02/26/16 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And guess what?
I got Sheldon Richman on the line.
He's about as libertarian as a man can be.
Trust me.
His website is SheldonRichman.com.
Of course, regular contributor at AntiWar.com as well.
And I love this article.
We're going to be running it, I guess, tomorrow or something.
I don't know.
Anyway, it's great.
TGIF, the goal is freedom.
That's what that stands for.
You knew that, right?
TGIF, the goal is freedom at SheldonRichman.com.
The Constitution and the Standing Army.
Welcome back to the show.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Good to be with you.
Good.
And so, listen, I love this thing.
You say it just like I say it.
For some reason here, the Constitution was basically just the Patriot Act of 1787 based on the pseudo 9-11 attack excuse of Daniel Shea's rebellion.
Yeah.
I hedged it a little bit calling it a proto-Patriot Act.
But, no, it's true.
What I was trying to point out there was that national security was a concern of the elite, the power elite of those days.
Because libertarians had this idea that national security didn't become sort of this dominating matter until after World War II, right, with Truman's 1947 National Security Act, which set up the CIA and did a lot of bad things.
But national security was on the minds of the rulers, the leaders from the very start.
An empire was on their minds as well.
First of all, they wanted to create an empire, a North American empire, which meant clearing out the Indian nations, which were regarded as nations.
So they had to conquer them first, kill them, move them, remove them one way or another, basically treat them the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians.
So that's why I think you can liken the Constitution to a Patriot Act because they said, look, if we're going to make ourselves secure and expand both geographically and commercially, we're going to need an independent source of revenue for the national government.
In other words, the power to tax, which the central government, such as it was under the Articles of Confederation, did not have, and the power to raise an army directly rather than having to go to the states and ask them to mobilize the militia.
Because a lot of times the states would say both to the requisitions for both money and men for the militia, they'd say, no, thanks, we're busy.
We've got other things to do.
The check's in the mail.
One way or another, they made an excuse.
So Madison and Hamilton and others said, enough of this.
The national government needs an independent way to raise an army and raise money, and that's why they came up with the Constitution.
The anti-federalists complained.
They made all kinds of arguments against it, some of them very good, but they lost.
They lost as far as the writing of the Constitution goes.
Luckily, in terms of policy, there were enough anti-federalist types, they were called Republicans back then, strangely, to resist the major initiatives of the federalists, so the federalists did not get their way, at least not fully.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
The famous Federalist Paper No.
10 by Madison about the mischief of factions and how you have to have separations of powers and checks and balances and all these things, and this is why we need this Constitution.
The way it's taught, and I guess maybe it's legit both ways.
I don't know.
I'll let you say what you think about it.
I don't really know, but the way it was taught to me was, you know, this is because they're trying to prevent, I guess, what we would think of as, you know, a right-wing, top-down fascist tyranny where any part of the government becomes so powerful that they just end up lording it over everyone, a standing army takes over, something like that, the leader of it, something like that, and yet it also, if you read it carefully, it seems to really be warning about revolution from below and saying that the way to prevent this mischief that anybody would ever try to take our power away from us that we already have would be to make sure that we don't have to rely on weak local state militias, like in the case of Daniel Shea's rebellion.
We had to throw together this ad hoc thing, but we need a permanent standing force to be able to put the people down, the whites, not just the Indians, but the whites who just finished winning the revolution for us.
Yeah, you know, Madison was not happy with the states.
He didn't think the states were cooperative.
He was in the confederation congress, and he was not happy that the states could delay sending money or resist or not call up the militia if the people in the federal government wanted it.
And so the Constitution was designed to reign in the states.
People sometimes think it was designed to protect the states, but it wasn't at all.
Madison actually wanted a provision of the Constitution that would let the Congress strike down, the Congress now, strike down state laws.
Now, he didn't get that.
He also tried to get something like that into the Bill of Rights, but he failed on that one too.
So you're right.
It really, the anti-federalists were right in that the Constitution turned what was a confederation into a, this is the term they used, into a consolidated government.
