaining, and that they would actually finally figure out that their business would be more stable if they went with market forces than trying to rig things, because don't they end up just making things worse for themselves, just like a housing bubble?
They get a grain bubble and this, that, and the other thing?
I don't think it's worked out that way for Archer Daniels because they have enough of a – for a long time they had enough of a lock in the market that they were able to do very well.
It didn't really matter that much what the price of corn was.
As long as there was an ethanol mandate, they were fat and happy.
But there are some businesses in some industries which have recognized that.
However, even if a lesson is learned, 10 years later it's forgotten.
It's like the same as in foreign policy.
Well, you know, Vietnam, we have to learn a lesson in Vietnam.
Well, this war is different.
So, you know.
All right, and now on fair trade, I always thought that was a hippie thing that says we promise that we're paying third world peasants a fair price for the coffee we're getting from them.
Fair trade means an entirely different thing in your book.
Right, well, it's very interesting how that term has been – how that term has evolved because, yeah, in the last 15 years, fair trade coffee, fair trade this, you know, folks who think that they're going to be doing good by paying an above average price, which by paying a price that's above market is going to have all these moral benefits.
It almost never does.
But going back to the late 1800s, the term fair trade was often used to justify trade barriers against foreigners who might have lower labor costs or might have lower taxes or might have certain natural resources because American politicians would always insist that it wasn't fair to make American businesses compete with foreigners who had any advantage.
And so the goal was to, you know, basically block almost all imports.
Yeah, it almost seems like going through the examples in the book, you talk about what you discovered in investigating, you know, who gets what trade policies.
It's almost like democracy itself just means the legalization of corruption, that they just – people get – you could just come up – if someone just made up a ridiculous tariff on a ridiculous thing out of midair, it couldn't compete with what you found in, you know, going through the files in the basement of the Trade Commission.
Yeah, of the Commerce Department or there was, you know, or of the secret tariff document, which I took possession of in Switzerland.
There were so many different trade barriers.
And at the same time, you'd have these politicians talking about how the U.S. was being victimized by its free trade at the same time that they were screwing American consumers every chance they got.
For instance, back in the late 1980s, we had import quotas, which dictated that each American could consume the equivalent of only two foreign peanuts per year, one pound of foreign cheese per year, and one teaspoon of foreign ice cream per year.
And if you look at those hard numbers, it's like, oh, free trade, except for the things that we import.
So I wonder, when you – and I think you really are alone.
You said, you know, ideas first, right, and the rest comes from that.
And then your idea is, you know, honesty and fairness and human freedom and that kind of thing.
And then you go trying to hold them to account.
But so you're almost alone, right?
I've never heard of anybody who, like you, goes sitting around taking on each and every department of the government like this, from the post office to all of the rest of them, HUD and the Fed in your books, and the Pentagon and the presidents and everybody.
And so I just wonder whether you think sometimes it's like the Twilight Zone over there or something, when you have – in every aspect of government policy, it comes off like some madness out of a skit somewhere, you know?
Not every aspect.
I mean, there are some agencies that are not as bad as others.
I guess that's a loaded question.
So who does a good job there?
Well, the General Accounting Office has done a good job in the past of exposing government abuses.
That's their only job is calling out the other departments, right?
Right, right.
You know, but, you know, I give them credit, you know.
Folks say the government doesn't work.
Hey, GAO works.
Okay, there you go.
That's fair.
I agree with that, too.
That's my favorite agency.
They have no power other than auditing the other agencies.
Yeah, no, there's – you know, there are some agencies that don't do much harm.
Some of the government research isn't that harmful.
So – but the thing that's happened is that the agencies that have gotten the biggest budget and the most power are usually those that do the most harm, like HUD or agriculture or, you know, defense.
And so those are the ones which I've tended to focus on.
I haven't done that much on defense, but, you know, next war I might make up for that.
Well, you know, terrorism and tyranny is a good one.
