03/06/15 – Jeffrey Tucker – The Scott Horton Show

Hi, Jeff.
Hello, Professor Scott.
Would you like to join me on the radio here?
Hey, everybody, guess what?
Jeff Tucker just showed up, which is going to make it easy for me to fill time here.
Yeah, no problem.
Let me see.
We've got mic three hot.
Go ahead.
Is this it?
You're on.
Yeah, OK, good.
Jeff Tucker, everyone, from liberty.me and the Foundation for Economic Education.
All those things are happening.
Very good to see you.
You too.
So often when we talk, it's just over digits.
And now here we are in the flesh.
Absolutely.
So you look fabulous.
Well, thank you very much.
Did you bring your skateboard with you?
Dressed to the nines, as always, of course.
Oh, wow.
No, but you didn't bring your longboard with you, did you?
No, I don't have a longboard.
You don't?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I don't know the right terminology.
No, I did bring a Thrasher magazine that I got at the airport.
OK.
Skater of the year, Wes Kremer.
And doing it right in here, man.
So the idea of skateboarding is to have an element of freedom in your life and total control and autonomy and creativity and a certain amount of energy.
I think, Jeff, I've always been a libertarian.
Yeah, there's certain spontaneous order that comes with a group of skateboarders getting together.
That's true.
I've seen this.
And it's all about individual accomplishment, but with your friends.
You don't skate against your friends.
You skate with them against yourself.
And you do a cool trick and they cheer you on.
And if you mess up, they kind of bolster you.
And if you nail it, you and only you get the credit.
I am.
That's what it's really all about, is actually making the thing that has been very difficult that you've been unable to make.
And then when you make it, then you get to skate.
Yeah.
So you set your own standards, basically.
Man, that's a good feeling.
I mean, you measure yourself against yourself.
Absolutely.
That's it.
Very individualistic.
I used my office used to be next to a sort of a skateboard crowd.
And I watched them one day and I saw exactly a little micro society in development.
That's exactly it.
Yeah.
And we all cheer for each other, too.
Here's one you'll always hear at a skateboard session.
Yeah.
That's cool.
Yeah.
I like it.
I like everything about skateboarding, but I don't know how to actually do the thing.
You probably should learn when you're 12 or forget it.
Well, I tried it at a party one time after a few drinks and I landed on my back.
Probably try before a few drinks.
A slightly sloped driveway, see how it goes.
Some people just got the talent.
I'm not saying it's too late for you.
It might not be.
I don't know what you mean by too late.
Usually, you got to learn when you're a kid or you just can't.
That's pretty much the deal.
Okay.
I get it.
Yeah.
Young at heart counts sometimes.
But does it sometimes overcome physical reality?
So is this your first Liberty Forum?
Yes.
This is the first time.
So what do you think?
What's your impression?
These are your peeps.
Yeah.
It's very cool.
Now, I have been to New Hampshire once before.
I gave a talk to some college students here, to the Young Americans for Liberty.
And I don't know if it was in this town or another one, Jeff.
Honestly, it was five years ago.
But I sure like this place.
I like the whole idea of the Free State Project.
I'm very happy to be here.
Well, it's got a great spirit to the conference.
This is sort of a can-do, you know, applied liberty sort of thing.
So it's not just about theory.
It's about finding ways to be free in the one life you have.
And I think there's really something to say for that.
In fact, I think it's kind of a higher level or like Liberty 2.0 or something like that.
Like, you know, you get beyond just reading about it or hoping that it happens at some point in your life because the political winds change or whatever.
And you say, to help with that, I'm going to take freedom into my own hands and do something about it insofar as I'm able and help to build up the institutions of liberty and basically make government as irrelevant as possible, you know.
And in that way, hopefully, we can make the state obsolete.
I think it's happening, actually.
I do.
More and more so.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I think, at the very least, this kind of thing is a great way to advertise libertarianism to the new people.
That's true.
There's so many Americans who've never even heard the word or had an opportunity to really understand it.
Yeah, and I don't even, you know, for my part, I don't even care if a person adopts that term.
What we need is people to sort of, you know, dig deep and find that thing within them that wants to be free.
That's more important than anything else.
Would you like some Skoll?
No, thank you.