And so that's why it was always ironic that the people that wanted a consolidated government seized the name federalists and called themselves federalists because that was a good word.
People liked the idea of federalism.
They liked the idea of a confederation.
So in a great act of public relations, the federalists grabbed that name and then called the other team the anti-federalists, although they were the true federalists.
So it was one of those things.
Just the same way the socialists stole liberal from the libertarians.
Yeah, it was one of those things.
And I like the comment by Elbridge Gurry of Massachusetts at the ratifying convention in Massachusetts who was an anti-federalist.
He said we have these strange terms, federalists and anti-federalists.
He says they're not very descriptive.
They're not accurate.
What we really ought to be talking about are ratificationists and anti-ratificationists.
But he said for short, let's call them the rats and the anti-rats.
That's funny.
Well, it was Patrick Henry that said, I smell a rat when it came to this thing.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, so one more thing here before the break then to address and more on the other side of it.
But the way they teach this in school too is they had to have a new national, a new general government.
Otherwise there are constant trade wars between the states.
You had to have this constitution was a free trade agreement with teeth to make sure that we wouldn't have that problem.
So you're a libertarian.
You must support that.
Well, I think we talked about this the last time.
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist, I think it's 12, but I always get the number mixed up, says that if we could get this constitution ratified, we could triple the tariffs.
In other words, there was sort of a race to the bottom.
The states were maintaining low tariffs against European goods but did not have tariffs against each other.
That's a myth.
So there was a free trade zone.
The only exception to this was and it was very rare.
One state might charge a duty on European goods coming from another state, but that was not very common and that's not what the contemporary argument you're talking about refers to.
People want us to believe that every state maintained trade barriers to every other state.
That's false.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I'm going, you know, my devil's advocate position here basically is my community college, you know, civics education, basically, you know, kicking up trying to remember how it was that they taught it, why this is all so necessary.
And that is the bottom line in all public education is that, listen, everything that the government ever did, it was because they had to.
Okay.
And even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff, as Ned Flanders might say.
Well, the Anti-Federalists were, you know, and they differed.
They didn't all agree on everything, but they were the libertarians of the day, which makes it odd that libertarian constitutionals take the position they do.
They have to ignore the Anti-Federalists.
The Anti-Federalists were against concentrated power.
They weren't radical Democrats.
They didn't want the state legislatures to be able to redistribute property, although some of that stuff was going on, so some people favored it.
But certainly the activists, the most vocal Anti-Federalists, the ones that wrote their own Anti-Federalist papers, were basically libertarians.
They distrusted faraway power.
And speaking of Federalist 10, see, the wisdom of the time came from Montesquieu, that a republic needed to be a small territory, because otherwise you couldn't keep your eye on the government.
It was far away, and an elite would dominate it, and you wouldn't be able to watch it.
So Madison comes along and says, no, that's not true.
We can set up checks and balances so we can have a big extended republic.
He was the outlier, but he won.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back with the great Sheldon Richman right after this.
The Constitution and the Standing Army.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, and that's why I'm talking with Sheldon Richman here on the show.
The goal is freedom.
The Constitution and the Standing Army is this great piece here.
We'll be running it on AntiWar.com, I guess, tomorrow.
There we go.
All right.
So, yeah, man, the Standing Army.
Now, that's really the thing of it.
You mentioned the National Security Act of 1947.
And you know what?
I really should have this memorized or on a post-it note somewhere or something.
I could swear the language is something like, and the CIA shall also do other things from time to time as authorized by the President, which means that they can break any law, murder anyone, do anything they want, basically.
And we can have that same kind of thing baked right into the Constitution, it seems like.
And again, back to my junior college education here, Sheldon.
Well, you know, some people were strict constructionists.
But the broad constructionists won out, and they said, after all, it does say general welfare right there.
And after all, it implies that they can take your land as long as they pay you for it.
And it implies that the government has the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus as long as there's a rebellion going on or whatever it is.
And so there are all these giant loopholes in the Constitution that they can drive Mack trucks straight through.