All right, and now you know what, too?
I think maybe the first I ever read of you back then was – it would have been the late 90s probably, but it was WACO stuff.
Oh, God, yeah.
WACO, of course, was very important to me.
And you did a lot of really groundbreaking work.
And, in fact, I don't know if that's the right word for it.
I know at least one example right in the book.
Something that you wrote about Ruby Ridge caused the investigation to be reopened, right?
Well, I mean, I don't know if that was the case, but there was a lawyer out in – one of the key lawyers out in Idaho said that that was a big part of the being reopened.
But it was fun to try to walk people through why the government was lying through its teeth on both WACO and Ruby Ridge.
And it was difficult to find editors with a gumption to run those pieces.
But I found a few, and there was a piece I did for the Wall Street Journal entitled No Accountability to the FBI, which was attacked by FBI Director Louis Freeh.
And it was fun to go back and forth with Freeh because it was like, ooh, okay, well, this is – yeah, I guess someone read that story.
Yeah, they were taking you seriously for sure and with good reason because there are liars and murderers.
At first they pretty much got away with it, right?
As you say in the book, the American people agreed the next day after the fire, and they saw the fire and the house burned down at WACO.
They said, yeah, they supported a tank assault on the house that just burned down full of people.
Yeah, I was appalled.
I was – I haven't forgotten watching that final day off and on.
I was racing to finish up Lost Rights, and the TV in the house I was living was in a different area.
But every now and then I'd take a break and just pace back and forth in front of the TV, watching it, listening to idiot commentators and the idiot FBI spokesman smoking away and just cursing like Huck Finn's father.
Yeah, I remember that day very well as well.
But here's the thing, though.
Your journalism – and there's few reporters.
I mean, really, I talk to a lot of reporters.
I read a lot of reports.
But there are few that really just cast such a shadow on the other ones for what lousy hacks they are, just what little lapdogs they are, when they're nowhere to be found on this stuff for fear of not being invited to some cocktail party or some crap.
Well, you know, sometimes it might be that there are reporters who have the gumption to write about it, but their editors block their stories.
I mean, I've heard of that happening many times with folks I've talked to.
But it just seems that at higher levels, the exposés of horrendous government wrongdoing have often been blocked.
We saw that a lot with the torture scandal.
It was amazing how slow the information was to come out in the U.S. about the torture abuses that occurred after 9-11.
Yeah, and then wasn't it amazing how – it seemed to me like there were a couple of days where there was sort of a question.
Are we going to be universally revolted and angered about Abu Ghraib, or are we going to split this pro-Republican and pro-Democrat?
And it was decided we're going to split this pro-Republican and pro-Democrat and go ahead and have a 50-50 argument about whether we like torture or not.
Well, not only that, but many of the Democratic critics were very feeble or almost apologetic, or it was like they had their tail between their legs.
I was amazed that John Kerry did not make an issue of that in the 2004 presidential race, because I was following that closely in May of 2004 when the Seymour Hersh story came out, when the memo started to leak out.
And once you had the culmination of the Hersh story, the photos, and the John Yoo memo, and there was a Defense Department memo as well, I said, okay, this is it.
I mean, you have the photographic evidence, you have the policy, and you've got the documentary proof.
And yet, the issue pretty much vanished for a long time.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that was the thing, right?
You could either impeach them and put them in prison, or you can argue for it and say it was the right thing to do because they're terrorists and whatever.
And so the people were convinced by the state and the media to double down on Bush's bet.
Well, and part of their frustration on that was that the Pentagon withheld most of the most damning photographs, and the American public has probably not seen the worst of those photographs yet.
And yet, since they withheld the evidence, they were able to spin the story.
And I was appalled that the Democrats or that there was not far more push, because if we'd seen the evidence, it would have been impossible for them to deny that torture occurred.
Yeah.
