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Alright, y'all, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scottwharton.org.
4,000-something interviews going back to 2003, 4 there, 43, 4400 or something.scottwharton.org.
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And speaking of the Libertarian Institute, Tom Woods is on the board of directors, and he's on the phone.
Hey, Tom, how are you?
Doing great, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Actually, Skype.
Not the phone.
Very happy to talk to you again.
You know, for years now, you've been interviewing me, but I haven't interviewed you in years.
I know.
It's crazy.
It's totally crazy.
I think probably because I've just been impossible to nail down.
That's actually the problem.
It's hard to get a hold of you.
It's not that you haven't tried.
It's not that you're just a snob.
I did give up trying.
I'll admit.
I know.
I totally get it.
I went, when I was making all those Ron Paul homeschool videos, I went about two years not doing any interviews with anybody, and I had one guy, he just has a half hour show, and he got so angry at me.
He said, look, Woods, it's only half an hour.
How busy could you possibly be?
And I thought, well, I'm basically nervous breakdown busy.
So yeah, your half hour thing, I just can't make it work mentally.
But now I am ready to go, man.
Cool.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
All right, listen, we got to talk about a couple of things before I start asking you about some things.
First of all, I want to talk about Tom's free books.
Tom's free books.
Dot com.
Yeah.
How about that?
I have started making free libertarian ebooks that mostly what they do is they take some hard question that we have to deal with 24 hours a day and give some really good meaty answers in there with a lot of information that will help you answer those questions more effectively.
So I got a bunch of free books there.
I'm going to be adding more.
I want to do one on because I've had guests on my my own podcast who are people who have converted away from neoconservatism and become libertarians.
I want to do a book of those.
I think that would be interesting.
How do these people change their minds?
What was it?
So that was going to be coming.
I think of a good title for that.
But yeah, I got a bunch of them there at Tom's free books dot com.
You're right.
Very cool.
All right.
And then the Tom would show and links to all the rest of your hundred books you wrote and all these other things are all, of course, at Tom woods dot com senior fellow at the Mises Institute, of course, all these things.
All right.
Oh, one more thing we got to talk about before I start asking you things is that we're doing a cruise, the Contra cruise.
You and Bob Murphy already did it once and now you're doing it again.
And now I'm coming with you.
Yeah, this is unbelievable.
Now, you know that there are places like there are publications like National Review that do a cruise or they do maybe two or three cruises a year.
In fact, they do so many cruises.
The cruise company that does it for them told me that National Review is basically a cruise that also has a magazine.
That's where their money comes from, really, is the cruise.
Weekly Standard has a cruise.
So we thought, you know, if these bums can have a cruise, why can't libertarians have a cruise?
So Bob and I have a podcast called Contra Krugman.
So we call it the Contra cruise.
We did it last year and we did awesome fun things like like we did family feud with libertarian questions and I really did poll and survey 100 people or we did Pictionary with all libertarian things you had to draw.
But it was just nonstop fun hilarity.
It was it was just so it was great.
Everybody raved about it.
Big chunk of those people are coming back this year.
And now I got special guests like you who are going to come on and join us.
I mean, what a time it's going to be.
So you should look at the video that our friend Jason Rink made of like a little montage of how great it was.
We put it up at Contra Cruise dot com.
But it's going to be such a great time.
And I'm so glad you agreed to do it.
Oh, and Jason's going to, huh?
I like that guy.
Yeah, he's our videographer.
Yeah.
I mean, basically, our deal is you get a free cruise if you make an awesome video about how great it was.
OK.
Yeah.
All right.
So now you were already telling me, too, before we went on here about a lot of other great people are going to be there.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, I'm not sure how many people know Dave Smith, but they should know him.
He's a great he's a comedian.
He's totally on our side.
Rothbardian.
Great guy.
Dave Smith is coming.
You've been on his show.
Michael Bolden of the 10th Amendment Center, who is one of the most fun people to hang around with ever, is going to be there.
And then in terms of musicians, we've got of who else?
Jordan Page, of course, is coming.
Tatiana Moroz, people you know, if you've been around the Liberty Movement for a while.
And then, of course, Bob Murphy and I will be there.
