07/04/07 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
And joining us now on anti-war radio to discuss what this declaration meant then and what it means today is my good friend Anthony Gregory.
He works at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.
He writes there and also for lurockwell.com, the Mises Institute at mises.org, the Future of Freedom Foundation, Liberty Magazine, the History News Network, the Libertarian Enterprise, Strike the Root, antiwar.com, and on my blog, Stress, at thestressblog.com.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
Hi, Scott.
It's good to be with you on the good old force.
Yeah, happy Independence Day to you, my friend.
Yeah, you too.
By the way, I'm sure glad we got rid of that 1% tax that the Crown was levying upon these people.
Now we're free.
Well, you know, I think most people probably don't know that.
In fact, I think I was brought up under the impression that the colonialists were being forced to pay as much as 3% tax.
You're saying that they were basically being taxed at 1%?
Well, there's an interesting piece on lurockwell.com today by Gary North about the taxes that were levied and how it was actually a repeal of the trade tax from British Tea that inspired the Boston Tea Party because they didn't want British Tea to get this unfair advantage.
But there was also one tax, and I think it was the stamp tax, but it might have been the molasses tax for some little mixed up better right now.
One of the taxes that they were mad about was cut from 3% to 1%.
That was kind of what really upset them because they knew that it was a trick to get more revenue, which, you know, it's really ironic because today a lot of the tax reformers want to, they're always saying if we have this tax, a flat tax or something, then the state can get more revenue from us with less trouble.
Right.
That's the supply side argument, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it was the stamp tax, yeah.
Because it was actually, it was this new duty to cut the tax that also irritated them.
So that's ironic.
But the point, you know, I was just making a joke about how we were dealing with relatively low taxes.
Now, the way they were enforced when they were resisted wasn't exactly good.
But of course, if you resist the IRS or any federal agency today, they're not exactly Jeffersonian in the best sense of the word in how they respond to it.
Well, you know, this thing was written a year after the war had started, more than a year.
And so by the time that this was written, you know, they could say outright that, listen, this guy's burnt our towns to the ground.
He's ravaged our coasts.
He's destroyed the lives of our people.
So, it doesn't say, hey, we don't want to pay our 1% tax anymore in this.
It describes a state of all-out war between the empire and the colonies.
Oh, no, that's true.
And I wouldn't want to minimize what the British government subjected the American colonists to at its worst.
But even before the war started, people were upset about the, there was a period referred to as salutary neglect, where the colonists were more or less left alone by the British crown in the late 17th century, or sorry, late 18th century.
And the Americans were just upset when they started trying to collect taxes, largely after the French Indian War.
So it's true that, you know, they had very real grievances.
And it is very inspiring that for a change, there was a, what I call, there was a moment of clarity in world history, where people did say they had enough.
Well, let's break this into a couple of parts.
I want to spend the most of the time this hour talking about the American empire and all those who should be granted independence from it and America's foreign policy.
But I want to start with, it's not really the point, it's just a rhetorical flourish, I guess.
It's not really the point of the Declaration of Independence, but it's the principles that I think make it most famous and make it, well, most dear to my heart.
And that is the argument that I can't prove it, but it's self-evident to me that I was born free.
And by the way, I'm armed.
So come and tell me I'm not.
And that's basically what it says.
It says, in fact, I believe Jefferson's original phrase was, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.
And Benjamin Franklin said, nah, you know, people will quit believing in God before too long or they'll argue about what's sacred and what isn't.
Let's make it easier.
Let's make it where an atheist can be free to.
Let's hold these truths to be self-evident.
They didn't even try to prove it.
They just said, I say so what?
Yeah, that's true.
And that was brazen.
And of course, the great thing about the Declaration is that it has all of these universal truths, the principles that should apply at any time and in any place.
They're truths about human nature, not just about America.
You know, most nations, of course, are born out of war or conquest or consolidation of power or dissolution, and I wouldn't want to slight any national heritage.
But one really cool thing about the American story is that they did declare these universal truths, it wasn't like, this is our land because of this so-and-so war back 200 years ago and we won.
It was more about these principles that could apply.
It wasn't unique to the people declaring them.
I think people on all sides kind of, they misconstrue, they misunderstand the statement in the first place, and then they deny it.
A lot of times, I think, basically write off the rest of the ideas because they say that it's just not true on its face, that everyone is created equal.
And I think they're just misunderstanding.
That doesn't mean like, what was that novel by Kurt Vonnegut about everybody being forced to wear weights and thick glasses and whatever to force them to all be equal?
It doesn't mean equal in that sense.
Like for example, Anthony Gregory is a better writer than me by far, but what it means is that Anthony and I are both born with the very same natural rights to not be aggressed against.
That's what it means.
