04/01/15 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Oy vey.
Eh, sitting here arguing with Justin Raimondo on Twitter about Rand Paul.
What's to argue?
He's the worst person on Earth.
Okay?
He's horrible on everything.
Well, luckily Sheldon Richman's on Skype, so I didn't have to stop and call him and give you guys dead air.
Hi, Sheldon.
How are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us.
Everybody, Sheldon Richman, he's about as libertarian as a man can be.
He's over at SheldonRichman.com, and he's good on everything.
I don't ever have to argue with him about Rand Paul.
Anyway, so listen, you wrote this great thing about how our government is the cause of any terrorist threat, however overblown, as you stipulate, that the American people face, and how the more they fix things, the more hundreds of thousands of people die all across the Middle East.
How they've, in a word, ruined the 21st century so far, the government of the USA has.
And you say in there, you know, maybe if we didn't have them, we wouldn't need them.
Since, of course, their excuse for us needing them is protecting us from all the enemies that they create for us.
Touche.
But then, and this comes up from time to time, as you know, oh yeah, well what's the alternative to having a government?
Because ever since Westphalia, everybody knows that you've got to have 190-something nation-states in the world with their guns drawn at each other's heads all the time, including thermonukes, I guess, and whatever.
And by the way, you know, my neighbor a few houses down, he kidnapped some little girls just the other day.
So obviously we need cops to prevent things like that, and it wasn't the government that made him a criminal, he's just a criminal.
And they let him go, by the way, the cops did.
But anyway, that doesn't undermine my wonderful statist argument.
We need government because bad countries and bad politicians in other countries and bad people who live in our neighborhoods, Sheldon, and so how could you possibly be an anarchist in the face of this real world that we live in, sir?
Yeah, the line about if we didn't have...
I first heard it in terms of lawyers.
If we didn't have lawyers, we wouldn't need them.
So I thought I'd hijack it and put it to political use.
Anyway, the state has gotten us into all kinds of messes, and for intrinsic reasons, politicians, people who run governments, no matter what the form of government it may be, are always going to be essentially unaccountable.
So the people that run governments essentially can pretty much do what they want.
There's only minor accountability.
The consequences are not very great.
Most people aren't paying attention.
They're too busy with their lives, especially when it comes to foreign affairs.
They don't know the history.
They don't know the esoteric information that would enable them to make better judgments.
A lot of stuff is simply done in secrecy, as we know, and you don't find out until years later.
So the governments have the potential to be rogue, especially if they're the governments of a, quote, great power like the United States or any others you can name, Russia or Iran, even Iran, all of them.
They just can't be trusted.
So your question is, your point might be, well, okay, I can grant that, but how could we be the only ones who give up the state when everyone else has one?
And there I would say at least if we gave up the state, we wouldn't have the U.S. government doing what it's been doing at least since World War II, and probably you can go back before that, in the Middle East, where it's been making enemies and thereby endangering the Americans.
So not only endangering and killing foreigners, but I talked about endangering Americans because, as I say in the beginning of the article, the politicians tell us that their first duty is to protect the American people.
Okay, let's take them on their own terms.
If that's true, why are they constantly embroiling the American people in these sectarian and tribal and political and ethnic and other kinds of disputes that come back to haunt us through blowback and what you call backdraft and other things?
So we can't tolerate this anymore.
The government is a troublemaker.
It gets us into trouble.
It doesn't protect us.
Could we do better without it?
Well, I can't give you a blueprint for how a stateless society would look because that's the very point.
It's spontaneous order.
It's bottom-up, just like you couldn't tell me what a free market in computers would look like before it happens.
I can't tell you what shape exactly private protection would take, but it's going to be better than the state because the state serves the ruling class, serves privileged interests, and they don't give a damn about the rest of us, which is why they don't mind imperiling us.
Well, yeah, I mean, no doubt about that.
I can't think of an enemy that wasn't created by the American establishment one way or the other.
Even going back to Hitler, I mean, for crying out loud, even the Nazis were bankrolled by the American power elite, those who own the state, the bankers most closely tied to the state, even going back that far.
Len Lease to Joe Stalin to help him turn back the Nazi tide, and then turn around and make him the biggest enemy in the world to justify the whole Cold War and on and on like that.
But, you know, come on.
If we didn't have a monopoly on power in D.C. to prevent another one from replacing it, it would be replaced by another one of people maybe even worse.
At least we get to vote for these guys, Sheldon.
Get to cast your one vote.
Makes a big difference.
Well, a couple things about that.
For one thing, if you have a state, especially a national state rather than, say, highly decentralized, although I wouldn't want a lot of little states either, but that would be preferable to a highly decentralized one.
There's a, you know, if somebody were outside, wanted to take over, what would it be?
It would be different since it wouldn't be this single land mass under one jurisdiction.
But if somebody wanted to take that over, they'd have to actually conquer it like household by household.
There would be nothing to surrender, right?
You know, the British took – didn't take very long to conquer India because it had a very well-developed political structure and class.