And the people who come on this thing are just great.
It's just it's fantastic.
They're wonderful people.
So you'd be crazy not to do it, basically.
Cool.
Yeah, that's right.
I think, too.
What was the website again?
It is ContraCruise.com.
And right there, right on that page, on the home page, there is that video that Jason made.
Wait, did you say what month this is?
It's October of 2017.
But you see, you may think, oh, that's so far away.
I can't even think of people.
This thing is is booking quickly.
A lot of people are because now that they've seen the video, they say, all right, I wasn't willing to roll the dice on just Bob and Tom.
But now that I see that it actually was fun and Horton is coming, now I want to sign up.
That's funny.
I'm kind of worried that some of these people are signing up just for the chance to throw me overboard.
But, oh, no, actually, well, I think you may have one friendly critic, but, you know, he's also a friendly critic of mine.
So he's no problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll have we'll have some fun.
Cool, man.
Yeah.
I like oceans and stuff.
It should be great.
Wait, where are we sailing to and back?
We are.
We're we're starting at Port Canaveral near Orlando and we are making our way to.
Oh, geez.
Now I can't remember because I remember last year's itinerary.
I don't.
But I mean, it's a Caribbean cruise for a week.
Cool.
Can you check what our exact stops are?
OK.
Yeah.
But we'll find out.
It's going to be great.
It sounds great.
All right.
Cool.
Now I'm asking questions about things.
Oh, yeah.
That's good.
But you know where you could find out the itinerary would be at Contra Cruise.
Contra Cruise.
Yeah.
OK, good.
All right.
Yeah.
Now you can ask me whatever you want.
I'm going to ask you some things.
Hey, listen, I've been up to my eyeballs in this Afghanistan book.
I'm trying to get finished.
And then there's so many wars that Trump is escalating all over the place.
And I saw out of the corner of my eye that there was some big controversy over a pretended repeal of Obamacare, which I already knew wasn't going to go anywhere anyway.
But I get the idea that we still did learn some important things through the exercise of going through this not even vote in the Congress in terms of Trump's relationship with the Republicans, with the truth, things like that.
What'd you learn?
Well, yeah, I mean, this this episode, I thought, was very revealing because, first of all, Paul Ryan does not like Donald Trump and has not really made much of a secret of that.
So why Trump is reaching out to this guy, other than the fact that he's policy wonkish and he sort of seems like the default guy to go to in this situation, is a real mystery.
He's the sort of guy Trump was supposed to be campaigning to get rid of.
And now he's not only is he siding with with with Ryan, but he's making allegiance to Ryan's bill the touchstone of GOP orthodoxy now, to the point that this group of people in the House Freedom Caucus, which, by the way, is not to be confused with the there is also a Liberty Caucus.
These are actually two different things.
The Liberty Caucus grew out of Ron Paul's informal luncheons that he would have from time to time in his office where he would invite some Congress or anybody who wanted to attend.
He'd bring some speaker in.
I was a speaker at that once.
It was it was really neat.
I got to meet some interesting people.
And then that grew into this formal thing, the Liberty Caucus that Justin Amash is involved in.
Now, the Freedom Caucus, which Justin Amash is also involved in, is maybe one step less hardcore than the Liberty Caucus.
So from our point of view, the problem with the Freedom Caucus is they're not hardcore enough.
But certainly they it was bold of them to stand up to Trump, who they know is a guy who is going to savage them on Twitter and is going to really let them have it.
But yet they've stood up to him.
And what I've been reading is that what Trump is really looking to do here with this attack, he's got a spree of tweets against them saying, we've got to fight them in 2018.
We got to fight the Democrats and we got to fight these Republicans, Republicans who were simply voting against, you know, what everybody kind of knew was a crummy bill.
What he's really looking to do, apparently, is to try to peel off the the weaker people in that caucus, the ones who feel uncomfortable being targeted by the president.
Now, Amash and Thomas Massey obviously do not feel uncomfortable.
They are energized by it, as you can see, by the energetic Twitter responses they've had to Trump that have been funny in some.
I mean, I thought Massey actually had the better response.
