All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is my website.
Keep all my radio archives there.
About 30, wait, 2,500 interviews going back to 2003 there, ScottHorton.org.
And our next guest on the show is Lou Rockwell.
He's the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
And of course, he keeps website lourockwell.com and its great blog.
And he wrote the book, The Left, The Right, and The State as well.
Welcome back, Lou.
How are you doing?
Scott, great to be with you.
And I'm so glad you're back on the air.
Well, thanks.
It's good to be here.
I've made this change to the No Agenda radio network, and it seems new and interesting and very exciting to me so far.
So I guess we'll see how it goes.
Well, thanks very much.
It's great.
Great.
All right.
So I have an important question for you.
The state, do they inflate so that they can wage war, or do they wage war so that they can inflate?
Well, sort of a chicken and egg question.
I mean, maybe I should say the reptile in the egg question.
It's a, you know, these are their, if we think of the favorite, what are the favorite activities of the people who rise in a state?
First of all, there's killing.
I mean, they like war.
We should all, this is hard for regular people to understand that there are actually people who like killing.
I mean, it's not only serial killers and private criminals, it's government criminals.
And they like waging war.
They like sending off young men to die.
They like bombing cities.
They actually get a charge out of it.
These are very bad people.
So there's that.
And then, of course, they like stealing.
Murray Rothbard always said, if you want to think of the government properly of the state, think of it as a gang of thieves writ large.
So how does the government steal?
It steals in two ways, leaving aside regulatory theft, which is maybe another whole subject, but in sort of direct theft, they tax, or they just put the gun against your head and demand some portion of the money you've earned or the money you've saved.
And then there's also the question of counterfeiting, or rather, counterfeiting, as it's called in the private sector, monetary policy, as it's called when the state does it.
And so that's, of course, inflation, where it's not actually printing up new notes, but you can think of it that way.
It's mostly, of course, digital these days.
But it's morally no different from the guy with a printing press in his basement printing up $100 bills, except it has far worse of an effect, because that guy has a bad effect.
He depreciates the money of other people in the local community and defrauds business people and so forth.
But the government is able to affect the whole world in this way.
So these are the state...
Hayek made the point about the state that the worst rise to the top in private society, the best tend to rise to the top.
Now, this is not always true, but on the margin and for the most part, the most successful salesman becomes head of sales.
And the guy is the best automotive engineer, although the more and more that companies are regulated, this is hindered.
But in a free market, the best automotive engineer is the guy who rises up to be in control of automotive engineering at the car plant.
So this is true, and the guy who is the best baker, customers come to him who's serving the best rolls and bread at the best prices.
Although from a primal standpoint, you shouldn't be going there, but that's not a good example for me to use.
But in the government, it's the worst people who get to the top, the most demagogic, the best liars, the backstabbers, the people who you just don't want as your next door neighbor, you don't want your daughter marrying one, these politicians, these are the worst type of people.
And so that's the state.
So the question for the libertarian would like to think the question for the average American is, do you really want these people having more control over you?
Indeed, do you want them having the same amount of control?
Too many Americans seem perfectly happy to be looted and ordered around by these people who are very much their moral inferiors.
And of course, they're told that they're their moral superiors, but in fact, we have to only think about how any of us think about bureaucrats that, you know, the DMV or politicians or whatever, virtually nobody has a good opinion of them except, of course, people who are paid to serve them like those in the media or big academia and so forth.
But regular people don't have a good opinion of these people.
But too often, they still have a good opinion of government.
So it's our job to try to, of course, diminish that opinion.
And it is the only way that we have a chance to fight these people, because we can't use violence.
I would say from a practical standpoint, of course, we can't use violence because they've got all the weapons and the guns and the atomic bombs and so forth.
But from a moral standpoint, this is not our, this is not, these are not the weapons of peace.
These are the weapons of war, killing and murder and so forth.
So I would say our only choice from a practical and from a moral standpoint is trying to persuade people to, in effect, withdraw their consent from the state.
Because the state, Edwin de la Boétie, the great 16th century French libertarian thinker, pointed this out, and David Hume and Mises and Rothbard and many other people subsequently, because the state is a tiny minority and must be a tiny minority so they can live it up off the rest of us, the ruled is always a much larger group than the rulers.