It doesn't mean that someone who's born crippled and is going to spend a life in a wheelchair is just as strong as the bodybuilder.
What it means is that he has just as much right to his life as the other guy does.
Sure, yeah.
And of course, I agree with that.
I don't agree with the egalitarian idea of us all being equal, because that's just absurd.
We're obviously all different people.
But of course, we all have equal rights.
We're born with equal rights.
I agree with that.
And it is true, unfortunately, people dismiss the Declaration of Independence.
Hey, let me ask you this, Anthony.
Can you prove it?
Jefferson apparently didn't even think he could prove it.
He just said it was self-evident to him.
Do you have a better argument than that?
To tell you the truth, not really.
I mean, I have my belief.
But I think ultimately, people rely on either some idea of faith or some idea of the fact that when equal rights are respected, it leads to better results.
So that must mean there's something inherently good about rights.
That's what a lot of people believe.
And other people have other ways of looking at it.
But my personal opinion is that it is just something you take to be true.
And that's that.
I mean, we all have to operate with some assumptions.
Of course, there's the natural law tradition, which is very spiritual.
And I ascribe to much of that.
But ultimately, we do have to make an assumption here.
And I believe in it, but I hate to say it, but I personally don't think you can prove it with science, or with what we would call natural science.
It's inherent in the laws of physics.
I think it's just an operating assumption.
And we all operate on such assumptions every day, and I think that's fine.
People know that it's not right to violate other people on some level.
I mean, every culture has had moral standards.
Almost everyone would agree that there are some things that you just shouldn't do.
And they have different reasons for believing it.
But all the natural rights tradition is, or the Jeffersonian tradition, or whatever you want to call it, is taking these views and just trying to apply them consistently and with principle.
I've always thought that this is what defines an American.
When I watch TV and I see people from all over the world, they all look like Americans to me.
Because every kind of person that you can imagine, every description or character that you could draw on a piece of paper or what have you, somebody in that representative sample lives here.
And what we all have in common really, ultimately, is our belief in the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
If we don't have those, then what do we have?
The last war to rally around?
Oh yeah, well, you know, the real beautiful...
America has always had this libertarian strain in its tradition.
And that is the best tradition that unites America.
You're right.
We're not all from the same place or have the same faith or the same national origins or ethnicity.
America is a nation of outcasts and exiled religious heretics and people who were dragged here in chains.
We're kind of the dredges of the world, but we became such a great country, or such a great people, largely because of the freedom we do have and the freedom that unites us in our beliefs.
So I definitely agree with that.
I see all of humankind as my people in that sense, and I do think we all potentially share a respect for freedom.
We should all be respected in our right.
Well and this is, as far as I know, this is why people around the world at least used to like America and used to, I remember when I was a kid, people talking about where they were from, people would say that in America the streets are paved with gold.
It's the ultimate escape to get away from your tyranny, to be that exile and have a place to escape to.
This is the dream come true for people all around the world, even still, even after six and a half years of Dick Cheney mass murdering people.
Well sure, that's why we have such a great, we've drawn such immigration from around the world, and there's always people who don't like that, but there's always been huge waves of immigration.
There were periods where the feds really tried to stop it, or limit it severely.
But that's true, and of course the United States has inspired revolution folks, if you look at all these other declarations and constitutions, many of them have just copied and pasted much of the language of our founding documents.
And we certainly have been an inspiration in showing people the possibilities of commerce and trade and religious tolerance and due process, and all of these great aspects of our liberal tradition have certainly been what has made people think America's best, and also has created the wealth and has allowed for the cultural flowering and the artistic development in the U.S.
These are all also a result of being a free, relatively free country, and those of course have also been very inspirational for much of the world.
I would agree that it was the freedom in America that made so many people admire and love America.
Well, and it seems to me that the amount of freedom that we still have distracts people or convinces them that whatever our country is doing overseas can't really be that bad, because their neighborhood is such a nice place to live.
Lew Rockwell actually wrote this just a few weeks ago.
People think of America's role in the world, they just picture their neighborhood writ large and imagine that that's how America treats the world, basically how they're treated in their own neighborhood, and that that's just not right.
And I want to ask you, Anthony, if you think that after 231 years, that we've become the thing that we swore to destroy?
Well, yes.
We have.
The United States Empire is the worst than the British Empire was.
Certainly for American freedom, it's at least as brutal.
Over time, it's killed millions of people, it's currently occupying 150 countries with 1,000 military bases.
The United States is constantly at war with someone, pretty much constantly, and the U.S. has been intervening in countries, you know, what, hundreds of times?
It's surreal, and this has always been a big problem with the American people in the United States, the freedom at home and the freedom that has been enjoyed by the average American has served to distract Americans and also make them feel very self-righteous about their government.