Okay.
I do appreciate it, but I quit tobacco three years ago.
You're just dipping here without, you know, offering you some.
I am off the nicotine.
Okay.
Permanently.
Okay.
Don't even miss it.
In fact, I'm lucky because the wife smokes Marlboro Lights, which I hate and always have hated, so I'm not even tempted to start again.
You mean cigarettes in general you hate?
Well, yes.
Or Marlboro Lights in particular.
Marlboro Lights have always been a problem for me, so I'm not tempted to bum one from the wife.
If she smokes Camel Filter, I might have given in.
See, that's why she smokes Marlboro.
I guess so, yeah.
I might have given in if it was my brand.
Well, I have a friend who carries only menthol cigarettes because she's convinced that people don't bum them at bars.
That's a good point, yeah.
I knew a guy in high school like that, too.
Yeah.
This is strategic thinking, really.
Absolutely, yeah.
But what are we talking about today besides this meaningless prattle?
Well, I was thinking I could ask you a little bit about libertarianism and anti-imperialism.
I spoke with a newspaper reporter a little while ago, and I told him that anti-imperialism is at the core of libertarianism.
And then right after I told him that, I wondered whether it was really true.
Yeah.
I like to think that it is, Jeff, and it certainly is at the core of my libertarianism.
Well, you know what, though, Scott?
You make a very interesting point because I think in theory you're right.
In practice, it's been a long time getting there.
If you think about it, libertarianism was sort of, how would you say, maybe it was given life sometime at the end of World War II, in the American political context anyway.
But I think it was another 50 years, essentially, before we sort of got it right, the unity of love of liberty at home with a kind of foreign policy interests, I guess you could say, that were essentially united around the idea of peace.
Because for generations, you know, people imagined that you could sort of hold a foreign imperialist aggressive view, a garrison sort of state view towards foreign policy, while believing in limited government at home.
In fact, my friend M. Stanton Evans, do you know that name?
It sounds familiar.
Yeah, I know.
He was a kind of early person in sort of right-wing circles.
You know, he was a friend of Buckley's.
But also a friend of – he studied under Mises, a very interesting sort of journalist, Indianapolis News or something like that.
But he wrote for Human Events for years.
But he was one of these – they called themselves fusionists.
And Frank Meyer was their guru, really.
And so they had radical libertarian views insofar as it affected economics and even to some extent social policy in that same way.
It kind of hurts the foreign policy, though, to mix it up with the West.
Well, and then – We've got to take this break.
We should talk about this more.
It's very interesting.
Yeah, we'll pick this up on the other side of the break.
Talking with the great Jeff Tucker from Liberty.me.
Here's live at the Liberty Forum in Manchester, New Hampshire.
It was the Cold War, I think, that drove a lot of it.
That's what I was going to say.
Having a communist, which is, again, stupid and crazy and wrong.
The Assad regime is harmless.
He's never picked a fight with you.
Welcome back here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
Now, I hope Ian is going to come and bail me out in ten minutes.
Oh, is that right?
We only have ten minutes left?
Because then I'm on in ten minutes after that.
You're on what?
I'm on.
I'm doing the speech.
At the top of the hour, yeah.
Oh, wow.
So I need Ian to come in and cover my last segment for me, but anyway.
So this is your big chance to lay it all out.
And you're talking about terrorism.
That's a big topic.
I got way too much here, Jeff.
Yeah, I know.
Well, that always happens to me, too.
I end up having like three days of speeches, you know.
The one time was recently I was invited to Washington to give a talk, and I loved it because it was like – I was scheduled to speak from 1 until 5.
Now, see, I could do that.
That would be easier for me.
Right?
If I could just not have to worry about running out of time.
I had 200 people in a room from 1 to 5.
I gave one break.
Wow.
Yeah, that's ideal for me.
How many of them came back after the break?
No, everybody was happy.
No, and then we still talked afterwards.
But that's – I love that because I sort of laid it all out.
I just basically broke it down into four parts and just turned on and just went straight through from the beginning to the end.
I love that.
It's a great way to speak.
I love having the whole afternoon.
I always run out of time, you know, always.
I'm going to do my best to keep you and Anthony Gregory and Tom Woods in mind and other friends of mine who are so good at giving speeches who just get right up there like they always own the place and just make themselves at home.