And, you know, one of them, I guess, it's not even cute language, it just says right there, in Article I, Section 8, they can raise taxes, and they can raise and support armies, and they can declare wars and use those armies for killing people with.
And that's basically all the loophole you need.
National Security Act of 1947 notwithstanding.
Yeah, the powers are very, very broad, and they're not few and defined.
Madison says that in the Federalist Papers, but don't forget this.
The Federalist Papers were propaganda to sell the Constitution to the ratifying conventions.
There was opposition to the Constitution when it was proposed.
And Madison and Hamilton and John Jay set out, mainly in New York, to argue on behalf of ratification.
So it's propaganda.
It was sales.
I read that – I first read the Federalist Papers in a journalism class in college as great examples of persuasive rhetoric.
That's how they were seen.
The powers are very, very broad contrary to Madison.
In fact, my piece quotes three different Federalist Papers, two by Hamilton, one by Madison, on how the powers of setting up an army and a navy, which they called a peace establishment, by the way, had to be unlimited.
They used the term, has to be unlimited, because we don't know what eventualities or what contingencies we're going to face.
So of course the powers have to be unlimited.
It's right there.
So I don't understand this argument that the powers were few and defined, or that the government could only do what was expressly allowed by the Constitution.
That's just nonsense.
Well, and there's really nothing in the Constitution that would limit the war power to defensive war either.
As long as Congress declares it, go ahead and invade whoever you want, right?
Legally speaking.
Sure.
Right.
Look, you have the preamble that says the common defense, but the general welfare is a very broad term.
So you could easily justify foreign intervention on behalf of the general welfare.
And like I said, they believed they were surrounded by hostile powers who hated our republicanism and were going to crush us.
That was Spain and England, and they believed Spain and England were helping the Indians, which I guess they were, and we wanted the Indians' land.
So what are we to do?
We're surrounded by hostility.
What are we to do?
This is what Madison and Hamilton were arguing, and they said the confederation is too weak because the individual state militias aren't equal to the task.
And the taxing power at the state level wasn't enough because the feds couldn't get their hands on enough money.
So they needed these independent powers to tax and raise armies and regulate trade and push trade and negotiate with foreign powers and to acquire territory and other kinds of concessions.
And this sounds like a pretty big government to me.
And of course, they used that power within a generation to invade and conquer Mexico, and then that really caused the Civil War.
The results of the Mexican War ended up causing the Civil War and the Northern Invasion of the South just one generation after that.
So, yeah, I guess it worked out great.
Well, before we get to that, we have the War of 1812.
They wanted to conquer Canada.
All right, yeah, yeah.
It was not the first time they tried to conquer Canada.
And don't forget, who's president when the War of 1812 is launched?
They called it Mr. Madison's War because it was such a vanity issue for him.
And the Republicans who had fought the Federalists in the Washington and Adams years fought the Federalists over building up the military.
Adams himself was a little reluctant.
He was not as militarist as Hamilton and Washington.
But the Republicans fought them, but then once they got in power, they became pro-military.
So Jefferson was putting embargoes on different countries.
He called it peaceful coercion.
And then Madison goes to war against England after Madison had issued some beautiful warnings against war.
Remember that famous quote about how it's the germ of all bad things?
Slavery and jobbery and high taxes and debt.
Beautiful quote, except he's the one who goes to war when he gets in power.
And then the people that followed him, Monroe and John Quincy Adams, he's about to go to war with Spain.
When Quincy Adams is Secretary of State under Monroe, he's trying to get land from Spain, the Floridas, and a whole swath of land to the Pacific.
And he's ready to go to war.
He has a not so veiled threat of war against Spain.
The Spanish-American War might have occurred in the 1820s, except that Spain didn't want to go to war.
They didn't feel – I guess they felt they weren't going to prevail anyway, and so they negotiated.
But Quincy Adams was ready to go to war.
And you know what Quincy Adams did not like about the Constitution?
He did not like that Congress had the power to declare war.
He thought that should have been an executive prerogative.
I love learning history from Sheldon Richman, man.
All right, guys, so here's the good news.