If we withdraw our consent, if we refuse to go along in a non-violent, peaceful way, their days are numbered.
So we, they seem like they're impenetrable, it seems like a fortress that nobody could ever challenge.
But they're constantly terrified and because they're terrified, of course, they can commit great crimes.
We only have to look at the fact that most recently the Department of Homeland Security has bought enough hollow point .40 caliber ammunition to put five bullets in every American.
Now, why are they buying all that ammo and why are they buying full body armor suits for themselves?
What are they planning?
Is it a coup?
Or are they just terrified of us?
Or is it just the police state is expanding and they're planning to take more and more action against us?
But this is a, we're in a dangerous situation and if we don't just want to sit down, lay down, hand the government, your kids, your wallet, your life, your freedom, if you're not happy with that, then you have to resist, peacefully resist, what they're doing.
And it's definitely a crisis situation.
Yeah.
On that one, I guess the best case scenario would be it's simply a welfare check to some millionaire ammunition manufacturer, right?
Yeah.
Send him to Barbados and send him a check, sure.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, I do that at the Congress, too, and all the bureaucrats.
I'd love to see the whole government go on permanent vacation and we'd just pay them.
That would be, of course, a fantastically great situation.
But these people aren't, they're not like normal people.
They don't actually just want to relax and have a vacation or whatever.
They love crushing people.
They love putting their boot on your throat.
They love ordering people around.
They live for ordering people around.
They love it when they can order an entire town to evacuate because of some weather trouble or whatever.
They live for that kind of stuff, or they live for being able to order everybody in Baghdad to evacuate, or they love to drop bombs.
They love to punish people.
Right now, we see the U.S. going bananas over Julian Assange.
Why is that?
Because he put out damaging information about the government.
Well, not actually damaging to it, except, of course, in the public mind.
They can't stand it if they're cut down a notch by people who tell the truth about them.
And they can't stand being dissed.
They want everybody salaming them.
As Mencken said, the government not only wants to make us obey, they want to make us want to obey.
So it's the job of the libertarian to make people not want to obey, even from a prudent standpoint.
Of course, you oftentimes do have to obey, just like if the mugger comes up to you on the street, puts the gun to your head, and says, you know, I want your wallet.
It's probably not a time for a discussion of property rights.
So too with the government.
I mean, if they've got the gun to your head, then you may very well want to comply from a prudential standpoint, but you're never going to mentally comply.
You're never going to give them your heart and your soul and your mind.
They want those things, however.
They really are like the devil.
I mean, they're very, you know, imagine Janet Napolitano ruling us, and that's the type of person who rises to the top in the U.S. state, or Obama or Romney or, you know, they're all bad people, and they all do not have our interest at heart, shall I put that, you know, very tenderly.
In fact, they only have their own interest at heart, and that's all right, but not if you're intending to use violence and the threat of violence to bring about the fulfillment of your interests.
That's, of course, what's always wrong, and that's, of course, all the government does, is violence or the threat of violence.
If you look at a parking ticket, they're threatening violence against you, and everything the government does, they threaten violence or use violence, and so people go along with that, but we don't have to go along with it.
It is possible to educate ourselves, educate others, learn the principles of liberty, and start to resist, and they hate it when anybody doesn't, you know, bow down to them, when people refuse to vote, when they refuse to salam them, when they, you know, give them a look of a miscance, they can't stand it, and so Hobbes, the evil Hobbes, said that the thing the government can't stand the most, he talked about the prince, the prince's most damaging dangerous thing to the prince, he said, is laughter and ridicule.
He said the prince can put up with hatred, he can put up with anything else, any negative emotion, but if he's laughed at, that is dangerous to him, and of course that's right.
Of course I would say wonderful, right, but you know, dangerous to the prince, wonderful for the people.
So we should laugh at these people, we should ridicule them, we should learn about them, we should learn about the principles of economics and history and political philosophy and so forth, so we have a firm grounding, but we, you know, we don't have to salute, we don't have to salute these people, or there'll come a time when of course they're gonna put us all in a line and put uniforms on us and order us to salute them.
So that's the way things are headed, and if, you know, one of the reasons it's great to have your voice available again on the station without, how shall I say this, a million commercials, a million ugly commercials, is because your voice is so important in explaining to people why war is wrong and why all the rest of the things the government does to people are counterproductive or just downright evil.