I get so nervous before I give a speech.
It's completely ridiculous.
Do you?
Yeah, it just means that you need to speak more.
That's all.
You need to more often.
That's all.
It's the same speech I give on the show every day.
It's usually I can't see you and you can't see me.
Some people get more nervous in that digital realm.
They have to have an audience.
I guess I'm just used to it.
I used to get way nervous before the show too.
Did you?
I finally got over it just doing it year after year after year.
This is year 12 you've been doing the show.
Am I right about that?
Let's see, 98.
I can't do math.
I started in 98.
Oh, much earlier than I thought.
I thought it was 2003.
Yeah, 2003 is when I started the interview show.
I see.
Then 2007 is when I started really doing a daily show for pay.
That was in 07.
That's eight years ago now.
Earlier we were talking about the US foreign policy problem and libertarianism.
I do think it's interesting that we went basically 40 years with most people that accepted libertarian ideas for domestic policy, rejected them in terms of international politics.
You had this sort of murderous sort of longings for nuclear war on the one hand abroad and the other hand arguing for tax cuts and deregulation at home.
It doesn't work really.
Because the USSR was a communist state, so basically that kind of confused the issue a little bit.
It did.
That was, I think, the whole reason why Harry Truman hatched the Cold War.
I mean, the goal after World War II was to continue the corporate subsidies.
That was the goal.
How do you transfer money out of the American taxpayers into the hands of large corporations that constitute the ruling class that basically benefited from the war and they wanted to continue to live at others' expense?
The best way to do that was to concoct this whole communist scare, which took some doing.
It was an Orwellian trick because you recall that Russia was our ally, gallant, beautiful bringer of democracy to the world during World War II.
And then just a few days later, after the war settles down, it's like, whoops, oh, my God.
It turns out Russia is really evil, godless communism.
They're spreading it all over Europe.
We have to stop it.
The only way to stop it is through U.S. foreign policy and hence the Marshall Plan.
And this was a way, you're saying, for Truman to neutralize classical liberalism at home.
It was.
And so there was that hysteria about the Greek election.
Oh, my God, the Greeks like communism.
Big surprise there, right?
That's always been true, I guess.
And so, yeah, it really triangulated everybody on the right.
And there's a funny aspect to this, Scott, too, because the people on the right who are just famously stupid, but they always think they're smart, they were glad for Truman's switch on the Russia question because they wanted to, this is just bizarre, they wanted to show up FDR because they really resented, the right wing really resented the FDR's road to Moscow, essentially.
And so they liked this 1947, 1948 shift in U.S. foreign policy priorities because they thought it made FDR look bad.
That was part of it.
It's like, see, Russia is bad.
After 20 years of treason and FDR sucking up to Stalin, now we're going to reverse that.
Now we're going to reverse that and so he's going to look back.
So the right wing supported the Marshall Plan and then jumped on with the Cold War.
And there were very few dissenters.
One was our beloved St. John T. Flynn, who had his articles routinely rejected by National Review and died completely in obscurity in something like 1957.
Well, and he had been a classical liberal, not a conservative, correct, before that?
Yeah.
Of course, this term conservatism, as far as I could tell, was basically invented after World War II to describe this new form of thinking.
Before World War II, there hadn't been organized anything called a conservative, a conservatist.
Trotter often used to say that if you ever called him a conservative, he would punch you in the nose.
And I really like that.
So Russell Kirk invented the term.
And it's very strange because it used to be about fighting for human rights and liberty and everything.
And then under Kirk's tutelage, it became about watch fobs and large leather chairs and sort of fake accents and phony British-style affectations, plus sort of tipping the hat to U.S. imperialism abroad.
The whole thing became just disgusting.
Of course, Murray Rothbard was a great outlier in this whole period.
Well, I was going to ask you about that.
This apparently was all completely ridiculous on its face to him.
Scare the hell out of him here.
It was.
He never worked on Murray.
But, you know, the funny thing about Murray is it would have been so easy for him to just shut up about U.S. foreign policy and to make or build a pretty good career for himself.
I mean, he was a beloved economist, and he could have been writing for National Review, speaking for the great sort of CIA-controlled right wing, and had a decent life.