Sheldon's going to stay one more segment with us, and we're going to take some phone calls.
So if you guys want to start stacking them up, it's 512-271-4836.
512-271-4836.
And you're reminding me of what Anthony Gregory said about just how tragic it is that – so you have the whole Federalist Whig Republican side.
They're just the party of the Northeastern corporatists, millionaires on welfare.
And then you have – I don't know if you'd call it right or left or whatever.
You have the Democrats who are the more libertarian and decentralist of the bunch, and they're twice as militarist as all the industrialists.
It's amazing they had the Civil War at all when they had so many Indians to kill, and they had such a confluence of interest there that we'll wage the war that you guys will produce the equipment for.
And it will be – we'll call it the American way.
What's the problem here?
I don't know.
The amazing thing is that during the Civil War, they maintained – they kept up the war against the Indians, which – that always flabbergasts me.
You'd think they'd be kind of too busy, that there would have been a break in the war against the Indians.
Well, then that's how they healed all their old rifts too, like, yeah, sorry about Reconstruction and everything.
Let's all just go butcher the last of the Indians together and let bygones be bygones.
All right, we're taking phone calls.
There's something we can unite on.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right, it's the great Sheldon Richmond taking calls, 512-271-4836.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Sheldon Richman on the line.
We're talking about the terrible mistake that was the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
That's been at war pretty much nonstop since 1791.
Especially lately, it seems like.
Anyway, but if you guys want to call in and talk about what we're talking about here, the U.S. Constitution, the creation of the standing army.
Got questions for Sheldon about this kind of thing.
The number is 512-271-4836.
512-271-4836.
And there was a question here.
Fitzzy G in the chat room wanted me to ask you if you were familiar with this guy Robert Yates, who apparently kept his own notes on the Constitutional Convention separate from Madison's, that maybe are a little bit more honest about what was really going on there.
Sheldon, do you know about that?
Yeah, I have not looked through Yates' notes.
You're right.
Some people other than Madison did keep notes.
There were no official minutes.
And, of course, they locked the doors, right?
The public was not allowed in during the several couple of months.
And Madison, it's reported or alleged that Madison, before publishing his notes, or at least releasing them to the public, tampered with them, that he edited them.
There's some stuff on that.
Yates was a – I forget what – Yates was an anti-federalist who wrote articles against the Constitution, but I forget his – they used pseudonyms.
They used pen names like Brutus and Sentinel.
I forget which one Robert Yates was.
Federal Farmer.
They had different names.
They were keeping their identities secret.
Maybe they were afraid of retaliation.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, again, the number is 512-271-4836.
512-271-4836.
And, you know, I think – well, probably not with this audience, but overall you have a problem with the general audience making arguments like this because, well, you're going after people's identity, basically.
Those of us who go to government schools, we're all raised to identify our own individual personality so closely with the state and its glorious history that, you know, okay, well, maybe Vietnam was a mistake, or maybe Woodrow Wilson didn't make the very best call over the Zimmerman telegram, or maybe – but anything wrong has basically got to be an exception.
Okay, since World War II, things have really kind of gotten out of control, Sheldon.
But, geez, before that it was a peace-loving republic of justice and liberty and this and that.
But what you're doing is you're going all the way back down the list to the very beginning and before that and saying, nope.
And so that's asking a lot of people, right?
You're basically asking them to change how they feel about, you know, which in a very broad and deep way, how they feel about the place where they live.
Yeah.
No, it's true.
We're all brought up with this folklore.
When I was writing this stuff, I was warned by someone who said, look, all people need their fairy tales, their folklore, and so I ought to be careful.
But on the other hand, you know, I'm doing it – here's another reason I'm doing it.
You know, when young libertarians first encounter libertarian stuff and they decide this makes a lot of sense, yeah, I'm a libertarian, they're full of energy and they want to go out and talk to people, especially if they're on college campuses, they want to talk to fellow students, but they also want to argue with their professors.
And this will occur in history classes too.
And if they are given false history or a very way oversimplified version of history, they're going to get slaughtered when they start talking to students and faculty who know some history.