He said, look, he said, well, he said, we it's we both came here to drain the swamp.
You know, it's a swamp, not a hot tub.
And then Massey starts calling the new health care bill swap care.
And he says swap care is polling at 17 percent, sad exclamation mark, which, of course, is Trump's trademark Twitter thing that the sad with the exclamation mark.
So those guys are energized by it.
But no doubt they're going to be some congressmen who feel kind of funny.
Maybe they're afraid of the response back home if they're not with the president.
And so what Trump is trying to do is peel off about 15 out of the 30 or so congressmen on the House Freedom Caucus.
Because if he could peel about 15 away, then he might be able to ram his agenda through come what may.
That's really what this whole Twitter fight is all about.
But man, obviously, the Freedom Caucus is the closest we have to some kind of anti-establishment group in the Congress.
And for Trump to be suddenly now the establishment guy who's angry at the anti-establishment people pretty much speaks for itself, if you ask me.
Yeah.
So he's a businessman.
So why doesn't he understand that the more national regulation of health care we got, the worse off we are.
We need to let, more than anything else, we need open competition between all kinds of health care services, not just insurance.
But we got to deregulate right now so that the consumer can benefit.
Instead, we have all these free riders in the health care industry.
He's got to be able to understand that.
And his advisers, and I'm thinking of people like Bannon, who is somewhat of an outsider as well, you would think that they would understand that, yeah, what we need to do is just repeal and not replace, just repeal and keep repealing and side with Amash and Massey and push Paul Ryan out of the way.
And then wouldn't that be the better politics anyway, Tom?
It seems to me like it would be.
If he'd come up with something really bold and it failed, well, then he could turn to his base and say, look, what could I do?
I came up with something that was great and they stopped it.
Let's see what we can do in 2018.
But now what does he say to his base?
I came up with something crummy that is associated with Paul Ryan and that failed.
Well, geez, I mean, that's what you want to, that's the sword you want to die on?
I think the thing is he's just not that interested in health care policy.
I think he made an issue out of it in the campaign because he knew he could make political hay out of it.
But I don't think he really cares.
I don't think he has really well formed ideas on the subject.
And if he does, I think he does favor more government involvement.
I don't think he would be altogether opposed to a single payer plan.
He came out and said something like that in the not too distant past.
So I think that's what I think he wants to be able to say, OK, I kept my promise that I would bring this up and I did.
It didn't work.
Now we can finally move on to something that he actually does care about.
In fact, the one specific point he would give in the debates because he wasn't giving many specifics.
He was saying things like it's we're going to have the best replacement ever.
It's going to be great.
Nobody knows what the heck any of this means.
But the one specific thing that he would he would say is that we're going to open up competition among across state lines so that health insurance providers, you can you can shop for health insurance providers across state lines and that'll open up competition.
Now that's not as much competition as you and I would like, but it's something.
But it was the one thing he said in the whole campaign.
And in this Paul Ryan bill, there was no provision for that whatsoever.
So the one specific that he gave us during the campaign season isn't even in the crummy bill.
Ridiculous.
Well, so what did you think of Bannon's dismissal of Cato Institute type Austrian school economics and basically this dogma of capitalism as the provider of all when really, obviously, we need a strong national policy here, Tom.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Boy, that was that's a real disappointment, because, I mean, I think there are some redeeming qualities in Bannon.
I don't think I mean, certainly I don't believe he's a he's a white nationalist as everybody.
I think it was Paul Krugman wrote an article about, well, we have white nationalists in the White House.
And he hyperlinked to an article, the very first sentence of which is Bannon saying, I am not a white nationalist.
I'm inclined to take people at their word.
If they say there's something I think there's something if they're not, they're not.
And he says, I'm a nationalist.
So if you're an American, you count as white.
Good enough.
You know, that's all.
Yeah.
I think that's basically his view.
If you're an American, that's good enough for me.
All right.
Well, I'm I'm not a nationalist of any kind.
I'm not a white nationalist.
I'm not any kind of I'm not an all people nationalist.
I'm totally against nationalism, except if it's nationalism against, you know, the EU or something.
I favor that kind of nationalism.
I want people to break away from that.
But then I want them to keep breaking away.