But you just could not shut Murray up.
And he wouldn't stop talking about U.S. imperialism and the essential lies on which the Cold War was based.
And he lived kind of a lonely life, really, for a very long time.
There was one point that he was completely out of a job, and he actually started writing encyclopedia entries for a living.
And they weren't published, but he was writing for large-scale encyclopedia sets and stuff like that.
That's amazing that he could be that marginalized.
I know.
And then finally in the mid-1970s, of course, or the early 1970s, the birth of libertarianism as we know it today.
But even there, I think it took until about 1990 for things to really cohere, because you had to wait until the end.
The fall of the U.S.S.R.
Yeah, it was the end of the Cold War, essentially.
That's when finally we started getting some sense among libertarians about U.S. foreign policy.
But it's not entirely there, right?
I mean, even now.
Yeah, even now, most of the libertarian movement comes from the right.
So even if they're kind of, okay, Tucker, I guess I should be anti-war, like you say, it still doesn't matter that much to them.
No, but there's more anti-war sentiment among libertarians now than I think there's ever been in my lifetime.
I mean, the Students for Liberty came out with this very beautiful book called, I think it's just, The Case for Peace, something like that.
Really a good collection of essays.
And this is rather new.
I think it's good.
It's becoming much more the orthodoxy and the hawks, and these kinds of people are very much in the minority at these events.
Well, especially, you know, the young people coming up now, the college kids and whatever, they've lived through Bush and Obama, right?
The liberal Republican and the conservative Democrat, the centrist extremists who agree with each other on every single freaking thing.
So who could be 20 and not be a libertarian right now?
Oh, I think that's exactly right.
And to have some sympathy for people like Edward Snowden.
Sure.
You know, I was just at the ISFLC meeting where he spoke, you know, to almost 2,000 students, and, you know, like a live feed, a video feed from, of all places, Moscow, right?
I still can't quite process that.
Isn't that something?
Yeah, it's like when John Ashcroft announced that we turned Jose Padilla over to George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld to be tortured.
This is actually in Red Square giving the announcement in Russia.
Isn't that something?
The way history turns, yeah, it's just extraordinary.
Have you seen Citizenfour?
I actually have not.
I got it off the Pirate Bay, but I haven't gotten a chance to look at it yet.
Okay, you got it from the right place.
By the way, are you a Pirate Bay aficionado?
Because if you're not, you will be.
I'm a huge fan, but I just prefer streaming stuff.
And so I stream Citizenfour.
I can just see you.
I can imagine you being the all-time world's greatest champion of the Pirate Bay.
You know what?
Wait until the end of that movie.
Is that the music?
Oh, the music's playing.
We've got to go.
Right back with Jeff Tucker in just a second.
Right at the end of Citizenfour, Obama comes on and calls for the prosecution of Snowden.
And I tell you what, if you had any sympathy, it would make me very sad.
This is one of my favorite sections of work.
But we've all been through this.
You did.
No, I told that guy.
All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm doing a live remote.
I'm excited, man.
This is great.
I'm at the New Hampshire's Liberty Forum in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is a really nice town.
I saw it out my hotel window this morning.
How did you learn to work all these buttons?
I'm seeing you over there managing this massive machinery.
Actually, I'm ignoring most of those buttons.
It's this one and this one.
Also, you only have two buttons.
You and I are on.
Other than that, I'm leaving it alone.
This is Ian's territory.
Because it looks complicated to me.
It is.
It is.
Like, I feel like I'd have to train for a week.
If my elbow bumps this thing, we are done.
Oh, I see.
I think we're all right.
But, yes, Ian Freeman is the one with the computer set up here.
He's always doing things.
He's the man that makes LRI run, for sure.
Right.
He looks like a DJ behind the, you know.
So, earlier, we were talking about the whole problem of the ruling class.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, what?
Everybody, it's Jeff Tucker.
You know the voice.
It's Jeff Tucker.
Really?
Yeah.
But, you know, my voice is a little bit not the way it should be.
You have a great radio voice, by the way.
Well, thank you.
But, you know, I'm a little under the weather right now.
That's what accounts for the sort of manly groveliness.
It makes you sound even better.
There we go.
Okay, right.