And now, you know, I wonder, you're very critical of Larry Potts and some of the other FBI agents that you name in the book for their involvement in Ruby Ridge and Waco, but these were the very same guys that told us that there is no John Doe, too, and that McVeigh didn't have a bunch of neo-Nazi friends helping him out that day, and it was just him and his friend that was two states away at the time.
And I wonder, I don't think I read all of the stuff that you wrote in Late Nights, and I wonder whether you ever covered that.
I mean, this is Larry Potts that was feeding us this line of crap, Jim.
No, I haven't covered that.
I was surprised at how the government raced to execute Timothy McVeigh.
It's frustrating that we have not learned a lot more about that case, because there are a lot of things that raise eyebrows at a minimum there.
Well, and as you say in the book, too, it was treated as kind of a retroactive justification for Waco, as though David Koresh had done the Oklahoma bombing, him and his people, somehow.
Yeah, that was something which came out very clearly.
Congress finally got off its butt and held hearings about Waco in July of 1995, and the Clinton administration put on a full-court press to try to block those hearings and then try to smear them even before the hearings started.
They were saying that it would be very bad, you know, that if we have hearings it might persuade someone else to blow up another government building.
President Clinton had a comment basically portraying the folks who were very critical of the thing.
He was saying it was a part of a Republican war on police, which was a complete fraud, because the GOP spent most of the time bootlicking the police, and yet there was a preemptive attempt to demonize any critics of what the government did on Waco.
Well, and they even won Ryder somewhere towards you with the Oklahoma bombing somehow.
Oh, God.
Yeah, I mean, that was a book review in the Los Angeles Times.
And there was a talk show I did.
I've forgotten who it was.
It was a national talk show in 1996, and I was talking a bit about Waco or whatever, and some guy calls up and says, ìBovar guys sound like a warmed-over version of Timothy McVeigh.
î And so, you know, I made a point to add that to my blurb list.
Yeah, well, you know, people will tell themselves whatever they got to, you know.
It's sad, and it's consistently frustrating to me that people don't have a better bullshit radar when it comes to claims by politicians and government officials, because that's almost the root of the problem, that people are gullible.
Some of them have chosen to be gullible.
I mean, some of them have got the brains to know better.
But it is as if they choose not to add two to two together.
And so they just go, ìYeah, okay.
All right.
Fine.
Well, yeah, the president says that.
î I mean, I don't understand why people are so deferential to a government that has done them such harm.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's like you say in ìAttention Deficit Democracyî.
It's the ìBattering Citizen Syndromeî, right?
Got nowhere else to turn, so say you're sorry for getting beaten up.
Well, people could turn to independence and freedom and self-responsibility, but instead they seem to think that the next politician or the next president is going to save them.
It ain't going to happen.
It's just going to be a whole new set of lies and horrors and, you know, different wrenches thrown at the national economy.
But I've been amazed there's not been far more backlash against Washington.
Yeah, me too.
You know, I don't know if you saw this one from just this week where there's this town in Arkansas where they've declared this sort of pseudo-martial law, and it's just a small thing, and I'm sure maybe some local judge will stop them in a few weeks for a little while or something.
But anyway, you know, it's not the biggest emergency, but it just goes to show that the police right now are so militarized and are so full of themselves as, you know, thinking of themselves in paramilitary terms, clearly using their armored personnel carriers to break people's houses down on a regular basis now on a drug warrant.
That kind of thing.
You watch it on the Kansas City SWAT on the Arts and Entertainment Network, for crying out loud.
They just show it all day.
They'll attach a cable and pull the guy's house down, you know, before even knocking on the door.
And I just forgot where I was going with that, but something about how, yeah, isn't it amazing how it's gone this far?
Well, did you think that something was going to be different, that people could somehow make a change?
Or how could we make a change, do you think?
I mean, to be honest, I thought that once people got more of the information what the government was doing, that there would be a backlash against government abuses.
