02/23/15 – Jeffrey Tucker – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
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And Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Right now, we go to our friend Jeffrey Tucker from Liberty.me.
Welcome back to the show.
Jeff, how are you?
Oh, no.
Hey, it's good.
Internet connection problem, it says.
No, no, no.
I got...
You hear me now?
Yeah, I can hear you fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just switched connections.
It's amazing.
I was on a bad Wi-Fi connection.
Right before I got on, I just quickly switched to another one, and here we are.
It didn't even kick you off, huh?
It just kind of said...
For a second.
Yeah, it's like sort of leaping from one building to the other, while dangerously risking falling to the ground, and suddenly you grab on just to the ledge and pull yourself up.
That's what just happened.
All that just happened just now.
Yeah, and Skype magically kept the call going.
I'll give them credit when they deserve it.
It does sound better than a phone call for all the technical problems, and that was a technical success right there.
That was something they deserve.
Yeah, that felt good.
That felt very, very cool, and the timing was just exquisite.
Yes, it was right on time, right when I needed you.
I actually was the bad timing there.
If I hadn't caught myself by seeing the visual warning from Skype and just gone on, it would have been fine.
Oh, man.
What did you think when you saw that warning?
Did you start...
Did you worry?
I worried.
I thought, oh, no.
Is it me, or is it him?
Who's got the problem with the broadband?
There's some sense of uncertainty of the future, and then everything's just locked into place.
All happened in a split second.
That's very exciting.
That's just how it's supposed to be.
I am talking to you from the headquarters of the Foundation for Economic Education today, right now.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I am there.
Very soon.
Yeah.
We're just kind of doing a roundup of what's going on around here, and it's been a lot of fun, so I excused myself from a staff meeting.
I know that nobody ever wants to leave a staff meeting, ever.
I imagine they have a lot of books I would like to read there.
Well, it's kind of a high-tech-y office.
We've sort of been radically digitized.
This is not the old fee mansion.
This is not your grandfather's fee anymore.
This is a new sort of tech-y cubicle office.
I kind of like it.
Hey, Jeff.
Yeah?
You have an announcement.
Make the announcement.
Yeah?
Jeff Tucker has an announcement coming up for you.
Tell him, Jeff.
Well, now you're intimidating me.
No, the announcement is that you and I are going to do a thing together, and we're going to do it every month without fail, and I'm going to learn from you.
I'm going to sit at your feet so you can explain to me how the world works, and I'm excited about that.
Well, yeah.
Hopefully, there's going to be some vice versa there, too, I think.
I was planning to outsource my brain to you.
You object to that?
Well, you know, yeah, a little.
I'll tell you what we'll do.
You say stuff, and I'll say stuff, and it'll be great.
The show is going to be called Eye on the Empire.
Now, we hadn't even really had a chance to talk about this yet.
This is our first time to talk about it.
I explained this, I guess, to Mike, but I don't know if I've even had a chance to tell you why I wanted to name it that, Jeff, is because that was the name of Alan Bach's column at Antiwar.com.
Yeah.
This is a great man.
Yeah.
He was really great.
Did you know him, Miles?
Did you know him?
Yeah, I knew him well.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I assumed that you guys were butts.
Yeah, we were butts.
Yeah, yeah.
He's my hero.
He's the first guy I interviewed when I started the interview show and about his column at Antiwar.com.
I learned so much from him over the years.
When I lived out in LA, we got to be friends and hang out a couple times, which I feel very grateful for.
Anyway, I thought, well, we should name the show Eye on the Empire.
I think that's a really nice idea.
We're going to invite people to join us and to do questions, and we're just going to have fun, and we're going to learn a lot of stuff and get a lot of viewers, I think, and a lot of Q&A, a lot of interaction.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
A live show and on video and just the two of us with anybody who wants to join us.
Well, and I think that there's a lot of room here, too, for ...
My mind is kind of reeling at what all you know.
I have no idea what all you know, but I know it's a whole hell of a lot.
Hopefully, I can ...
Well, we kind of know different areas, right?
I mean, my specialization is in economics and peer-to-peer technology and digital real estate and that sort of thing.
But also libertarian principle and libertarian understanding and libertarian history and a lot of that stuff, too.
That's certainly where I lack.