Well, you know, it really does come all the way back down to the way we learn it in elementary school, which is that, well, your money's legit because it's got George Washington and it's the government.
If it had a bank's name on it, it wouldn't have the presumption of legitimacy anyway.
This got George Washington on there, it's green, it's our money, the government's in charge of it, so it's not even in question whether it's fair or not until Ron Paul brings it up to you, something like that.
It's not in question until someone says, but this is the cause of that boom and bust that smashes so many lives and dreams, you know?
Until you are given, explicitly given a reason to doubt at least the presumed legitimacy, at least, even if not of the results, at least of the motivations of those public-spirited people who go into running the government for you or whatever, then you could really live your whole life believing them.
You know what I mean?
There are people, old people who are going to die in old folks' homes today who still believe in FDR to this day, you know?
No, Scott, you're so right about the government schools of ethics.
Of course, the purpose of the government schools is to convince you that without the government, you know, you wouldn't have any clothes, you wouldn't have any food, people would try to sell you dangerous medicines, it would rain too much or it wouldn't rain enough, or, you know, whatever.
Protect you from all the shadowy bad guys all over the world or maybe in your own town who are trying to get you.
Thank goodness there's the government.
And that's the purpose of the schools.
And it's also, of course, at the same time where the public schools want to destroy all independent thinking, all critical thinking, because they don't want anybody thinking outside the channels of the government.
So you're allowed to agree with Obama, you're allowed to agree with Romney, but that's about the width of the range of opinion you're allowed to have.
In other words, no range of opinion at all.
Although it does seem like the presumption of legitimacy, it's as rigidly enforced as it is, you know, on the TV or whatever, and in that corridor between New York and DC, it seems like, and maybe I'm not the best judge of this, but it seems like people are starting to see through this, especially with a campaign like this, where the two candidates are just so similar, everybody, it's not just me, everybody mixes their names up and calls one the other and that kind of thing.
It's just so obvious now.
So I don't know, I'm kind of torn on that, it just depends on what time of day I am, it is, how optimistic or pessimistic I am.
But I want to get back to my original question about central banking and war, because I had this theory that maybe this would have been the policy one degree or another, maybe it makes no difference or what, I don't know, but it seems like after the dot com bubble, they wanted to go ahead and inflate a housing bubble, but the real motivation behind turning the interest rates all the way down and the money machines on full blast was the double dip super recession that we were destined to have after the September 11th attack on downtown New York.
And I don't know for a fact if there was a political meeting between Greenspan and Bush on this or whether there needed to be, but I remember that the bank started announcing 0.0% interest rates for all kinds of different things within a couple of weeks after September 11th.
And it seemed to me that the real reason that they inflated the housing bubble to the degree that they did was to make the wars seem free.
Because if they had had a limited strike on Al-Qaeda, you know, Egyptian and Saudi friends of Osama in Afghanistan and left it at that and wrapped the thing up by Christmas 2001, they wouldn't have needed a big bubble.
They could have done that in the middle of a recession and people would have said, OK, you know, whatever it takes to get that guy fine.
But they wanted to go to Iraq and then obviously they want to continue the policy they're doing now.
Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iran, everyone else.
And you can't do that if you raise everybody's taxes.
So maybe it's just a correlation without the causation.
That's what I want out of you is whether you really think that there is the causation that that's where this giant housing bubble that destroyed so much what some people say half of the on paper wealth in the world anyway, was destroyed in the collapse of this thing.
I say it was all about the terror war so that they could get away with having extra wars.
Lou, what do you think?
Well, you know, Scott, you make a great point.
And if you go back to the first central bank, it was the Bank of England in the late 17th century.
The guys in this time, it was entirely a private bank versus, you know, fascist public private operation like the current Central Bank of the United States.
And the men who set it up said to the king, you know, you can't fund your the rotten House of Commons isn't willing to vote you the taxes.
You need to fight all your wonderful wars.
So here's an idea.
Let us print up the money and then you'll have all the money you need for your wars.
And by the way, we'll make a little bit too.
And that's what was the argument for the first central bank to fight wars.
So I think that, you know, I would say the causation, however, goes in both directions because, of course, the big banks and other financial institutions and the government itself benefits tremendously from inflation.
But also, of course, they want the war.
