03/02/15 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I promise I'll get back to debunking Netanyahu and the Iran stuff here in a little while.
But first, it's our good friend Sheldon Richman, vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom, which is just $25 a year, $15 to read it online.
That's fff.org slash subscribe for The Future of Freedom.
It's Sheldon and Jim Bovard and, of course, Jacob Hornberger in every issue, plus a lot of other great writers, too.
And so, yeah, that's fff.org slash subscribe.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
I'm always glad to be back.
Thanks, Scott.
Good, good.
Very happy to talk to you again.
So, hey, man, teach me some history.
It looks like you got a two-part series.
Is that a series if it's two parts?
A two-parter at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
The War of 1812 was the health of the state, part one and two.
So I guess start with the title there.
What does that mean, health of the state?
Yeah, I guess I usually write current events, so I guess I'm a little late writing about this one.
But I wasn't around in 1812 to 1815.
You're pretty anti-war, though, if you're even anti-war of 1812.
I'll give you credit.
Yeah, I think it actually makes the case even stronger.
So I can I can elaborate on that.
But to get back to this phrase, the health of the state, most people will recognize that.
That was a wonderful phrase coined in 1918 by Randall Bourne.
Randall Bourne was sort of an individualist progressive writer.
He was kind of an odd mixture of philosophies there.
You know, I think he even called himself an anarchist.
But on the other hand, he supported some government stuff.
But that aside, when his all his progressive friends were jumping on Woodrow Wilson's war wagon in 1917, when Wilson was decided he wanted to get into the European war, the great so-called Great War.
Bourne was like the only one of his crowd.
He was a he was a journalist, the only one of his crowd, really, who said, wait a second, this is nuts.
You guys aren't going to control the war.
The progressives thought that they could guide the war, the war effort and actually use it to create reform at home.
He said, you're all crazy.
Of course, he was right and they were wrong.
So in writing this essay, he was he died before he finished.
Unfortunately, he had a flu or serious disease that was going around.
He wrote he was writing a longer essay called The State, maybe even a book.
And the famous phrases will be found in that called War is the Health of the State.
And he explains how in times of peace in the republic, most people don't pay much attention to the government.
Doesn't have the majesty and the trappings because people are just busy with their lives and they're not not much thinking about it.
But when you come with the state comes into its own in wartime and he describes what that means.
You can find this essay at any word dot com or lots of other places on the Web.
It's definitely worth reading.
So that's where the title comes from.
War and the great Robert Higgs, of course, has a whole book, Crisis and Leviathan, which which documents this further, that war and crisis that seem to be related to war, economic crises to always end up boosting the power of the state.
And the power never falls back to the pre-crisis dimension.
It stays big.
I mean, they may even they may shed a few powers, but they never undo everything and go back to how things were before the crisis.
So that's the idea about the war boosting state power.
It provides all kinds of opportunities to, you know, for politicians to aggrandize themselves.
And they don't have that power easily.
Well, of course, it's pretty ironic that one of the greatest statements along these lines that can be cited, particularly if you're arguing with, say, like conservative right wing nationalists, would be James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, who I don't know if this was a speech or essay or a letter.
He wrote the most dreaded enemy of liberty, where Madison himself, the guy who created the provision that says that Congress can create armies, is the one saying, oh, that's the last thing you want to do here.
And it really goes on.
It's it's a it's a very quotable thing.
I'm sure you've quoted it plenty of times.
Debt, taxes, jobbery, you know, executive power.
But here's irony of ironies.
Madison was the president who took the country into war against England in 1812.
He got a declaration or at least he got a declaration of war.
I guess we can't hold him responsible for it.
That came later for the first executive war without Congress.
He went to war and the Republicans and Madison himself saw opportunities to to increase the size of government in war.
And as the war was coming on, lots of Republicans at the time, he was a Republican.
The federalists were against the war.
The federalists in New England were threatening to secede because of the war.
They were friendly to England and they thought the war was crazy and didn't think the U.S. was even prepared for war.
England was the greatest naval power on Earth.
And the U.S. didn't have much of a Navy and the Congress wouldn't even vote to create a Navy as the war was coming.
But the Republicans saw great opportunities in this war, the kind of things that ought to make libertarians and others very uncomfortable.
Now, hang on one second, Sheldon, because I know that both articles are really about the domestic consequences.
And that really is the point.
But we got to talk a second here about getting into this thing.