So it's so it's not really my sort of thing.
But yeah, I mean, for one thing, Bannon has been saying genuinely like uncoerced nice things about Paul Ryan, which just boggles my mind that a guy from Breitbart would be saying nice things about Paul Ryan.
But then when he made that comment, you're right about libertarianism and Austrian economics and the Cato Institute.
Well, first of all, it goes to show he doesn't quite know all the institutional rivalries and ins and outs of all this.
But to say that Austria, if you believe in Austrian economics, you're not living in the real world.
I mean, what does that mean?
I would say if you're still looking for state solutions after all the previous ones left, you still searching for still other ones.
Maybe you're the one who's not living in the real world.
That is just such a ridiculous.
That's the kind of criticism you would get from Nancy Pelosi.
Very disappointing to hear him echoing that.
Yeah.
And especially I thought I think you're right that it's really telling that he would mix up Cato with the Austrian school because it just goes to show, I think it's a pretty typical right wing dismissal of libertarianism, in fact, that he doesn't really know much about it.
He just knows that they're opposed to his Hamiltonian vision for America.
So they're all basically the same people.
It's the same kind of dismissal that the left has of anybody to their right.
They basically think Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, you know, these are more or less the same person.
Not really, actually.
Not really.
Right.
All right.
Now.
So in part of the research for my book, I've been studying about the eight something billion.
And it's probably really three times that that the USA has spent building a road system in Afghanistan, 90 percent of which is completely worthless right now, of course, and which the Afghan state could never maintain on their own ever anyway in a million years.
But so then I'm looking at the news and they go, hey, look, there's a fire and the fire caused a bridge to come down in Atlanta, Georgia, the other day.
And then there's reports that come in that say there are weak bridges from the Eisenhower, you know, National Defense Highway System years that have got to be replaced.
And right now we need a huge infrastructure boost.
And everybody knows this is why we need government, Tom, is my roads, the roads, man.
And so Donald Trump says that's what we need.
All new roads, all new bridges, all new airports.
We need a massive New Deal stimulus spending program to fix up American infrastructure.
He says when he goes overseas and he sees the airports there and then he comes back to America and he sees our airports, he's just ashamed.
He just can't stand it.
And I predict that he'll be able to get this legislation passed because the whole thing is all just pork barrel spending for everybody.
So if there's any Democrats who don't want to vote for it, just keep bribing them until they're bribed.
That ain't hard.
We saw George Bush do that in 06 with all the war extensions and all that after the Democrats came to power.
He bought them off for a dime.
No problem.
But maybe he's right.
And maybe you and I need to accept that banning the Nationalists and Donald Trump, the great leader, that they know what they're doing.
They're going to rebuild all our crummy roads.
Because after all, I mean, they're really crummy.
They kill 30,000, 40,000 people a year.
They're so crummy.
So what do you think?
Trillion-dollar stimulus spending on roads?
All right.
Well, you already know my short answer to that, right?
But yeah, this is – it's going to be hard for Paul Krugman to continue to be an opponent of Donald Trump because what's Krugman been calling for for years and years if not a stimulus program like that with infrastructure?
And his argument is we got low interest rates now.
It's a great time for the government to borrow and spend on things that we really need, namely infrastructure.
Well, for one thing, almost all the infrastructure in the U.S. is at the state level.
And that's where it's funded and that's who's responsible for it.
So the federal government really does not have a role here.
I mean, Ike was involved in the interstate highway system, which is another matter.
But most of the roads are maintained by the states as are the bridges.
So let them decide what the correct priorities are.
So I wouldn't even go to the next level of radicalism of saying you don't even need government to provide roads.
That's a harder thing for people to see, even though I – especially today, you have all this technology.
It would be easy to measure people's use of the roads.
And you wouldn't even necessarily do that.
Who knows what the system would be?
It wouldn't even necessarily be tolls.
It could be that different merchant associations would just band together to have the roads be free so that people can get to their stores.
I mean, there are all kinds of possibilities.
I mean, would you consider that television service is free in different ways?
I mean, yeah, you got to pay for Netflix or you got to pay for cable or whatever.