The idea is, since the United States is so free, we can do whatever we want abroad.
We can kill as many people as we want in the name of freedom because we understand it.
People see the U.S. government as the embodiment of freedom.
Of course, that's the repudiation of everything the American Revolution was supposed to stand for.
It wasn't, we're going to be independent and then we're going to set up a government that's going to take over the world because it'll be the best government.
The most favorable way we could look at the Revolution was a rejection of empire, not as the establishment of a new one that would rule the world better.
In your article on LewRockwell.com today, you say that the idea was that a house divided might be more civil, peaceful, and secure than one kept together by force.
Oh yeah, I mean, that's important.
One thing people don't realize, again, people look at the American Revolution as the beginning of the shining city of the hill, the great country which would come to save the whole world from its own problems and then dominate the globe.
But originally, the whole idea was separating from empire, dissolving a union, destroying a political connection, a political bond, and freeing, and the colonists freeing themselves from the yoke of the British.
But the U.S. has become completely hypocritical about this.
The U.S. pushes other countries around, the U.S. is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, and is now waiving its favor in other countries.
One thing that I like to point out to people is they say that these other countries, which supposedly need American democracy exported there by force, are also not really ready to govern themselves, which is ironic, but they also say that the U.S., when it goes there and fixes things for these people, the U.S. can't just leave.
The people need the U.S. to guide them because they have so many problems.
This is what we did wrong in Afghanistan in the 1990s, was after we helped them fight off the Soviet Union, then we just abandoned them.
Yeah, that's what they say.
That particular action where the U.S. sided with the Islamists against the Soviets kind of kick to a point, because those who think that our empire spreads liberty, because the U.S. will bomb Afghanistan and force them to let women into schools, which, as far as I understand it, has only succeeded in a very, very limited sense, parts of Kabul or whatever.
The idea that since the U.S. is more modern and advanced and liberal and enlightened, it can force these people out of their reactionary custom is kind of exactly the opposite of the idea that the Afghans should have ruled themselves despite their many problems as versus be ruled by the Soviet Union, which also sought to elevate women and bring education and all that stuff.
Of course, the British empire that the colonies rebelled against had this tradition of liberalism, but it was the hypocrisy that a lot of Americans couldn't stand.
The British empire has the rule of law, prides itself on the tradition of the Magna Carta and separation of powers and constitutional government, but then look at the way it treats its colonial subjects.
Americans have always been able to recognize the problem with central power, with central state imperialism, at least when it applies to them, but then, unfortunately, for a long time now, Americans have thought that they were chosen to spread freedom and justice by force.
Of course, the U.S. doesn't just spread freedom by force.
It will force other governments to wage a more aggressive drug war than they would otherwise, force them to comply with American regulation, even copyright law, and to say nothing of the way that freedom is supposedly spread, you know, bombing people and setting up checkpoints and installing and protecting regimes that implement socialist constitutions and Sharia law.
The idea that the U.S. is spreading freedom and democracy is absurd and should be seen by now to be absurd.
Yeah, it would be just the same as if that was the excuse of George III back in the 1770s, right, that, oh, if we let these people be independent, they'll create tyrannies, and we have to keep them free by conquering them.
Yeah, and you know, just as the British, just as America has some freedoms that a lot of other countries don't have, the British had freedoms that its subjects didn't have, and that they didn't want that much.
The British, arguably, you know, some historians think the British were pushing for more religious toleration in parts of its empire than the colonists wanted.
The British, they eventually, they got rid of slavery before the Americans did.
So even if there's some truth to the idea that the British were more liberal than their colony, there's some truth to the idea that Americans have a better sense of liberty than some of the people that our government pushes around.
When you have a government that pushes everyone around in the name of liberty, it poisons the idea of liberty.
It's bad for everyone in the long term.
It's certainly been bad for the American people to have this empire.
I mean, the amount of wealth that's eaten up, the civil liberties that they've trampled.
I mean, last year they got rid of habeas corpus.
Yeah, I want to get back to that point you just made about giving liberty a bad name.
This is something that is definitely true here in the United States and certainly in places like Latin America, where I think if you say businessman capitalist, you know, to the average guy in Latin America, he pictures a Republican politician.
And if you say liberty to a liberal in America right now, they'll say, oh, the liberty for you to kill me, oh, your liberty just to go around raping and murdering and stealing whatever you want.
And that's what liberty means now, right?
It's something you take, taking liberties and things like that.
The entire concept has become, over the last 231 years, completely wrapped up with the idea of the state's so-called enforcement of that liberty.
Oh, yeah.
And this is most true, perhaps, with the concept of free enterprise and free trade.
The government, you know, you've got all these international managed trade agencies that have given free trade a bad name.