And the fact that the country was as divided, as you're saying, would seem proof positive that this was unnecessary.
If half the states thought it was unnecessary at the time, as you say, threatened even to secede over it.
So can you, you know, without necessarily getting into the details of how true it all was or how justified any of it was or whatever, can you refresh us on the cost of Spelly here?
What was I guess I remember from grade school while they were impressing our sailors on the high seas.
Is that it?
Yeah.
So that was part that was part of it.
The consequences weren't all domestic, though, but we can get into that later if there's time.
But as far as the causes, look, England is fighting France at this time.
The Napoleonic Wars are on and both England and France are trying to stop the U.S. from delivering goods, just consumer goods and other things to, you know, to the other country.
Now, England doesn't want France having the goods and France doesn't want England having the goods.
So they were interfering, both sides were interfering with U.S. shipping with neutral rights.
And, of course, the shippers and the merchants were upset about this.
Jefferson had retaliated by putting on an embargo, I guess, an embargo, a comprehensive embargo passed in 1807 that forbade all exports, American exports, not just to England and France, all exports.
Because exports, you know, he called this peaceful coercion.
He thought this was a way short of war to stop these two powers from doing this.
It didn't work.
It failed.
And Madison felt there was nothing left to do now but go to war.
Now, you're right.
The English were grabbing merchant seamen from American ships, claiming that they were actually British and deserters and putting them in the Navy.
So my point is even a war that on the face of it seems like a good war, justified war, because interference with neutral shipping and grabbing sailors off the high seas, that sounds like, you know, those are bad things.
Although it does kind of sound like Thomas Jefferson was Bill Clinton to Madison's George W. Bush here, kind of getting us into this mess.
And then Madison exploits the crisis his predecessor created.
Well, right, because, you know, they saw that America's pride was on the line, honor, sovereignty.
Don't forget, it's not that long after the revolution, sovereignty, independence.
The war ended up being called the Second War for American Independence.
So Madison felt there was no choice now.
Nothing else was working.
And so they had to attack England.
Now they had some other things on the agenda.
They wanted Canada.
They wanted to grab Canada.
Don't forget, American leaders, rulers from the very beginning had this idea of manifest destiny, even if that phrase wasn't coined until about 1845, I think.
They believed that America was the rising new empire in the world.
The European empires were tired and old and worn out.
And the U.S. was destined to rule the Western Hemisphere, certainly all of North America.
And so Canada was on the agenda.
Now they didn't make it.
They got the army invaded.
In fact, some state militias refused to go into Canada, saying we're not allowed to go into foreign countries.
We're state militias.
So they wouldn't go.
But the army did go.
But they got pushed back.
They got repulsed.
They burned the Canadian capital of York at that time.
And England retaliated by burning Washington.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, y'all, with the great Sheldon Richman on the War of 1812.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
It's my show.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richmond, vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
And Sheldon, did you see that thing in Harper's by Andrew Coburn about how his great great grandfather, Admiral whatever, Coburn of the British Imperial Navy was the one who burnt Washington, D.C. and freed all the slaves and the place upside down?
I don't know if I saw that or not.
Oh, man, it's great.
I'll have to.
I think I have the PDF here somewhere he sent me.
I'll forward it on to you.
It's really great story.
This is Alex, Andrew and Patrick Coburn's great great great great grandfather.
Something was I don't know his title.
That's some fancy title.
And he was the one who sacked D.C. apparently.
And anyway, so, yeah, now the real point of this is war.
The War of 1812 is the health of the state.
The dreaded enemy of liberty, as Madison himself put it here.
And so.
Well, now talk about it seems like you mentioned in the article here and you end up getting to to the Kagan's for crying out loud, but not to get too far ahead of ourself.
It does sound like national greatness became if I understand you right.
You're saying that, you know, weekly standard style national greatness became a project of the founding fathers themselves as they were getting older.
I'm familiar with Jefferson complaining about the useless sacrifice of the generation of 1776.
So it can all be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons and all that.
But I think you're saying here they all pretty much thought that way.
And and that was part of what led to the war was they thought that the revolution had worked too well.
And they wanted to counter revolution to some degree to to set things right.
What are you talking about there?
What the hell am I talking about?
Well, Gordon, would this this doesn't come from Robert Kagan, Gordon Wood, who's an eminent historian of the early, you know, the colonies and the revolution in the early republic, has a book called The Radicalism of the American Revolution, where he points out that in the last chapter that every one of the founders died, disappointed in what what had happened, what America had become, because it was it was a commercial republic where basically people were concentrating on their own economic well-being and their own and their and their family.