But generally speaking, when you're dealing with the radio or a lot of this stuff that we consume or videos coming over YouTube, they're funded in one way or another in ways that people wouldn't have anticipated.
They could be funded through subscriptions.
They could be funded through advertising.
There are all kinds of things people wouldn't think could be done.
I bet a lot of people wouldn't think there'd be such a thing as credit cards if it weren't for government because, well, who's going to lend money to poor people?
Well, it turns out almost anyone.
So they, you know, if they turn a profit doing these sorts of things.
But in terms of the infrastructure, the bridges falling down, it is true that there are high profile cases where big bridges do collapse or there are problems with them.
But generally, as David Stockman has pointed out, most of these are bridges or collapsing stories.
And what those are doing is they're taking these tiny little bridges like from rural Iowa where maybe maybe wheeled vehicles don't even pass over them.
And they're saying, look at all these bridges that we need to to work on.
Well, you know, some bridge somewhere in the backwoods of Idaho that is in a bit of disrepair could probably be dealt with by the people in Boise one way or the other.
So there is no epidemic of of problems with bridges.
This is a made up.
This is a made up thing.
But basically, this is a state matter.
And the idea that if we borrow the money and we spend it on this stuff, this is going to give us a lot of economic activity.
All you're doing is shuffling things around, right?
All you're doing is taking resources from some other deployment and shuffling them to this temporary use.
But once this temporary use is done, once you build that built that bridge, the guy who built it for you still doesn't have a job at the other end of that bridge.
That's the that's the the main point.
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Well, you know, I think it was something that Lou Rockwell wrote back when about how, you know, the Democrats in their own way, they really love the state and they really do see themselves as stewards of it, whereas the Republicans, they're really not.
And they really see themselves as businessmen most of the time.
And when they get their hands on the state and not being libertarians at all, they're just conservative Republican businessmen.
They use that power to simply rob the rest of us completely blind, even run the whole damn government into the ground in the short term.
They don't even care.
Look at George Bush in Iraq, blow America's empire's entire strength, to put it nicely, on some stupid war they didn't need to have at all.
I wonder whether you consider, well, first of all, you pretty much agree with that.
And then secondly, if that's all this really represents is just, you know, a bunch of cronyism, a bunch of payoffs for a bunch of, you know, construction mobsters or God knows who.
Yeah.
I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if that's what it amounted to.
And yet at the same time, the economic logic behind it, that if we throw some money into the economy, that should generate some activity.
That does seem to be the sort of thing that the average person thinks is a good idea.
The average person who doesn't have any particular interest in wanting to reward construction companies, it just sounds right.
They think, well, the economy is about money sloshing around.
So if we force some in there, it ought to slosh around and generate activity.
But that's not really the way to think about it because we don't just want activity.
We want profitable, sustainable activity that's really aimed at satisfying consumer preferences.
And there's no reason to think that, I mean, you figure out consumer preferences based on what people are voluntarily willing to buy.
And what the stuff government is spending money on, there's been no indication that it's anything people genuinely want to buy.
And so we can't know if it's a complete misallocation of resources or not.
But the presumption has to be that it is.
So that's the way I look at it.
So boo to the – plus where is he going to get this money?
He wants to – he's escalating – now sometimes he's escalating in a – you know, he's not like he's sending 50,000 troops somewhere.
But he's escalating in so many different places that it looks like his foreign policy is not going to be – 2016, it was, hey, they've launched all these stupid wars that blew a lot of our money.
In 2017, it's like invade, invade, invade, invade.
If he's also committed to not touching entitlements, which I understand is his view, where would the money for the infrastructure stuff come from?
Where could it conceivably come from, especially from a guy who says he's a businessman, he's going to run this government on a business basis?
What business that's in this much debt says what we need is a trillion dollars more of spending?
I don't know any business that operates that way.
Well – I mean, is it conceivable?
You can just borrow it from the Japanese and the Koreans and the Chinese like always and the Saudis, whoever, or he's going to have to get the Fed to print money and buy it, the new debt?
It's conceivable that you could continue borrowing it.
But again, there's no business that would continue that way.
Now you would say, well, the difference is that the government is not like a business because it can tax and it could do all these other things.