I always have just outsourced my libertarianism to Anthony Gregory.
Whatever he says, I'm pretty much for that.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
I know.
I'm more or less still the same way.
In fact, I was just digging through the archives of Fiat.
Anthony Gregory had this amazing article on slavery, and I just learned so much from reading that.
Yeah, yeah.
He's just brilliant.
So good.
Yeah, but ...
So I'm for all this anarchism.
I just am obsessed on a narrower kind of path most of the time.
But I love learning about it.
I love talking about it.
And I think it'll be really great to have much more libertarianism mixed in with my foreign policy stuff.
Well, and there's also a kind of an interesting intellectual history to talk about, because you're also interested in the history of American foreign policy, dating back to, say, the post-war period up to the present.
And so I have a lot of knowledge about how libertarians were responding during the Cold War to various events.
During the 90s after the Cold War ended, I personally remember many features of the first Iraq War and how libertarians were responding to that.
And so there's a very interesting political intellectual history to discuss here, too.
One thing that you find out more and more in this foreign policy realm, at least from what I can tell, is it really does, there's so many analogies in the past, right?
There's hardly ever a new situation.
People always think that it's new, you know?
Like, oh my God, here's some foreign dictator we have to deal with.
Oh, here's an oppressed people somewhere crying out for American intervention or whatever.
But actually, in fact, it's just almost like a repeated situation again and again, you know?
But people act as if it's fresh and it's new, and this generation's being uniquely called upon to save the world, you know?
But we've always been there before.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, even though we're a very small minority, us libertarians, all this terrible crisis is always, as Connelisa Rice and Rahm Emanuel would say, a great opportunity for us.
I mean, I couldn't tell you, I'm sure you get this all the time, too, but I couldn't tell you how many times I've had people tell me, well, you know, I was a liberal or a leftist or some kind of thing for a long time, but just, you libertarians, you antiwar.com types are the ones who, through all of this, have kept your head and, you know, didn't deviate on Libya, didn't screw it up on supporting this or that revolution that, you know, some so-called peace groups decided to get on the bandwagon.
And so I think, you know, as we switch from Republicans to Democrats in power, especially in the presidency, and then back again, we are in the position of basically catching everybody who's washing out of these liberal and conservative movements because they just can't stand the hypocrisy and the totalitarianism.
But who's standing there?
Jeff Tucker's good on everything, still, after all this time, that kind of thing.
And so, you know, it seems like, especially, I mean, my view is using foreign policy, but through economics and through so many other topics, we're the ones who are good on stuff across the board in a way that is good for bringing in new people.
They can pick up on one thing, the IRS here or a war there, and then understand the kind of unified field theory of liberty that we have to present.
Well, everybody else gets distracted by the changing power structures, you know?
I mean, so, you know, if we get a Republican president next time around, you can just guarantee that suddenly all the Democrats and the left are going to be, you know, amazing on issues of civil liberties and foreign policy and all that kind of stuff.
But then, you know, if they get their guy in charge again, suddenly it's going to be like a repeat of the Obama era, where it's just, you know, see no evil, just look the other way and let the guy do what he wants.
And the reverse is true for the Republicans, you know?
The Republicans have been severely critical of Obama, but all that will go away if they get their guy in office.
So it gets tedious after a while, because it's not really about principles.
It's really about just backing their guy no matter what.
It's nationalism in the end.
But then again, you know, I think everything is just, I don't know if it's accelerating or maybe, I don't know, I didn't live through the Vietnam era or whatever.
Maybe the cynicism and the dishonesty and the blatantness of it all was just as bad then.
But it seems like it's getting worse and to our advantage in that sense.
But now the guitars and drums mean that we've got to take this break, Jeff.
But hang tight right there.
We'll be right back, y'all, with Jeff Tucker right after this.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commodity discs.com or check them out on Facebook at slash commodity discs.
And thanks.
Hey guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
The Scott Horton Show.
Well, it's one of my shows.
The Scott Horton Show.
On the line is Jeffrey Tucker from liberty.me.
And we're talking about our new show.
The premiere is tomorrow night at nine o'clock Eastern Time, eight o'clock Texas time.
So that'd be six o'clock dinner time if you live out in California.
And the show is going to be called Eye on the Empire.