Now, they weren't civic minded.
There wasn't the civic republicanism, this idea where everyone is thinking about the nation.
How can we improve the nation?
How can I serve the nation?
And they all despaired about that.
They were both republican and federalist alike.
They they might have had different approaches to this spirit, but they they didn't like this selfishness, this commercialism that they saw all around them.
So when the war was coming along, the Republicans and Madison and others, Albert Gallatin, who was, you know, sort of the anti Hamiltonian who took over the treasury when the Republicans came in with with with Jefferson, they all saw this war as as having a potential to sort of give the American people a shot in the arm of national fervor.
And Gallatin says after the war, people, you know, thought of themselves as a nation now as Americans.
And they they were they were happy about this.
This was a good thing.
This was, you know, a spillover from the war.
And they didn't see any other way to get this.
I'm not saying they went into the war for that, but they saw the benefit.
They saw that as a benefit of the war.
And it shaped thinking after that, that we needed a national purpose.
That's how they saw things.
There wasn't a national purpose before that.
And and so they were delighted.
They were delighted by that.
And it's it gets translated into the view of government as the war is ending.
You know, Monroe and Madison who follow Monroe and John Quincy Adams who follow Madison have a much bigger government in mind.
They they want internal improvements.
They want they like Henry Clay's American system, which included tariffs and building up canals.
And and, you know, Quincy Adams says the purpose of government is to look after the, you know, the well-being of the people, the political, the moral, the social well-being of people.
This was not these were not small government people.
These were not libertarians.
And, you know, war is like I say, war is the health of the state.
Plus, it also fueled future expansion.
They realized that expansionism could work.
They threatened war.
They held their own against the British.
There was no winner when they wrote the treaty.
It didn't even talk about impressment or neutral shipping rights.
It just sort of said status quo ante.
But the British were very much interested in accommodating the Americans at this point.
They don't want to fight the Americans anymore.
And so they end up, you know, settling the boundary between Canada and America.
And America uses that Madison and others.
I mean, Monroe and Adams use it later against the Spanish saying, look what we did.
We helped.
They you know, they had some major victories over the British Navy, the American Navy, which was much smaller and newer.
And yet they they succeeded, like on the Great Lakes and other places.
So this was a sign to the other European powers, Spain primarily, that don't mess with us.
We're going to this is our hemisphere.
We will we are destined to rule this whole hemisphere.
And they proceeded to do it.
They moved.
They got to the Pacific, you know, within a few years afterwards.
They had they had territory all the way to the Pacific and which they saw as an entryway to China.
I mean, this is how they were thinking.
And there was and then they started building a global not in 1898 when they want to get when formally to war against Spain.
But in the 18, you know, after 1815.
And now you even quote Grover Cleveland calling these conservatives a bunch of communists.
You know, the the American system, Clay Clay, I guess, gave it the name or it's identified with him.
But it's basically Hamilton system was picked up by Monroe and Madison.
It then suffers some setbacks because Jackson Jackson becomes president.
He's he's more more relatively speaking, laissez faire.
And so is his successor, Martin Van Buren.
So there's kind of a rally for the small government, decentralized, decentralized.
But then they end up losing because Jefferson, I mean, sorry, Lincoln brings the American system, you know, in full force to to the country with an international bank and tariffs and everything.
And that basically stays in existence up until the present day.
And I point out that the Grover Cleveland, who was among the more laissez faire issue of the of the president's relatively speaking, again, he complained about corporatism.
He didn't use that term, but he talked about all the privilege for business, big business.
And he and he called it the communism of wealth and capital.
And he said that's what stimulates the other kind of communism.
In other words, he's he said communism wasn't the result of just envy of rich people.
It was a backlash to privilege that rich people got from the state.
In other words, it's the old Marxian thing that the state was the executive committee of the ruling class.
That's exactly what Cleveland complained about.
Now, he didn't undo it.
Maybe he wasn't able to undo it.
But the point is, he complained about it.
And he actually attributes the rise of communism, the working class kind of communism to as you know, to the backlash against how business was riding roughshod over the American people.
Yeah, it's a fascinating story.
And it's not what we learn.
And it's not the typical libertarian version of history.
I think I think libertarians traffic too much in fairy tales when it comes to history.
Like we had this great laissez faire past and it all went wrong.
When in the New Deal.