So, it's the great Jeff Tucker from the Foundation for Economic Education.
That's right.
And from Liberty.me.
That's right.
And he's my partner in our monthly new show that we've had.
We have a great new show.
We've had one new show so far, one episode, the premiere episode.
People loved it.
It was crowded and people were all over it.
Yeah, I got a great response from that, too.
Yeah, I did, too.
And I realize I'm going to have to actually wear a suit to do the show.
Do you think so?
You know, I have a bow tie for you, if you want.
It's up in my room.
It's a Liberty.me bow tie.
Would you let me put it on you?
Yes, I would.
Okay, we'll have to get somebody else.
I don't know whether I'll be able to tie it again myself for the next episode of the show.
It's just like a shoe.
It's just like tying a shoe.
It's just like tying a shoe.
You tie a shoe, right?
Well, that I can do.
Yeah, you have laces on your shoes.
I do.
Yeah, okay, not everybody does.
I've graduated up from Velcro.
I'm doing great.
Velcro.
In Manchester, New Hampshire?
Oh, right.
I always thought that Velcro was the greatest invention ever.
Give that name.
Yeah, okay, that's a little bit of an exaggeration.
I mean, you know, I think it's a good thing, Velcro.
Okay, good.
Not ever.
Yeah, I think that was a little over the top, Scott.
Okay, I accept that.
I get over the top a little sometimes.
All right, so I got Jeff Tucker, the great Jeff Tucker here.
Ian Freeman.
Hey.
The man.
Uh-oh, I better hit your button here.
Thank you.
Ian Freeman's here from Free Talk Live, and now in about- I've never been on your show before.
That's true.
Yeah.
Welcome.
We've been working together for years, and I've never been on his show.
I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm on in ten minutes.
Like speaking on.
You have to be out there speaking.
I'm giving a speech, yeah.
I have to be out of here and in the other room to give my speech ten minutes from now, so I'm probably going to bug out of here in a few minutes, so I can go in and get set up.
They'll wait for you.
But at the break, we were talking, Jeff, about the interests behind the empire.
Now, I think probably, without being the master of all history, I think probably the United States American empire has the greatest public relations in the history of empires.
The British public relations was, we are here to kill you and take your grain and starve you to death.
All hail the Queen of England or whatever, right?
The Americans pretend that they're killing you for their best interests, and that's been their shtick basically since the end of World War II.
In fact, it wasn't until the end of the Cold War that so many conservatives, like Chalmers Johnson and Eric Margulies and others, went, you know what?
We really always were an empire.
It wasn't just about containing communism.
It really was about expanding world empire, and it took until the end of the USSR for them to even get it.
Forty years went by.
Forty years went by before people recognized that.
It was a successful PR, but so tell me, what's the real truth, Jeff?
But here's the thing.
I think the line that you're presenting here with regard to U.S. foreign policy mirrors the domestic equivalent.
Every government program is helping people, even those that are obviously egregious, right?
Minimum wage is a great example of that.
It keeps people out of the workforce.
That's why we had minimum wages in the first place is to keep people from getting jobs, basically.
We don't want those people getting work and propagating themselves.
But rather than just say that, they say the opposite, that the purpose is to help people.
It's the same thing with U.S. foreign policy.
So what is the purpose of the state?
That's a big question because from my point of view, we don't need it.
It doesn't actually do anything but steal our stuff and diminish our liberties.
So what's its purpose?
What's its real function?
Why does it exist in the first place?
That's a big question.
And it took me a long time to figure this out.
But I think the answer is actually relatively simple.
It's the tool by which the ruling class exploits everybody else.
That's it.
It's not complicated, actually.
Now, is that kind of Marx Okami to you to call him the ruling class, Mr. Free Market Libertarian?
No, I don't think so.
I prefer parasites.
Yeah, well, that's a decent term.
But really, there's a way in which the state is exogenous to society, but it also serves the largest interests in society, the largest corporations, the largest financial interests, the biggest banks, and really there is a class structure behind it.
It was born out of a class structure, at least in the 20th century form.
Well, you know, Gareth Porter is my favorite reporter.
If you ever listen to the show, you've heard me interview him a hundred times.
And he's some kind of leftist or progressive or what have you.