But eventually this does – this weighs the economy down in a variety of ways.
I mean the – anytime you complain about taxes in the US, you get told, oh, but we're undertaxed compared to Europe.
Kind of an answer is that.
OK.
So all right.
So you have even dumber people in other countries.
That does not answer my original complaint.
You're not going to get real, genuine, it seems to me, tax relief until you can legitimately say the expenditures are coming down.
And tax relief is important because it's – first of all, it's a matter of justice.
But secondly, because it's not just a matter of, well, either the government can spend it or the private sector can spend it.
But either way, it will be spending and spending is good.
The private sector is going to spend it on something that's tried and true, that's going to be good for the long term, that's going to increase our productive capacity.
There's nothing that the government can do that's going to increase our productive capacity.
It just takes the money and spends it, consumes it, and it's gone.
So I want the money returned into private hands.
And I want resources that when the government does spend all this money, the resources get diverted to them.
The government is going into the market, competing for resources with the private sector.
I don't want the private sector to have to compete with government for resources.
I want them to get the resources and use them for things that we need.
So that's the way we ought to – that's the way we ought to be thinking.
Yeah, he could keep borrowing, but we're getting to the point where in – not very long from now actually, by 2030, depending on where interest rates go, you could be easily looking at a trillion dollars of interest payments in a year.
That's not something we want to be doing.
I mean that's taking the money, opening a window, and literally throwing it out the window on nothing.
Yeah, I mean that's the part that really kills me about all this.
When I think about every bit I paid to the IRS, or not me, my next door neighbor, whatever, where everything that he's given that because of marginal utility and all that really meant a lot to him.
The money taken out of his check that meant all these things he couldn't do, including even provide for his people or for food, for college, for a better place to live, for whatever it is.
That all that money, his whole life long, is actually just the remainder on some wasted nothing, some tires that the Air Force never used that just went in a pile, that meant nothing to them.
And especially, to me, the insult to injury, just the worst one at all, is just the millions and tens of millions, or I don't know, you tell me, hundreds of millions of dollars that go just to pay interest on the debt.
You think about all the struggling people, all the little guys whose businesses get audited in full-scale CIA stress positions for every last dime they got, run them right out of business just to throw some money away at some foreign sovereign government central bank bondholder.
People kill themselves over the despair because of the money they don't have because of what the IRS does to them.
Their kids go to foster care.
Their businesses go bankrupt.
Their employees go homeless, too.
The whole thing is a wreck, and it's all just for nothing.
It's all for some bolts on something that they didn't even use to bomb anyone.
Yeah, totally agree, totally agree.
And meanwhile, you've got Trump saying, I've managed to get Boeing to cut down the price of the new Air Force One or whatever it was.
Well, that's great.
But meanwhile, he is talking about, he's like a bonanza for these people.
He's opening the spigots for saying, we've got to increase the military budget.
So it's like I voted for, if I were a Trump voter, I would have voted for, I guess, John McCain plus Jeb Bush.
Now John McCain and Jeb Bush didn't like, it's like he's kind of forgotten that he's doing the exact things that the people he made fun of would have done in his place.
So what was the point of voting for Trump if you're just going to get a Jeb Bush foreign policy and a Jeb Bush domestic policy?
I would not have been surprised if Jeb Bush had pushed the American Health Care Act.
What would have been different about it?
So what's the deal?
I mean, a lot of bombast, I guess, is different.
But this, and you know, I sent out an email the other day to my list where I talked about this and Trump's war on the Freedom Caucus.
And I had some pushback from people saying, well, look, you know, he's up against big opposition.
But no, wait a minute.
What?
Like they were really trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I thought at this point, it's hard to.
Right.
Why?
Why is he's up against big opposition?
He just stopped the Bushes and the Clintons single-handedly, right?
But more than that, I mean, for crying out loud, the guy is making the freedom people into his opposition.
There's no reason that they have to be right.
So how do you excuse that?
I mean, his every instinct, domestic, well, not every instinct, but a lot of his instincts are pretty bad.
I think his Supreme Court picks might be OK.
And I think on education, it might be OK, although I'd rather just have them shut the Education Department down.