You know, put some – buy off some people, put them in charge, and voila, they could rule India for a long time.
It took them much longer to conquer Ireland, which was fairly anarchistic, and you had to basically conquer it one clan at a time.
Now, that doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's a heck of a lot more difficult, and just because one little group may surrender, that doesn't mean the next one next door is surrendering, and they may continue to resist.
So I think there's – that sort of decentralized defense can be much more effective, and you have to wonder who today is going to try to invade what we call the United States and take it over anyway.
The Russians?
The Iranians?
You know, say what you want about them.
I don't think that's on their mind or that they believe they'd be even capable of doing that.
In fact, just yesterday, Yossi Melman, the Israeli intelligence analyst, wrote a story for the Jerusalem Post saying there is no existential threat to Israel, much less the United States of America.
If anybody wants to look at a map of just the size – and, of course, there's the great – I think it's true, it's apocryphal anyway – the Japanese general who said, invade America?
Not in a million years, are you kidding me?
There would have been a rifle behind every blade of grass, and he wasn't talking about the army.
He was talking about the Californians.
Okay, but now, so what about the creeps in my neighborhood?
There are creeps in my neighborhood, and just because the cops let this guy get away with kidnapping two little girls the other day, I don't know.
I guess it's a self-refuting point.
I'm an anarchist too, Sheldon.
I'm not doing a very good job of playing devil's advocate here, but give me a minute.
We've got to take this stupid break, and then we'll be back with the great Sheldon Richman.
He's going to talk about free market security in our land, in our time, right after this.
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No, seriously, the guy three houses down from me kidnapped two little girls the other night, and then he kept them for like two hours.
Apparently he didn't touch them or kill them.
He brought them back to a street full of flashing red and blue lights, if you believe that.
But then they let him go.
The fact that he was white and the little girls that he abducted were black, oh, that probably has nothing to do with it, right?
Can't imagine if it had been the other way around.
But anyway, let's pretend for a minute that he was black and the little girls that he abducted were white.
Then he would have gone to prison and then I would have had an argument to make to Sheldon Richman right here.
Like, hey, Sheldon, who's going to arrest and prosecute the kidnappers?
If we don't have a monopoly county police or city police jurisdiction, if we don't have judges who have the right to preclude other judges from deciding, they get to decide and put people like that in cages where they belong.
Well, this anecdote you tell leads me to think, and I didn't know this, that you lived in a little anarchist community.
I didn't know that.
So you're making a complaint about anarchism because some guy got away with kidnapping some girls.
So I don't understand when people raise an objection to anarchism by pointing to an example that occurred.
Well, in a context where there are states all over the place, I don't quite get the logic of that.
You didn't mean it that way, but that often happens.
Well, you know, there is some there is some past examples we can look at that have been written about by John Hasnas, great libertarian legal scholar and and Bruce Benson, another libertarian legal scholar, about there have been sort of pockets of history where there was no centralized state.
And yet criminal justice was was carried out.
In fact, it was more carried out in terms of reimbursing or making restitution to the victim rather than sending money to the king, which is what happens today.
Right.
The fine goes to the state and a person may get in prison, but the victim usually gets nothing.
That's an afterthought.
The victim may be able to sue in civil court, but the burden is there then on the victim.
So crime wasn't really crime.
It was it was tort and it was seen as not a not a breaking of the king's peace or the of society's peace, but of wronging a particular person.
And so the whole thrust of the system was to how to make that person whole as much as possible.
And in the case of murder, where, of course, the victim is gone, the heirs or the family of the victim, there would be some form of restitution to that person.
And just like today, we have wrongful death awards, although that's handled again, handled in civil court separate from the criminal court.
So the point is, people do figure out a way to do this.
We seem to know the basic premise here that I'm challenging is that and it's funny because libertarians don't accept this in other cases, that somehow if it weren't for the politicians in the state, we'd all just be sitting around, you know, twiddling our thumbs saying, gosh, I don't we don't know what the heck to do.
We're just going to sit here until, you know, somebody does something for us.
That's not what happens.
People get up and form mutual aid societies and insurance companies and organizations that vouch for individuals.
So you know who you're dealing with and you know that if this person that you're dealing with wrongs you, you there are procedures for you file to file a grievance and a complaint against that person, which then gets heard.
I mean, libertarians ought to be reading about the law merchant, which was the completely private commercial law that was generated in the after the fall of the Roman Empire by international traders who didn't want to go into international courts because because if you were a foreigner, you didn't trust them.
So merchants set up basically their own courts and their own body of law, which we still actually have today.
It eventually became, you know, commercial law, but it worked very well.
Lots of scholars have studied this.
Pete Leeson and George Mason and other economists have studied this.
Political scientists have studied it.
And people are able to carry out those so-called legitimate functions of the state without a monopoly state.
It's in there in the history.
Yeah, I guess we're just not supposed to pay attention to that.
I saw somebody tweeted earlier today.
I'm paging down to find the quote.