And it's going to be live at liberty.me.
Now I'm sorry, hard breaks interrupt there.
So before we get back to the show and to liberty.me and these other things, I think you were going to say something about the explosive growth of libertarianism in this day and age.
Oh, gosh, I don't know.
I mean, yeah, but just just that we seem to be the only ones that keep keep our heads in the midst of all this partisan nonsense, you know, I'm so tired of this, this back and forth handing the reins to this party, handing the reins to that party, and then everybody just sort of shutting up, you know, and in a predictable, tedious way.
So I hope that no matter who gets elected next time around, that there'll be at least some of us out there making a consistent case for for peace and trade and for for globalization of the right sort and not the wrong sort.
I think it's an opportunity for us.
I agree with you.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So what are we going to talk about?
We're going to talk about tomorrow night.
I want to talk about the prospect of the prospect of shutting out of the Department of Homeland Security, which is all over the news today, too, you know, that's well, you know, we were just talking about a couple of things from the chat room.
First of all, a short anecdote.
Jeff's a great guy.
I remember meeting him 20 years ago at a Ludwig von Mises event in which a professor of mine was speaking, sitting around the boardroom table as the talk was about to start.
And this dandy looking guy in a seersucker suit sits down next to me and pulls out a patch pouch of Redman chew and offers me some.
I couldn't turn Jeff Tucker down.
So that's a great memory from Fitzy G in the chat room there.
I like that.
That is cute.
I'm still doing the Redman.
That's for sure.
There you go.
So also in the chat room earlier, got in a big argument accidentally about Homeland Security because I was saying, I think it's actually within the realm of possibility that this thing is going to be broken up and spun off.
And then the answer was, you're crazy.
That couldn't possibly be true.
And you know it, buddy.
And so I'm not sure.
I kind of think so.
But what do you think?
Yeah, I think that's a pretty intense response.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, my God, you know, this furlough, of course, is laughable.
It's just, you know, a small, small fraction of the employees.
And, you know, I guess it's 15 percent, but we all we all know that, you know, most of the employees of the Department of Homeland Security don't do anything anyway.
So it's not going to make any difference, you know, either direction, plus or plus or minus.
So that doesn't matter.
But yeah, I mean, it's possible that it could get broken up into various into various divisions at some point in the future.
So my thinking is that the agencies that have been absorbed into this new department would rather be at least back under their old departments, right, back under the Justice Department or back under Treasury.
And because the agencies haven't really ceased to exist except for they redid the immigration control.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I think a lot of the old fiefdoms are still there, but just subsumed.
So I don't think that Liberty is going to win out here.
But I was thinking that possibly ambition could be made to counteract ambition.
And all these different pigs might stab each other in the back and throw each other all under the bus and demand to be spun off for their own sake, you know?
Yeah.
And whoever's in charge will will fob it off with some great increase in efficiency or some some nonsense like that.
So no matter what happens, it's not going to be good for Liberty, but it will be proclaimed to be wonderful for good government and, you know, a vast improvement in our lives or whatever.
You know, I do a lot of flying, Scott, around the country and out of the country.
And I've noticed a big change in the TSA over the last several years, you know, not nearly as intense, not nearly as threatening as they used to be, but in a strange way that you get the sense that it's become so routine that not even the employees of the TSA take their jobs seriously anymore.
You know, they're there to have fun.
And also, I think my general sense of the TSA employees are tired of being treated as enemies by by passengers.
So they're actually just in their own personal interest of reaching out to people and changing their ways in a way.
I don't know if that's good or bad for security.
I just noticed that it's a good example to me how bureaucracies don't really work.
You know, they've never really been about security.
It's been more about harassing Americans.
But but but I think that the average, you know, worker in the TSA is just sort of sort of fed up with with with the whole business.
You should never forget that bureaucrats themselves face, in a way, the worst cost of bureaucracy there is.
Yeah, they have terrible bosses and terrible co-workers and hate the systems that they work in.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, you got to figure a lot of those people, they really want to do security work and do their part, they think, to keep dangerous people off of these planes.
But they don't have the freedom within their job to even actually do that.
No, they end up just confiscating people's hair gel and, you know, bottles of liquor all the time.
It's pretty, pretty boring and pretty terrible and has nothing to do with security.