They'll get slaughtered, and that could be a traumatic experience.
Some of them may decide maybe this libertarianism stuff isn't right after all, or even if they don't – even if they still think it's right, they may say, I'm just going to shut up about it because, you know, this is – it's humiliating to be told I'm wrong.
You know, what about the slaughtering of the Indians?
Oh, wait a second.
They slaughtered Indians?
So we need to give young libertarians the straight scoop on history so that they don't go to the slaughter, so they're better prepared, so there's that reason if there were no other reason.
All right, so we've got one caller on the line, and time for at least a couple, so go ahead and call in, y'all, if you want.
512-271-4836, talking with the great Sheldon Richman.
You are on the air.
Hi, Sheldon, this is Balder from the chat room.
Looking to the future of freedom, I'm wondering how we can break this cycle of revolutions and have a peaceful revolution so we don't have what happened in Philadelphia happens again.
You know, the empire is gone, the new order is here, and the new order contains the seeds of its own destruction.
There's not even a reason for a rebel to fight against it, but we need to prepare to prevent the next order from coming up again out of the ashes.
How can we do that?
Good question.
Wow, if I knew the answer to that, I'd be able to afford Starbucks coffee.
I don't know.
You're talking about strategy, which is a very tricky thing because people are people.
They're complex.
They have a lot of things on their minds.
They're busy.
They don't have the time to hear about theoretical arguments or even history, and I don't have a good answer to that.
That's going to be an ongoing conversation.
We have to do the best we can, which isn't much advice, but that's all I got.
Hey, thanks very much for calling in.
All right, and we've got one more here.
Hey, I'm Scott.
You're on the air with Sheldon Richman.
Hey, Scott.
This is Cecil Lentz, Libertarian candidate for president.
Oh, well, good to hear from you.
You got a question for Sheldon?
Yes, I do.
What is your opinion about the Federalist takeover during the Civil War, after the nullification and everything that happened?
Because you're talking about standing armies.
The Union army was dissolved and the federal military took over.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I think secession should have been allowed to have occurred simply because I think it was wrong for Lincoln to use violence to hold the union together.
That's my opinion.
I think the reason for secession for southerners was, certainly the leading southerners, was immoral.
They wanted to preserve slavery.
That was their main reason.
And preserving, destroying slavery was not, obviously, as a lot of people know, was not Lincoln's main motive for holding the union together.
He just wanted to hold the union together.
I think that was wrong.
I think the way to fight slavery was by non-state means and after secession occurred.
So I don't agree with what the union did after the war was over because I don't think they should have prosecuted the war at all.
But things are very complicated and I'm not a Civil War expert.
I refer you to the best book I know on the Civil War, which is Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's book, Freeing Slaves and Emancipating Free Men.
Sorry, Emancipating Slaves and Enslaving Free Men.
I highly recommend that book.
It really is a great book.
Absolutely.
All right.
Hey, thanks for calling in.
Yeah, not a problem.
Thank you.
All right.
Good times.
Yeah, man.
So, well, let's see.
I guess that's it for the calls and we're about out of time for this segment.
But that was cool.
We got two good ones.
By the way, Robert Yates apparently was Brutus.
So he was a very prominent anti-Federalist writer.
And if you go to his Wikipedia page, you will find his notes, his convention notes.
So I will be taking a look at those.
Oh, hey, here's another question for you in the chat room real quick.
Can't call, but can someone ask Sheldon a good place to begin learning about American history, particularly for homeschoolers?
You got some good kind of independent avenues that you might point people to?
Well, a very good book that I like and I've learned a lot from is Gordon Wood.
There's no S at the end of his name, so I'm saying possessive here.
Gordon Woods, but it's W-O-O-D.
His book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
Very good start.
Cool.
The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Wood.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much, Sheldon.
I always like talking with you, man.
You know that.
Anytime.
My pleasure.
All right, Sheldon.
That's the great Sheldon Richman from antiwar.com and sheldonrichman.com.
Free association.
The Constitution and the Standing Army.
Really good stuff.
We'll be right back.
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