The U.S. has been behind that.
But no, that's absolutely true.
I think most people still don't think liberty is a bad thing, abstractly understood.
But I think that it's worth noting that the government sees liberty as something worthy of co-opting and claiming for itself.
Right.
And in advertising, right, like every kind of laundry soap or anything like that, if they can put the word something free on there somewhere, that's worth an extra one percent or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People like liberty.
But, you know, I don't know how many people really understand what liberty means.
You talk to some conservatives about the liberty of someone to, you know, smoke marijuana or do other drugs and not be hauled off into a cage, and they'll think that's going too far.
But you know, the American colonists, most of them would have thought it was completely nuts that some state, to say nothing of some state hundreds or thousands of miles away, should have any say as to what you could do to your own body like that, I mean, to what you can put in your body.
It's just absurd.
So, of course, conservatives who might use the word liberty more favorably and more often than liberals, they don't really understand it, most of them, and of course, liberals like to talk about civil liberty, but often they don't even apply that to, say, the right to bear arms, and they certainly don't apply it across the board to economic liberty.
Well and I think that's a basic misunderstanding, and I'm glad you mentioned that, because that's a pet peeve of mine.
Civil rights, civil rights, civil rights.
Well, what about just rights?
I mean, civil rights means that we were born free, we created a government to protect our rights, and as part of that, we came up with this arrangement where, for example, we can't be denied the vote, okay?
That's a civil right.
But my right to not be stabbed to death by you, for example, exists with or without the law.
Yeah, and you know, I know that the legal theorists like to draw the distinction between civil rights and civil liberties, liberties being negative rights, rights to be left alone from the government, mostly, civil rights being things the government grants.
But there is a sense in which most Americans think their rights come from the government.
You know, the government is what gave us these rights.
Thank God that our government gave us the right to speak, and the right to bear arms, and the right to be secure.
And if they want to take it away, or take part of it away, well, why should we complain?
They're the ones who gave it all to us to begin with.
Yeah, well, I have to...
Oh, go ahead.
Oh, that's the new story.
Oh, incidentally, I see that the TSA is beefing up the airline security for the Fourth of July.
Oh, geez.
So that's...
All right, but no, they're sending here swarms of armed agents who can just cut our substance.
Yeah, yeah, to harass our people and eat out our substance.
Now, so listen to your point about the premise that the government gives us our rights.
And this is a mistake that, you know, experts make.
This is like, you know, I think the false premise that so many liberals base their understanding of the Constitution and the powers of the government on.
But I have here the Bill of Rights.
And I don't know why this is, Anthony, but it's at usinfo.state.gov.
That's the one that I can find on the internet that includes the preamble to the Bill of Rights.
It's almost always excluded, but here it is on the government website.
They have it, and it says right here, the conventions of a number of the states having at the time of adopting the Constitution expressed a desire in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added.
And as extending the ground of public confidence in the government will best ensure the beneficial ends of its institution, yada, yada.
And then Amendment 1, Congress shall make no law.
Amendment 2, shall not be infringed.
Amendment 3, no soldier shall.
Amendment 4, shall not be infringed.
Oh, wait, no, I skipped ahead.
Oh, shall not be violated, number 4.
Amendment 5, you can't do this or that to them.
I guess when you get to 6, here they are, this is more of a civil construction that they can't do anything to your natural rights unless they give you a fair trial, et cetera like that.
And the language of the Bill of Rights is the language of a list of declaratory and restrictive clauses that were added by people against the new government that they had allowed to exist.
This doesn't say, well, Anthony, because we like you and because we're really nice, we're going to go ahead and allow you to write what you feel like.
It doesn't say that.
It says they are forbidden from preventing you from writing what you feel like.
Yeah, and, you know, of course, a lot of people argued at the time of the constitutional ratification that a Bill of Rights was not only unnecessary but was potentially a cause of confusion because they said, well, of course the government can't restrict our right to speak or carry guns because the Constitution is a constitution of enumerated power and we all have these rights.
So surely the government can't do anything to violate these rights because we didn't let them do it.
We didn't say the government could.
So as opposed to the government giving us our rights, the whole idea was we give the government its rights.
But that's why they included the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which really are supposed to, you know, steal the deal and say, look, just because we're mentioning rights doesn't mean you guys don't have more rights.
You have every right that we didn't give the government the explicit right to take away.
Right, that's what the Ninth Amendment says.
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Yeah, and, yeah, rights don't come from the government.
The government, in fact, can only operate insofar as it violates rights.
Government- Well, the government is, it's a monopoly on force.
It has the taxing power.
It has the power to tell other governments not to be in its jurisdiction.
It's inherently, it's inherently an un-libertarian institution.