And every now and then there's been a little bit of a backlash, or you've had different politicians come in who've promised to stop doing the same abuses.
But basically things have consistently gotten worse over the last 30 years as far as what the government does, as far as the rights it violates, the amount of money it seizes and wastes.
So, you know, it's getting more difficult to be optimistic.
Yeah.
Well, and this is the thing, you know, reading through your book, ultimately it's a great, it's a fun and very interesting story of your life and your life's work.
But really it's the story of an unending list of innocent victims of arbitrary power.
It's horrible what goes on.
Yeah, and it's very rare for a victim to get compensation from the government.
And even if he does get compensation, it's from taxpayers, not from the government officials that did him wrong.
It's striking to me that the government has sovereign immunity for almost all of its crimes.
And, you know, there's this theory of democracy that people pull in the leash, but, you know, that's a leash that hasn't worked for a very long time.
And so many people would, instead of wanting to pull in the leash, would prefer to jump on the bandwagon and see the government, you know, bash the bad guys.
I mean, if it's a SWAT team busting their neighbor's house or, you know, busting some foreign country or some group here that's unpopular.
I mean, it's sad to see that herd mentality.
And, you know, maybe that's one of the themes, I guess, my hostility to herd stampede.
That was something which struck me when I was in the Boy Scouts at times.
You know, there's all these people marching in the same direction.
Damn, I don't want to be here.
Yeah, it does feel a bit weird.
And, you know, see, this is what I guess where I was starting with that whole thing.
Maybe you're just born a libertarian because I'm pretty sure I'm like you where, you know, in high school, for example, oh, you can't wear a hat and you can't wear that shirt and, you know, this, that, and the other kind of arbitrary, ridiculous rules.
And you could get in real trouble for just this stupid thing, out of proportion, whatever.
And I always kind of valued that as a 10th grader and thought, well, good.
All the other kids here, too, are learning how despicable state power is, just like me.
And we're going to all this whole generation is going to grow hate in the cops and want to be free.
But, no, it was just me.
I was the only one in the whole hallway thinking that, you know.
Wow.
That's a great antidote.
Yeah, I guess I didn't have that much faith in a mass reaction against the absurdity, but there have been plenty of times.
Well, for instance, I was hoping that Waco and Ruby Ridge would be the most important public education lessons of the 1990s, but they weren't.
They were basically brushed aside.
The government was able to cover up a lot of their worst abuses or else it will just kind of, you know, have a slow grip, grip, grip of the facts coming out, which prevent a much stronger backlash.
Yeah, it's just amazing that so few people have spoken up in defense of their own rights and liberties.
On the other hand, though, things are kind of changing, don't you think, with the social networking and whatever?
Is it just making it seem like it?
Oh, let's see.
I could take a glance at Facebook and see the 10 most recent posts and like, yeah.
You know, it's good that it's easier for people who are pro-freedom to connect with each other.
That's a huge plus, but I don't see that many people who are pro-freedom.
But maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
Well, yeah, no, I mean, I guess it depends on whether we're talking raw numbers or whether we're talking percentages, right?
Sure, sure.
No, I mean, for instance, it was great that Ron Paul motivated so many young people to do more reading about freedom and the Federal Reserve and foreign policy.
I mean, that was a huge plus, and that's something which could pay dividends many years down the road.
But, again, I'm just surprised that we've had three presidents in a row who are pathological liars, and yet you still have all these people who get very upset if you don't stand up to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Yeah.
All right, Jim.
Well, everybody, check out his books, especially the latest, Jim Bovard, Public Policy Hooligan.
It's on Kindle at Amazon.com.
Check out his website, jimbovard.com, and especially also makes a great Christmas present, Attention Deficit Democracy, and all the rest.
A great new book and a great collection of documentation, journalism on the abuse of Americans' liberty by this government.
Thank you so much, Jim.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
Everybody, that is the heroic Jim Bovard, again, at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org, and his own website, jimbovard.com.
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