So I think they want to enrich themselves.
They want to enrich their friends.
They want to increase their glory and their power.
And so the two key things that increase the state's power, central banking and war.
So, you know, I think they have central banking so they can have wars and they have wars so they can have central banking.
But they would have even if, you know, there are central banks in countries that aren't belligerent like Sweden or whatever.
So I think they would still have a central bank.
And even if they didn't have a central bank, they'd still be fighting wars.
I mean, certainly governments fought wars before central banking.
What central banking did was make possible world wars, these long-lasting, huge, regional, unbelievably destructive wars of the 20th century.
That was made possible by central banking.
And also, as you say, when Congress wants to have another war or wants to agree with the president to have another war, there's none of the discussion that used to have to take place, where's the money coming from?
Because it seems to be exactly right.
It seems to be all free.
There's no discussion in Congress, except by Ron Paul, about what the economic effects of this sort of thing, because it's just free, just print it up.
Although, of course, I always wonder, well, why don't they just abolish all our taxes too and just print up that as well?
Because that's their grip on your collar.
That's why.
That, of course, is the key reason, because it controls us.
And also, they want every dime they can, so they want to inflate every dime, they want to borrow every dime, and they want to loot every dime, steal every dime from you in the form of taxation.
Madness.
And now, here's the thing about that too, though.
If I had to guess, I would think that the guys at Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns would still like to have a Lehman Brothers and a Bear Stearns.
So how could these presumed masters of the universe, these billionaires who run these investment houses, how can they be so blind?
They've never even heard of Ludwig von Mises or what?
I mean, come on.
Well, you know, they're all, I think it's true that they're all Keynesians.
I mean, Keynesianism is not only the economics of state power, as Joe Salerno puts it.
In some sense, Roger Garrison makes this point, in some sense, a Keynesianized economy turns everybody into a Keynesian because that's the sort of mindset you have to have to deal successfully with the government and with the banking system and the Fed and so forth.
So the people who rise to the top of these institutions and who are, of course, aching on the government to do its evil work for themselves, also, they believe in it all.
My guess is they do believe in it all.
Certainly, it's made them rich.
Why shouldn't they believe in it?
It made them rich and powerful.
Of course, some of them, as you say, can go out of business, and I think it's a little bit like the Gambinos and the Bananos.
There are real fights among people in the establishment, and sometimes one gang loses versus another gang.
One thing they're agreed on, however, is looting the rest of us.
In other words, Goldman's men in the government say, oh, go ahead and let Bear Stearns fall.
We're not going to bail them out.
In fact, we're going to pretend like we agree with Lou about principle and how we shouldn't bail out banks, and then we're going to change our mind in a week when it comes to Goldman and their allies.
Yeah, or Goldman said, let's get rid of Lehman.
Who knows, right?
Who knows the personal and intense hatreds and also the corporate interests in these gigantic corporations that are allied with the state in the current fascist American economy?
I don't know who paid off the most, who bought the most politicians, who funneled the most money to Henry Paulson's private bank accounts and so forth.
I don't know.
I mean, how does this work?
It's a criminal enterprise.
That we know for sure.
The exact methods of the criminality at any one time, that's the job for the analyst, the observer, the historian.
Well, in so many of these issues, it really comes down to the question of stupidity or the plan because it would have to be a brilliant plan to be this stupid on purpose kind of a thing.
I remember there's a great video, I'm sure you've seen it, of Peter Schiff speaking to the Mortgage Bankers Union or something.
I don't know if they have a union.
Mortgage Bankers Association in 2006, telling them, you're all wrong.
You all believe these democratic politics that make no sense whatsoever, or economics that makes no sense.
Here's real economics and here's why you guys are screwed.
And then one guy in the audience, I think speaking for the entire audience says, well, this is just crazy.
I mean, what are you saying?
I should just slip my wrist?
And Schiff says, well, sell your houses as fast as you can.
That's all I'm telling you.
But he had this whole crowd and he's speaking, if you watch that thing, it's just pure common sense.
That's Austrian economics?
I thought it was something fancy.
Apparently, it's just common sense.
And he's sitting there explaining it to them and they're absolutely incredulous.
I mean, these guys are at least all millionaires, if not, I'm sure there are a few billionaires in the room.