The state, the idea is if the state violates our rights a little, taxes us a little, you know, because if we have a right to wealth, or rather we have a right to our property, then anyone taking it by force would be compromising our rights.
But the whole idea of a small state, a constitutional state, is if it violates our rights just a little, it can protect our rights overall.
But even someone who believes in government for the purpose of protecting our rights has to acknowledge that government is the opposite of freedom, insofar as there is government.
That's the whole point.
That's what, you know, Ludwig von Mises made that insight, that government was a negation of liberty.
And he wasn't an anarchist, but he recognized that's the very nature of government.
It's imprisoning, it's fining, it's killing, it's brutality, it's not liberty.
And so the bigger the government is, it doesn't mean the more rights we have, it almost certainly means the opposite, that it's taken more and more rights from us, more property, and has intervened in more aspects of civil life.
People think often, I hear the case made, that individualism basically is a rejection of society, that it's, you know, every man is his own island, and that kind of thing.
And yet it seems to me that the less force you have, the greater the voluntary connections and exchanges and spontaneous, bottom-up kind of societies arise by themselves.
Oh, sure.
You know, I think one of the best examples of this is an international relation.
Because they'll say that those of us who don't want our government to push everyone around are some kind of isolationist.
And it's funny, because if another government minds its own business, we say it's peaceful.
We say it's not being aggressive.
But when our government minds its own business, that's isolationism.
But in fact, our busybody government has isolated the American people from the rest of the world like nothing else.
You know, the world is definitely more resentful and fearful and distrusting of the American people than it has been in a long time, or probably ever.
And it's because of our government pushing people around.
It gets in the way of trade.
It interferes with, and in the domestic sphere, yeah, it interferes with economic transactions.
I don't believe, now, if someone wants to be a hermit, I don't think he should be forced to join society.
But I certainly have nothing against community or society or sharing or cooperation.
And freedom is what allows for this the most, and it's also what allows for the production of wealth to allow for this the most.
The market, voluntary associations, this is what fosters true community.
And the state gets in the way.
And in fact, it's the state that creates the most dangerous and problematic class division.
It's the state that puts different groups of people against each other in competition for privileges or for exemptions from the law.
Any tax, when we're talking tax code, are we going to cut these taxes?
Well, if we keep revenue the same, that means we have to increase taxes on other people.
And of course, it creates special interests who have an incentive for the government to grow and lock more people up in prison.
And it's the state that divides people and makes society more, makes people more atomistic and more isolated and more paranoid and fearful of their neighbors.
It's not freedom.
That's one of the biggest lies, is that those of us who believe in freedom want to just hoard everything and go live all by ourselves and don't like anybody and hate humanity.
And it's a lie to cover up for the real inhumanity.
Yeah, people think that community means the local government, when obviously community means the local bowling league or the guys that get together on Sunday afternoon to skate the bowl or whatever kind of, I don't know, the bar scene downtown, the old ladies quilting bee.
It doesn't have to be the city government or the county judges or the state legislature or anybody else to create community for you.
No, no, it emerges on its own.
It's the idea of spontaneous order, the idea that in freedom, people voluntarily want to associate with one another.
If you look around, most families aren't kept together by force, most associations and clubs aren't kept together by force, and in fact, the desire people have to belong to a political community with each other, to have government programs, it's definitely directed in the wrong way, but it shows that people do want to have a sense of community.
If you have anyone who's ever been to a rock concert, there's community right there to a large degree, no one's being forced to stay there, and if anyone is being forced to stay there, there goes your sense of community.
Nothing isolates people as well as threatening them, with caging them and with shooting them, and that's all that government is.
At the end of the day, when the government has a law or an edict or a tax or a regulation, what it's saying is, if you don't do what we want you to do, we'll put you in a cage, and if you resist enough, we'll kill you.
That's what underlies all statism.
It might not be the intention of those who want the state to be bigger and powerful, but that's what the state is, and it's just completely counterintuitive that this is the way that you get people to get along.
By living and letting them live, too.
Yeah, that's what's intuitive, is you should let people be free, and of course people should – yeah, no, no, no, I've long been upset about this whole, you know, oh, you're a libertarian, you're an individualist, that means you want all of humanity to die.
Well, of course not.
Trade enriches both parties to the transaction when it's voluntary.
The market creates wealth for everybody who participates voluntarily.
And this isn't advanced physics or anything like that, it seems to me pretty straightforward that pointing guns at people who haven't yet done any harm to anyone is not a good organizing philosophy for fostering society.
Well, and you know, we can see, too, that in a system of property rights, you can be a socialist all you want.