OK, maybe some things went wrong in 1898 with the war against Spain.
Well, you don't really get that misunderstanding because that's the propaganda from the other side is that everything was laissez faire until the Great Depression kind of thing.
And so they're going to go back and relearn a lot of stuff.
That's not the only reason.
That's not the only reason.
I think there's this golden past of people that libertarians like to point to.
And it's a way of saying to the non libertarians, look, this is our heritage.
Look, we just want to get back to this.
And if you look at it too closely, you'll see if you look at it close enough to close, look at it close.
You'll see you don't want to get back to that.
You don't want to get back to that.
Look, we have John Quincy Adams, who's often quoted favorably because, you know, he said America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
He thought the Constitution was a terrible mistake in the Constitution.
Namely, Congress got the war power.
He said that's an executive power.
Everywhere else is an executive power.
It should be an executive power here.
During the Monroe administration, when Adams was the secretary of state, General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida, right, which was possessed by the Spanish at the time.
Killed a bunch of Indians, killed some British soldiers of fortune.
They weren't in the army.
They were just adventurers.
Executed after trying some of them.
Congress went back and said, we didn't declare war.
Why did Jackson go in there?
Some in Congress did, like Henry Clay.
The Monroe administration, led by Adams, defended Jackson to the hill and said he did nothing wrong.
It set the precedent for executive war.
It goes back then.
It didn't start with the Korean War.
All this stuff goes all the way back to the beginning.
They wanted an empire.
It was manifest destiny.
God has ordained this.
And these guys were driven.
Because people like the fur traders, like the big fur trader, John Jacob Astor, had Monroe's ear the whole time and was getting favors.
Here's the big thing that comes out of the war.
Trade is now formally a government program.
Even the free traders saw it as something pushed by government, not just privately done.
But government was in charge of opening markets.
That's a statist program.
Right.
In fact, Harold, let me give you one more minute.
Talk about the changes in taxation.
Well, the Republicans have been against internal taxes.
They were okay on some tariffs for raising revenue.
Not so much to interfere with trade, but just to raise revenue.
They saw that as an external tax.
They didn't like internal taxes, but with the war, they needed the money.
And Congress passed internal taxes during the war, or as the war was coming up.
And Madison even says, oh, thank goodness the Republicans have got down their dose of taxes.
They finally took the medicine that they needed to take.
But even then, they couldn't cover the costs, and the government had to borrow.
And banks popped into existence and inflated, and the government let them suspend specie payments.
And the result eventually was the Panic of 1819, which Murray Rothbard wrote about.
His doctoral dissertation was on the Panic of 1819.
And his history of money and banking in the United States discusses this chapter in American history.
So we get a bad panic and depression in 1819 because of the war and inflation and government borrowing.
All the stuff that Madison warned about, he then did.
In other words, they thought somehow they could fight a Republican war.
In other words, have the war without all of the intrinsic features that war has.
And they couldn't do it.
As I say in the second part, which will be published this week, they could sooner square the circle than to fight a war that didn't have those intrinsic features.
Yeah.
You know, when you talk about the mythology that libertarians believe in, they're kind of the more right-leaning ones usually.
They tend to lean toward the explanation that it's democracy that killed the republic rather than it's the empire that killed the republic.
But what you're explaining here for certain is that it's always been the war machine that makes the so-called system of the rule of law under the Constitution null and void.
Yes.
But the people, you know, yes, it wasn't democracy, but the people loved it.
I'm not saying the people were against it.
The people loved it.
They loved how the war came out.
They thought that Madison was able to dictate terms to England, even though the Treaty of Ghent shows no such dictation of terms, but people thought that.
They loved Jackson.
The Great Battle of New Orleans, of course, occurred after the signing of the peace treaty.
Yeah, but I just mean, you know, the chains of the Constitution are thrown off not by a bunch of poor people voting themselves food stamps and whatever.
They're thrown off by the Pentagon.
They're the, you know, it's precursors, the presidents exercising their war powers.
They're the ones that make this, that, and the other section null and void.
As you say, they're the ones who invent the conception of American citizenship rather than your state or turning these United States into the United States and all these kinds of things on down the line.
That's the origin of it all.
Like Donald Sutherland explains to Jim Garrison in the JFK movie, what's all this about, all these marble temples and statues?
It's the war power.
That's what it's all about here.
Never mind the Constitution.
That's long gone.
Right.