But but other than that, his economic instincts, he wants to cut taxes.
But you know, he's now he's talking to his Goldman Sachs treasury secretary about how to go about that, which just tells me it's going to wind up being another one of these shell games.
Now, his tax proposal during the campaign, I remember it actually being pretty good.
But you know, likewise, during the campaign, we were told we were going to get a full Obamacare repeal.
And what we actually wind up getting when push comes to shove, we'll just have to wait and see.
Yeah.
Obamacare for now.
All right.
Now, one last thing.
You wanted to talk about the Russia deal, Putin and Trump.
What do you think?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, there's there's nothing.
There's just nothing to this.
This is ridiculous.
And it's becoming to the point where the Democrats are trying to tell their folks at home, look, we might not actually have any actual evidence to give you.
So don't get your hopes up about where our investigation is going.
I mean, that's pretty, pretty bad.
I mean, there are there are some Democrats like there's a former CIA guy who was very pro Hillary, who was saying that Trump is an unwitting, you know, foot soldier for for the Russians.
And then.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
And now he said, OK, look, not only is there no fire, there's no smoke, there's nothing.
There's nothing to this.
And the bizarre thing about that to me is that this is the exact kind of innuendo and non story that if Alex Jones had been pushing it, the Democrats would have been calling it fake news.
I mean, this exact kind of story and again.
And what's also interesting about it is that people like Robert Perry over at Consortium News and Glenn Greenwald, who, you know, who's who's great.
These are people who they haven't got anything in common with Donald Trump whatsoever.
But their point is, he's got so many things you could criticize him for.
You don't have to invent things, you know, you don't have to make up this crazy Russian story because because not only is it false, it's a story that is all it's going to do is generate more anti-Russian sentiment among the public.
And it might even push Trump to feel like he's got to prove that he really will stand up to the Russians.
And this could prove disastrous.
Why do this?
You can come up with all kinds of reasons to oppose Trump.
There's no reason to invent them.
Yeah, I'm with you there, and especially the part about the real danger, because what you have here is I'm sure there's some specialized term for it in public choice theory where these people get the whole world killed for their own bureaucratic position if it advances it.
And so you have it reminds me really a lot of all the rumor mongering about Saddam Hussein in 2002, where the overriding message day after day wasn't really about the danger of Saddam.
It was that we all agree about the danger of Saddam, right, everybody.
And everybody says, right.
And we do the two minutes hate every day, every day.
And just to reinforce all this.
But like you say, it's all just based on innuendo.
It's all just a big non story.
But just like with Iraq, you have this confluence of interests where none of them were had a compelling case or anything, but they all had a reason why to join the bandwagon.
And here you have the military industrial complex mixed with the Democrats and all the liberal TV people who all support the Democrats and identify themselves with the Democrats, certainly more than the Republicans, certainly far more than Trump and his administration.
And so the the Cold War people, the generals, the admirals, and all the arms industrialists and the spies and all of them, they have all their reasons they want their Cold War.
And then you have the Democrats who, God, they need an excuse.
They do anything for an excuse for how they lost to Donald effing Trump.
I mean, really.
And the only obvious answer is because they ran Hillary Clinton, the first worst person in the world.
And so she lost to the second worst.
And that's the answer.
And they can't deal with that.
So and and boy, like if you watch CNN, I mean, they're just never going to stop.
I mean, this is just goes on and on and on.
Every little thing out of context, it doesn't matter what it is.
And like you say, here's a guy who's horrible on everything but Russia.
And that's the thing they attack him for.
Yeah, it's it's insane.
It's totally insane.
And the thing is, but it turns out that so far he's not even as good on Russia as I wanted him to be.
I know.
Disappointment.
But at least his rhetoric was, I mean, at least saying, I see no reason for us to have this conflict.
I mean, I'm a dealmaker and maybe I can make this work.
That that's nothing wrong with that sentiment.
It's just and, you know, the whole it would be interesting to do a whole investigation of how the Democrats suddenly went to being so insanely anti-Russia.
They weren't this insanely anti-Russia during the Cold War.
I mean, during the Cold War, they were looking to make excuses for Russia all the time.