When I was in high school, I went out to, well, halfway between here and a couple of towns east of here somewhere, I don't know, where all these kooks lived at their little socialist commune, and I went out there and visited the place one day, and they all lived there as their little socialist collective, and the one guy was the boss of everyone or whatever, but anybody could leave any time they wanted, and they kept that little socialist commune thing going on out there for, I don't know, 20 or 30 years, it was called the Zendik Farm, it was east of Austin, Texas, I don't know if it's still out there anymore, I think the old guy died and that kind of thing, but, you know, assuming you live in a free country, you can be a socialist all you want, just do it on your own private property, that's all.
Yeah, and if it's economically viable, you're not going to need to force people into it, and if it's not economically viable, then stop pretending it is.
You know, I used to live in a co-op, and once in a while someone would say, how could you live in a co-op if you're a libertarian?
And I'd say, well, this co-op doesn't tax anybody, you know, there's fees, but you voluntarily submit to them, you can leave, it turns out also this co-op doesn't bomb other co-ops, and if it started waging war down the street, I'd probably not be very down with this co-op, but no, of course there's going to be, you know, sharing and communalism, and in a truly free society, I think that people who wanted that in their lives would get to have it much more than they have it now.
There'd be, I mean, think of, you know, all it takes is for the federal government to call your commune a compound, and you might end up dead, barbecued, gassed to death, so, you know, I don't necessarily approve of every communal lifestyle, but, you know, a truly free society would allow it, and they'd be able, they'd still of course be trading, this is one irony, any commune is really, well, some are going to be somewhat self-sufficient, but they're still going to be, you can't be completely self-sufficient on a very small level, you're going to have to some extent trade with other people, I mean this has just been true since the beginning of civilization, so yeah, our commune is such, I remember the co-op I was in, some of the people who were very more communal in their thinking thought it was such a good deal because we got bulk, you know, bulk cereal and stuff, but we bought it from the capitalist system, even if you make your own stuff, you're going to buy tools, I mean there's a reason that autarky doesn't work on the national level, it wouldn't work on a very small level, but you should be free to interact with people in the way that you and they want to, period.
The freedom of association is the very foundation of a civil, free civilization, and in that sense, it is those of us who believe in freedom that would allow communes and voluntary socialist societies the most freedom to flourish.
Well, there are a lot of different examples, but I guess just off the top of my head, Ron Paul's low poll numbers jump right out at me as an example of what I think is the fact that the population of this land between Maine and San Diego and, you know, Washington State and Miami, Florida, the people who live here no longer believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, they don't believe in the libertarian society that you advocate, Anthony, it seems like to me.
Well, you know, one thing that I think can lead us who believe in freedom to be depressed is to think that it's just been this constant decline, and there is some truth to the decline thesis, and on the other hand, maybe what I'm about to say will make you more depressed, but the U.S. has had a lot of problems for a long time since the beginning.
Well, things certainly got better for a lot of people, for example, the average black guy no longer lives in fear of being lynched for looking at a white lady on the street, which was the case only, you know, 50, 60 years ago.
Yeah, yeah, so some things have gotten better even in recent times, but, you know, this is a country that had slavery and then replaced it with a consolidated state that conscripted and taxed people and, you know, burned death or destroyed newspapers under Lincoln, and then became, you know, and then waged war on the Indians, and it's been waging war across the globe for 100 years and across the continent since the beginning.
So, you know, the Americans have always been a little bit inconsistent about the Declaration of Independence's principle.
The fact that when the U.S. government wages war abroad and enslaves foreign countries, it does so in the name of liberty and self-determination.
As much as that frustrates us, it does demonstrate that people at least like the idea of self-determination.
It's not saying we're going to go to Iraq to just steal their oil.
Of course, some Americans would support that.
Mm-hmm, they would.
Yeah, a lot of them would.
A lot of what the Jacksonian tradition of just, you know, let's go get them, let's just kill them, let's have freedom for us, but not for the other.
That's always been a big problem in America too, but you're right that it seems people don't care, but, you know, and the poll numbers and, you know, Ron Paul, of course he's not really getting much media, big media attention, not what he deserves, and so he's not registering.
He's registering some of the internet polls pretty well, but, and as the internet continues to take over, as the main way people get news and connect to the world, I think we'll see an improvement in the way that, in how conscious people are of these principles, because the internet's already, the internet tends to have a better understanding, the people on the internet, of freedom, of peace, than outside.
So I'm hopeful of that, and I am hopeful that people will realize, they'll wake up one day and they'll think, wait a second, yeah, I love the people in America, America has so many great cultures, but we don't, cultural traditions, but we don't need to spread this by force, and why, like, what's going on here?
Why am I not more free?
Why, you know, liberals are starting to think, this is what the government does?
All this time I've been defending its high taxes, saying, you know, people should pay more, but what it does with my money is it goes and broadens, kills people.