And they're looking at him with their arms crossed, shaking their head.
No way.
This guy, he's just one of those always bears, you know.
But if you take any economics in school, if you read any economic publication, if you listen to the economic commentary in the news and the networks and the Wall Street Journal and so forth, it's all Keynesian.
I mean, they may differ with each other once in a while, but I mean, basically, it's all Keynesian economics.
And yeah, they all believe it.
They can't believe it when they're shocked when somebody, as you say, is telling them the common sense.
And if any of them listened to Peter, they did very well.
I guess maybe not most of them didn't.
But yes, this is, the bubble was horrendous.
And there obviously are other bubbles right now, whether it's in student loans and just many, the government is so damaging.
I mean, if you just look at, you know, Obamacare, but what it all began with Medicare, which was the Republicans defend every bit as much as the Democrats do, and yet it was Medicare.
If you look at the, if you look at a chart, look at the CPI, these are fallible constructs, of course.
But if you look at the CPI and you look at medical costs, until 1964, 65, when Medicare came out, they were pretty much the same.
Then medical costs take off like a rocket.
So what has government subsidization of, you know, allegedly taking care of the old people and so forth, they have made it impossible for regular people to pay for medical care.
They've driven the prices so high for the benefit of the doctors, the benefit of the big drug companies, the benefit of the government itself, and of course, the hospital industry and so forth.
But the patient gets screwed.
And it's the same with student loans.
It used to be possible to work your way through college, sounds like science fiction today.
Of course, they've, by helping the student, quote unquote, helping the student with loans and grants and so forth, what they've done is they've driven college, college education out of the price range of regular people.
So they have to go heavily into debt, which has other problems.
On the other hand, the administrators, the faculty, the guys building the college buildings and so on, hey, they're living it up.
They're having a great time.
It's never been so great as for them.
The student, however, gets screwed.
So this is the way the government operates.
They have an excuse that they're doing something.
But they're actually hurting the people without power.
And everything is done for themselves and for their allies in the private sector.
Again, it's a fascist, it's a fascist government.
It's a union of big government, big corporations against the rest of us.
That's the American government and the American economic system at the top.
And that's Romney as well as Obama, and it was Bush and it was Clinton and, you know, good on the list of the other creeps who've been in the Oval Office.
Well, now, Lou, give us a word about Ron Paul, because it seems to me anyway that he's done as much as any man ever, or maybe all of us combined, toward getting the American people by the millions to see through these constructs and to finally understand some of these very basic issues as they sound, the way you put them anyway.
Nobody, there's never been anybody like Ron Paul.
I mean, certainly nobody in American political history, I don't believe in it ever in the world.
Like Ron Paul, what he's done in terms of educating young people especially, but lots of older people too, in the truths of war and peace, Austrian economics, central banking, all the various issues that confront us today.
He has changed the hearts and minds of millions of people, and not only in this country, around the world.
He's got huge popularity around the world, and who has ever brought as many people to libertarianism as Ron Paul?
I mean, there's just nobody else in the county.
Now, of course, as he would be the first one to say, he's built on other great people, whether it's Murray Rothbard, and Lupita Nyong'o, and Henry Hazlitt, and Hans Senholtz, and you go down the list of all the great people that we've all learned from.
But his magic, I mean, his magic, he's a magical teacher of the truth.
And I think and hope that he's going to continue, and in fact, do much more of it once he's out of politics, once this whole convention in Tampa and so forth is over with, and after his final part of his congressional term, when he's free at last in January.
And I think we're going to see some amazing educational initiatives from him to keep this up and to try to teach more young people and to try to radicalize and educate people all over the world about the truth.
We have to know this is not just being interested in ancient Egyptian archaeology or whatever, which maybe is extremely fascinating.
But these things we have to know about, are our kids or our grandkids going to have any future at all?
Are they going to live in Nazi America?
I mean, there are tremendous issues for liberty and for prosperity, for decency that are ahead and Ron Paul continues to be the leader.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Lou Rockwell.
His website is lourockwell.com.
And check out the great blog as well as his own podcast show there at lourockwell.com.
Also Mises.org.
That's the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
All things Austrian economics, I'm guessing millions of text pages for free there of educational materials.
Mises.org.
Thank you so much, Lou.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show on No Agenda Radio and we'll be right back.