And they know this.
I mean, every time I get my hands checked for for bomb making materials, like do I have hand me a bomb hands?
You know, there's an element of absurdity about the entire charade, you know, and like everybody's just kind of like winking at each other and we're all rolling our eyes and we're like, why are we having to do this?
Well, because the machine, you know, selected you randomly to check your hands for bomb making material.
And the people who are doing the checking and holding you and all the rest of it, it's all it's all become just a little bit, a little bit silly.
And everybody knows this.
Yeah.
And that goes for really the rest of the state, too.
I think they got a real crisis of legitimacy going on here.
But now.
So yeah.
And it starts at the core of the of the public sector bureaucracy.
They they're as demoralized as anybody else.
Yeah.
Well, and at least there's that, you know, if we can't get rid of a little grateful and shodden fruit kind of thing.
Not that I'd be like, who really wants to work for the post office?
You know, who really wants to work for the TSA?
And I try to remember that, too.
You know, when I'm, you know, in the thick of these things, most of these people, this is sort of the best opportunities that they had, you know, thanks to a very truncated and and statist regulated market.
There aren't the kind of job opportunities there would be in a genuinely free society.
And a lot of these people just choosing this line of work because it's the best that they could find.
Right.
All right.
Now, I've got a few minutes left.
Let's get back to talking about business here.
What's Liberty dot me, Jeff Tucker?
Oh, hey, you know, the last month or so has just been gangbusters.
We didn't even open up a year ago.
I guess we opened up our doors in May and we had a kind of first iteration of the site.
We finally took it out of data, you know, a number or something like that.
But it's really a very beautiful and engaging social platform, publications, network and content delivery service.
We call it the global liberty community because everything on the site is about human liberty in an applied and practical way.
We're not just talking about politics, like who you should vote for or whatever, but really the things you can do in your life to avoid the central plan and live a freer life.
There are so many of them.
We have so many guides to that subject that you can download about using Bitcoin, avoiding the cops, moving to freer places away from tyranny.
You know, I have a guide on hacking your house and getting rid of government controls and regulations, you know, finding medical care in the age of Obamacare.
These are all the kinds of topics we cover.
But what unites us as a community is just this love of freedom and a determination to find it, even in an age of despotism.
So it's a wonderful community.
You can just join it up.
You know, we give you 30 days for free.
And after that, I think we're doing a five bucks per month kind of thing.
Unless they stop by scotthorton.org and click that link, then it's four.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's good.
They should do that.
Or use promo code Scott.
And in the last month, we've signed up so many new members and you can just see them rolling in.
We put it on the front page who's joining and every time you join, you get a smattering of people that will just, you know, sort of welcome you and friend you.
And it's a it's a way to kind of build a network.
And it's not just about building a network.
It's about building liberty, as far as I'm concerned.
That's why we started the the institution in the first place.
And things are just working out beautifully.
I'm absolutely thrilled with it.
But we also offer a lot of live shows that I'm just really happy that our show is going to be one of the featured shows.
Yeah, I'm really excited about this thing.
It's a great opportunity for me.
And I hope it'll yeah, well, you will expand your audience and, you know, you'll expand ours.
I mean, it's it's a it's a win win no matter what.
Yeah.
And I guess in the I had it here right in front of me, but I was looking at the wrong tab.
I meant to mention that your column is called Beautiful Anarchy there at Liberty.
I mean, Tucker dot Liberty dot me if people don't have to be members to read your articles, right?
No, no.
I think so.
It's open to everybody.
Hey, did you read my piece about Fifty Shades of Gray?
No, I did not.
Oh, man.
You got to click on Tucker dot Liberty dot me and and have a look at my article on Fifty Shades.
I think I think you'll really like it.
OK.
I actually don't know anything about that movie other than it's like Skinamax kind of something.
Yeah, I know.
That's what everybody thinks.
But actually, it's it's an it's an allegory for how the state tries to control our lives.
Oh, well, I like naked girls, too.
So two for in a movie like that, at least read an article about it.
All right.
Thank you very much, Jeff.
I'll see you tomorrow night at Liberty dot me.
Thanks so much, my friend.
Thank you.
That's Jeff Tucker.
Find him at Amazon and at Tucker dot Liberty dot me.
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