Well, of course it does.
And, you know, even some conservatives are starting to question war.
We have the biggest prison population on earth, and that's a big problem, and people, some people, you know, there's some more attention to this than there used to be.
Well, this is, this is really my concern, is that it seems to me like this is an emergency.
You know, Chalmers Johnson, in his newest book, Nemesis, says that the people of England had a choice, basically, at the end of World War II.
They could either keep their empire and become the victims of it themselves, or they could let it go and try to maintain their liberty on their rainy little island, and they chose the latter.
And then he compares the British Empire, of course, to the Roman one, and they chose to make themselves the subjects of their empire rather than give it up.
And it seems to me like we are on the Roman path, not the British one, and that if there was to be a resurgence of the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, hey, 2007, it's about time.
Yeah, you know, one thing that I keep pointing out to people is when they brought back Iraqi, or troops from Iraq, to help secure law and order after Katrina in New Orleans, you know, after these orders to shoot, you know, to shoot looters and so on, and they started rounding up weapons, rounding up personal firearms, you know, knocking on people's doors.
Very scary stuff.
This was the American empire coming home, and people were very desensitized to it.
You know, eventually the NRA said something about how the right to bear arms is important, and, you know, the people complained mostly that the federal government didn't do enough after Katrina.
Remember, that was the biggest complaint.
But we don't want the federal government to do anything, especially when it comes to, you know, rounding up weapons, pushing around local officials, keeping charity away, you know, keeping the Red Cross away, centrally banning disaster relief in a way that's just destructive, and putting people into, corralling them into convention centers and not letting them leave.
This is really terrible stuff.
And this is what the federal government does abroad.
And more and more, it is getting brazen.
I mean, look at what the police are doing.
Every day it seems like I read about some horrific active police brutality, you know, largely it's because the internet and because the media have gotten better at keeping track of it, with YouTube and everything.
But it seems to me that the frequency has also increased.
It used to be...
Along with the impunity.
Yeah, the impunity.
You know, if someone goes up and just shoots someone point blank in the chest, like the officer who killed Derek Hale, the Marine from Iraq over in Delaware, last January, I'm pretty sure.
That was, you know, it seems to me that was just murder.
And you know, he just got away with it.
Right.
And the fact of the matter is, and this is so important too, and I think that this is something that we all know in this entire society.
It's the same thing as we all know that there's 2 million people in prison and that some substantial proportion of them are being raped.
And we don't care for the most part.
It's the same thing with the police.
We know that if we shoot a cop, we are getting a chair.
I mean, the only way that you're getting life without parole rather than the death penalty for killing a cop is in the most extreme kind of circumstances.
For the most part, if you kill a cop, you get the death penalty, period.
And if they kill you, they don't even get so much as an indictment for involuntary manslaughter.
They get off scot-free virtually every time.
And that's not, you know, that's not just in Austin, Texas, which believe me, my friend, that is true in Austin, Texas, that cops can murder whoever they want.
It's true in California.
It's true all over the country.
And we have a mash flies militarized and empowered police force, especially because of the drug war and since 9-11 has got worse.
We have, you know, I see cops driving vehicles, just normal city cops.
They're supposed to be the guys that stand around on Sesame Street and, you know, help you get home and stuff like that.
And they've become this occupying force driving around these vehicles that, you know, they look like they belong on Hoth or something like that.
Yeah, these Imperial vehicles, they're not.
Well, that's a great analogy.
I mean, the Star Destroyers are clearly American aircraft carriers or the Star Destroyers.
There's no question about that analogy.
Yeah.
And, you know, they wear their body armor and they have their assault weapons, their battle rifle, rather.
And you can watch it on the Arts and Entertainment channel every night.
That's my favorite part is you turn to, when I was a little kid, Anthony, I'm a few years older than you.
When I was a little kid, when Nickelodeon first came out, I used to watch Nickelodeon because it was the early eighties and I was a little kid, but Nickelodeon went off the air at about seven o'clock.
And then this brand new channel, the Arts and Entertainment channel would kick on at seven.
And it was always ballet and opera and, you know, hoity-toity high society stuff.
Now it's Dallas SWAT.
Watch as we rip this guy's house apart and throw grenades at him.
Yeah.
And you know, in very few of these cases, are they going after anything that should even be illegal?
Yeah, that's in fact, the one I'm thinking of, the Dallas SWAT, where they rip the front of this guy's house apart, the cop has, you know, one, you know, maybe the size of, of Nickel in your hand, a Thomas Jefferson Nickel in your hand, about that size, a tiny little bud of marijuana and says, yep, well see, look, he had drugs.
After they destroyed this guy's house, beat him half to death, threw grenades in his windows.
Oh yeah.