So I don't get why the sudden I mean, it could just be they're crazed because they feel like they got to lash out and look for some reason that Hillary lost.
Maybe it's that they're not really in their right minds.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's that more than anything, because Trump's Russia policy is basically Obama's Russia policy.
You know, he's still got our guys, you know, Army Rangers training the Ukrainian military.
I don't know if he's still giving them trucks, but he certainly, you know, hasn't, you know, changed, you know, backed off of Obama's Ukraine policy, which was not as bad as it could have been, not as bad as McCain wanted it to be, but was still pretty bad.
You know, I don't know.
Working with Russia in Syria.
That's what Obama was trying to do at the end of his presidency in the war against the Islamic State.
So yeah, Trump's actual Russia policy is not outside of even the three by five index card whatsoever.
The only thing that's happened is the party in power has changed.
And so the narrative has changed.
Yeah.
And I think it's the neocons don't like those aspects of Obama's policy.
They don't they don't want diplomatic solutions to anything.
They want a bomb.
And so, you know, and Russia, of course, played a hand in in Syria and in Iran.
And that did defuse things to some degree.
I mean, whether it was the chemical weapons in Syria or the nuclear program in Iran.
And so they don't.
I mean, they view Russia as kind of getting I think they view Russia as getting in the way of what might have been a pretty darn good war if you just stop doing that.
Let us do what we want.
Exactly.
That's what Robert Perry says, that this is their number one gripe against Russia now is that they helped Obama avoid war with Iran and Syria.
Both those dirty S.O.B. s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, here's the thing, too.
Back to the politics of the health care deal here in the Freedom Caucus and what have you.
It seems to me the obvious thing is not to pick a fight with Putin to prove what a tough guy and what a non-Manchurian candidate he is.
The smart move here, obviously, especially from a Trump persuader point of view, is invite Putin to D.C.
He should have invited Putin to D.C.
February 1st, said come to dinner.
We'll go out.
We'll see a show.
We'll make friends.
We'll negotiate a reduction in our hydrogen bomb capacity and start really making nice and shove that right in the face of everybody who says, oh, he's a Manchurian candidate.
Yeah.
What?
For reducing the world's H-bomb arsenal?
Is that what liberals are really going to attack him for?
Something like that.
You know, stick it to the haters, as Trump would say.
But instead, he just lays down for he's like Barack Obama.
And watch, he's about to give him, you know, thousands more troops in Afghanistan, too.
He's going to do whatever they say, apparently.
Yeah.
I mean, man, wouldn't it be great if he did clearly defend himself just the way you said that you people are supposed to be, you know, remember when in the old days when you used to favor peace?
What the heck happened to that?
What's the matter with you people?
You're repeating every bizarro rumor that nobody in his right mind believes just because you're just dying for war.
What's wrong with you people?
Exactly.
Yeah.
It seems obvious.
Scott, I was about to wrap up and tell you, OK, you can get you can you can follow Scott over it.
I'm not used to this anymore.
I'm not used to being the guest.
Yeah.
I was going to say, man, it's good to interview you again, Tom.
This has been fun.
Yeah, I enjoyed it.
Thanks, Scott.
Yeah.
Good deal.
All right, y'all.
That's Tom Woods.
He wrote most of the books that have been written in the world.
You can find them all at Amazon dot com and at Tom's free books dot com.
Believe that he's given them away.
Tom's free books dot com.
Check out Contra Cruz dot com if you want to join me and Tom and Bob and the others this October out on the Contra Cruz and listen to Tom's show at Tom Woods dot com and listen to the Contra Krugman show at its Contra Krugman dot com for that.
Right.
Yep.
Yep.
Good.
All right.
Hey, thanks again, Tom.
Appreciate it, man.
Thank you, Scott.
All right.
So that's the Scott Horton show.
Four thousand and something interviews there at Scott Horton dot org and at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton show.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton show.
And hey, y'all, seriously, go over to the blog at the Libertarian Institute and find out how to help Will Grigg.
He's sick, very sick in the hospital, and his family sure could use some support.
So check all that out at Libertarian Institute dot org slash blog.
And thanks very much.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
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