It was a quote from Rothbard along the lines of how a heart.
Oh, here it is.
States always needed intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good and inevitable.
That really is kind of the bottom line, huh?
It's all just one big PR campaign.
Right.
And of course, the story that everybody learns from from school, of course, the government controls the schools.
No, no coincidence there is that the reason we have government was because there was this crying need that wasn't being served by the people, by the general, you know, the people in general.
But if in fact, if you go back and look at the history of states, the states are the result of conquest.
And and by by rulers who who decide rather than, you know, rob the people and move on to the next group, it makes much more sense to rob the people.
Stay where you are and continually rob them and protect them from rival robbers.
And they'll then they become grateful to you because you're protecting them.
Meanwhile, you're robbing them every day to finance all this and doing other stuff like renting monopolies and other kinds of privileges to benefit the your friends, the ruling class.
That's how states arise.
It wasn't that people sat around saying, oh, what are we going to do?
You know, we can't we can't protect ourselves.
Let's stay.
It wasn't.
And it wasn't Thomas Hobbes's story either.
So it wasn't a social contract that, you know, that ever happened.
It was the result of conquest.
Yeah.
And that's that great article.
Anatomy of the state was going out earlier.
I was arguing with a so-called libertarian, a conservative about the cops.
And he was saying, well, they're you know, they're just here to protect us and this and that.
But really, where they come from is they're the slave catchers.
And they're the guys who they're the enforcers of.
And I sent him that one where where Rothbard says that the state itself, it's just organized criminality writ large.
They really are nothing but a gang.
And, you know, it's funny because whenever I say I'll be talking about anti-government stuff, about the worst stuff, the wars, police states, innocent people laying in their corpses, laying in puddles of blood on the side of the road for no reason.
And people say to me, oh, you just hate every little old lady that works down at the Social Security office.
You deny that any person who works for government could possibly be a good person.
Anyway, Jesus, I'm in the middle of an argument with Jus Ramondo on Twitter right now as we speak about this.
Oh, anyone that you disagree with about anything is a bad person.
No, just Rand Paul is.
Doesn't mean every one of every member of his staff that I condemn them.
But the Senate itself.
Yeah.
And he's the perfect example when the son of Ron Paul can't help but be absolutely horrible in the United States Senate.
That's time to call the whole project off, if you ask me.
Well, because the incentives, that's the way the incentives work.
You know, I've said many times Ron could say the kinds of things he said without inhibition, because he knew he wasn't going to win the nomination or and therefore he was never going to be president.
But Rand Paul, actually, I assume, I don't know, apparently thinks he can.
And therefore he can't blow the opportunity he thinks he has by alienating a lot of other people.
He's got to give this muddy message that he's been giving, which is not even becoming, you know, not even muddy anymore.
Now it's sort of just pure intervention.
You know, he signed the cotton letter.
He voted for higher military spending.
So it's not even a mixed message anymore.
It's a it's like a pure pro empire message because precisely because he thinks he can win.
And the incentives are you got to gather constituencies.
So you got to you got you can't say things that are going to make people mad.
And, you know, Ron Paul didn't mind making people mad.
Right.
Yeah, he was happy to.
I mean, if it came to it.
Right.
It wasn't his point.
But if you were and and, you know, and well, whatever, we all remember 08 and 12, especially.
He told people what they didn't want to hear all the damn time on the right and the left and everything else.
And let the heavens fall.
But now.
So I don't know why these 10 minute segments just seem to go by in five or six to me now.
Sheldon, but can we spend the rest of time talking about some good reading material?
What would you have people look at if they really want to understand anarcho capitalism or, you know, whatever it is you want to call it?
Yeah, I don't call it anarcho capitalism.
That's a whole other talk about why I don't like the word capitalism.
I think there's good reasons to avoid that word.
I like the free market, not capitalism.
I would think a very good place to start.
It's very accessible.
It's not a very long book.
And it is like a written for the lay reader is Gary Shardia's The Conscience of an Anarchist.
You can find that through Amazon or other places.
Definitely worth looking at.
Rothbard's material is good.
I mean, I wouldn't make that all you read because there's been much more that has been written about on this subject since, you know, since Rothbard wrote.
I would look at Bruce Benson's The Enterprise of Law, which I've already mentioned.
He also will discuss the in that book discusses the the law merchant and other other anarchistic episodes in history.
John Hasnas has some very good papers on online.
When I would look up his and he's a he's a law professor.
I would look up his paper toward a theory of empirical natural rights.
Google that and you'll find that that's definitely worth reading.
You can find work, great work by Roderick Long online where he's answering objections to anarchism.
Just put in Roderick Long objections to anarchism.
I think it's like 10 different objections.
And that will lead you to other things.
All these things have have references and you can follow the trail and read a whole lot about it.
There's a huge and growing literature on this subject.
All right.
That's Sheldon Richman at Sheldon Richman dot com.
Thanks so much for your time again, Sheldon.
Great to talk to you.
All right.
We'll be right back.
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