I mean, look, Jefferson knew he had no constitutional power to buy Louisiana from Napoleon.
And it wasn't just Louisiana, of course.
It was the territory, which was much larger than the state of Louisiana.
He knew it.
He knew it.
He was prepared.
Actually, he was preparing a constitutional amendment and then decided, ah, let's not raise the issue.
Let's just go ahead and do it.
And, you know, no one made a fuss.
And then so the presidency becomes inflated very early on.
But with Jefferson, it becomes it's like even worse when the Republicans come in, because Jefferson was supposedly a small government guy.
And he ends up doubling the size of the country just by buying territory.
And then under Monroe, Adams does the same thing.
I mean, he was Spain negotiates a huge transcontinental treaty, which gives gives the U.S. territory all the way to the Pacific, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
And, you know, again, it doubled again, but it certainly enlarged it quite quite a bit.
And their their their scope was global.
They wanted Hawaii.
They wanted they wanted Cuba.
They wanted open markets in China.
They wanted to battle Russia in the Northwest Territory, because Russia had been had had outposts there for a very long time.
And they wanted to push Russia out.
They wanted to push England out.
Like I said, they wanted Canada.
They weren't able to get it.
And then they were going to then they turned their focus to Texas and Mexico.
They never got that.
Because here's the interesting thing.
I know you're very fond of Madison's point about ambition countering ambition.
And that's it.
That seems like a good policy.
And it didn't really work out in practice, except in one ironic way.
The people who the expansionists would have wanted Texas and Mexico.
But what stopped them, what caused them to put all that off for a long time, is that they didn't want the slave power to extend to those territories.
So they said, we don't want the slaves.
You know, we don't want Texas to come in as a slave state eventually.
So let's not go for Texas now.
So in their big 1819 or 1821 treaty with Spain under Quincy Adams, they were willing to say, OK, let's not talk about Texas.
You can have Texas.
We want the Pacific Northwest.
And so they in a way made an exchange.
But it was mainly because they didn't want the slave power to expand.
Yeah, well, there's one good thing you can say about them.
Only it's really just about the votes, not the morality of the situation, right?
So the slave power ambition countered the expansionist ambition.
There's an interesting use of ambition countering ambition.
Which, by the way, I mean, I usually cite that as, you know, our last ditch hope that these pigs can be turned against each other.
It's mostly their public relations that the checks and balances built into the system actually work, and that we have federalism, that we have a rule of law at all, which, of course, as we're discussing, it's really not the case.
Right.
But you'd like to think that, yeah, like a real big-headed federal prosecutor might put a governor in prison sometimes, and then we celebrate the little victories, you know?
Sure.
Yeah, sometimes that'll happen.
I don't think anything terribly significant.
I mean, look at the war power.
But I think if we did a counter-history or counterfactual history, if there had been no slavery, so everybody was anti-slave, they would have gone after Texas and beyond.
Sure.
Because there would have been no concern.
Or if everybody was pro-slave, they would have gone after Texas.
Yeah, I mean, Jefferson foresees an empire of liberty.
That was his term.
Of course, they have to tag the word liberty on there.
But he thought the whole Western Hemisphere, South America, too, not that it would be formally annexed, but it would be under the influence, one language he even said, under the influence of the United States.
The United States would be the guiding light.
You know, his plan, his idea for the great seal of the United States was the people of Israel and a pillar of light coming down from the heavens.
That was Jefferson's idea.
And Jefferson was the deist, right?
That was his idea for the great seal.
I guess it didn't make it through the focus groups.
But this is how they saw things.
These guys, look, you can pick out libertarian lines here and there in their thinking.
And, of course, look, domestically they wanted a fairly liberal environment.
They didn't want what King George was able to do with the soldiers bursting into people's homes and stuff like that.
They didn't want that.
Nobody wanted that.
The federalists pretty much didn't want that either.
They didn't want arbitrary government.
They wanted self-government.
That doesn't really mean limited government.
It just means it's not arbitrary.
It's got to go through procedures, including people being able to vote, although obviously not everybody had to vote.
And when it came to the presidency, they basically thought the Congress would be picking the president each time.
We got to go, dude.
We're about to start this next segment again.
Okay.
But thanks so much, man.
Great work, Sheldon.
Appreciate your time.
I enjoyed it.
Thank you.
Bye.
All right, Sheldon, that's the great Sheldon Richman, FFF.org.
The War of 1812 was the health of the state.
Part one and two will be up there very soon.
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