But when it comes to the empire, he puts it all on the generals and the spies and the national security state.
He says, you know, Lockheed and Citigroup and whatever vested billionaire interests are nothing compared to a bunch of generals with a bunch of ribbons on their shirt.
And you give a general a base in Kazakhstan and just watch as he comes up with reasons why he's got to keep it and got to stay and got to get promoted.
But I think all these parts of the ruling class is central in a way.
I mean, you have to have the generals.
You have to have the corporate interests.
You have to have the Federal Reserve to fund all the nonsense.
You've got to have the politicians grandstanding.
And they all come together in a grand conspiracy.
And that's why they call it we the people.
So we won't see it for exactly what it is, them the people versus the rest of us.
It's very difficult to see this, actually.
This truth is guarded in a way and we're protected from it because of the language of the left and the language of the right, which are in many ways like mirror images of each other, but neither one is really telling the truth about what's going on.
Yeah, very fair point.
So, no, this is a very interesting topic.
I think I'm going to make it the whole topic of my Sunday speech.
I've got it pretty well mapped out.
In fact, it's the subject of my next book.
Oh, great.
You know, there have been quite a few books written recently.
There's one called American Coup by William Arkin, who, not a libertarian at all, but a former Washington Post reporter.
And there's quite a few books like this.
Post 9-11?
Yeah, Post 9-11 about the rise of the homeland security state.
And if you thought we had a national security state after 1947, the homeland security state that has grown up since September 11th, oh, and the national security state, too.
And this is really kind of the Cheney policy.
It's that weird, bastardized, should-be-spelled-different version of privatization of government functions.
It's not a libertarian privatization where the government goes to hell and lets the market take care of it.
It's where the government hires mercenaries to carry out all their dirty work.
Edward Snowden was not an NSA.
He was at Booz Allen Hamilton, right?
That's true enough, yeah.
Working for the NSA.
And they have just contracted out so much of this.
And remember in the Iraq war where Halliburton or, say, Blackwater would kill somebody, and they would say, well, so who's going to prosecute them?
And the American courts would say, well, it's not up to us.
Ask the military.
And the military would say, well, it's not up to us.
Ask the Iraqi courts.
And the Iraqi courts will say, well, if Bush won't give us jurisdiction over Blackwater guys, I guess you're going to have to ask the Department of Justice.
And they're getting away with murder, basically, because no one's really in charge.
Pass the buck.
There is no system set up for any kind of accountability for these guys.
And we have just – it's almost unmeasured.
It's almost as invisible as the rest of the state that's been built in secrecy since September 11th.
I don't know what it reminds me of.
As you're talking, it reminds me of very much the way the premodern states functioned.
They were more or less sort of private exploitation agencies.
The king would give certain monopolistic privileges to certain people to go out and collect taxes or wage war or whatever.
And they could do what they want so long as they paid the king some portion of the proceeds.
And then otherwise they would get protection from the king.
But other than that, they weren't really – they didn't really work directly for the king.
And just on – they were more or less hired.
But they were private, private exploitation agencies.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
A little bit of just reverting back to form here.
Because the idea of liberalism is that, no, that's shit.
We should have laws.
And the state should have defined functions and stuff like that.
But, of course, we're living in a post-liberal age in a sense.
The state has become truly total and has been for a while, I would say.
In fact, I kind of resist some of this language about the coup, post-9-11 coup.
Because in many ways it was a follow-up to what everything the state aspired to do before 9-11.
It wasn't as if it was a sudden transformation.
We were once free and now we're not.
You know what the real coup was?
The coup was in getting the American people to repeat the mantra that everything changed.
Go ahead and have your way with me now.
Everything changed.
That was the coup.
Because before that, okay, you know, maybe we've got a crisis.
But this is still America and we still have our constitution.
And to put up with the police state.
We still believe in liberty and justice, right?
And then, no, everything changed.
Liberty and justice are now last on the list.
Now martial law has to be a permanent state of being.
Basically, yeah.
All right.
That's the music.
I'm done.
Thanks, everybody.
Live audience.
Yay, Scott.
I really like having a live audience.
It's great.
You make me very nervous.
But I appreciate it.
We'll see here in just a minute.
Thanks for listening.