Well, the drug war, the logic of the drug war has made this inevitable because when you try to stop people from growing plants, lighting them on fire and inhaling the, you know, the smoke, you have to have a police state that it just drives you to that, to that degree.
You know, it's a cliche, the prison and the prisons, they, they can't get rid of drugs.
Right.
Of course, they're going to turn all America into a prison and they'll still not succeed.
But you know, the real goal, I've become more cynical.
The goal of most of these people is not to get rid of drugs.
I mean, can they really believe that after all this time, it's just power and there's bureaucratic inertia.
If they liberalized the drug laws, it would just dry up a lot of these budgets.
They'd have to let people out of prison.
A lot of cops wouldn't get as cool, you know, vehicles to drive around in.
They wouldn't get to have as many excuses to meet with the military and, you know, train and tanks and all this stuff.
So it's really about power.
And that's what, you know, that really encapsulate what the state's all about.
Well, so what should we do, Anthony?
How does, how do our listeners declare independence from this mess?
Well, you know, obviously I don't know how to push the button to return us to article Confederation times in terms of our size of government.
If I did, I would have pushed that button.
Yeah, I hope so.
Well, sure.
I think what people, but you know, one thing we need to consider, if you push that button, the government would spring back up because people are ideologically predisposed to want the big state.
So you need to change.
There's really no easy answer.
You just need to change people's minds, keep educating yourself and reading, keep up with the news, do what you can and stand as an example and withdraw as much consent from the state as you reasonably can.
I can't tell people, I can't give people advice that would endanger them, but you know, people should really consider everything they do in terms of whether it's giving too much consent to the state.
I imagine most of your listeners have already withdrawn their state to some degree.
You know, there's the philosophical change, the shift that matters the most, but you know, just don't support them.
Tell other people, those around you, you don't support what's going on.
Don't support Obama.
I see these Obama stickers around Berkeley and I think, oh man, not that guy, you know.
I mean, what's your slogan?
He's not quite as repulsive as Hillary.
He, you know, so vote Obama.
He's not planning to nuke anyone yet.
Yes.
Yeah.
Gravel was great.
But yeah, I think the fact that Gravel and certainly Ron Paul have some support and growing support shows that there's this frustration and you know, there might be more anti-war, anti-imperial, pro-freedom sentiment in America than I had thought just a few years ago.
I'm actually more hopeful now than I've been in a couple years.
You see, you know, the Ron Paul thing has been good because it's inspired, you know, you've seen people on the Bill Maher show and The View and popular television and it's leaked into the mainstream media a little bit considering this idea of blowback.
And you know, for you and me this is elementary, but we've been expecting that of course the empire's been so brutal abroad.
I know some libertarians who on 9-11 they thought, now wait, was it the Arabs or was it the Latin Americans?
Or who was it getting back at us?
Right.
Yeah.
Thomas Johnson thought that perhaps it was Chileans because September 11th is the anniversary of the 1973 coup d'etat there.
Yeah, right.
And of course, most Americans would probably be offended if you said anything else ever happened on the 9-11.
Yeah.
Somebody asked me once, well, what would have happened if it had been Al Gore?
Cause I was making the case against Bush and I said, well, he would have blamed it on the Colombians and we'd have invaded there cause that's where Occidental has their interests.
Oh yeah, it wasn't Arabs, it was a bunch of angry Latin American types with red headbands.
Yeah, well, but the fact is, you know, most Americans haven't even thought about US foreign policy.
And if there's been one silver lining in this unspeakably horrible war that Bush has waged on the Iraqi people, it's that it, you know, it, it's, it's woken some people up.
There's been some thought, wait, maybe we're not that good at running the world.
Maybe we should get the hell out of there and bring our troops home from other places too.
I've heard a little bit more of that than, you know, I heard in the nineties.
In the nineties, even though the cold war has been over, you know, it was the liberals who were saying, now's our chance to save these people and those people.
And it's good that Clinton's deploying troops and, and and bombing people for, for this to save lives.
But I think there's a little bit more cynicism of that and people are actually less pro-government now than they were in, you know, 10 years ago, I think.
Well, I hope that's true.
And you know, I think about all the people who in the 1990s hated the government and, and I think most of them, somehow the media was able to turn their hatred for the state into hatred for Bill Clinton and his personality and what have you.
But I think a lot of that resentment against the state on the right is, you know, some of these guys are starting to remember how they used to feel about the government itself.
Not just the personality of the presidency.
And of course, anybody who considers them a liberal or leftist of any description has plenty to be angry about after all this time of Dick Cheney in charge.
Bush has a, I think he has a lower approval rating than Clinton ever had.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
He's down to 26 now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that means half of, if you split America into the left and the right, which of course is very sloppy, but that means about half of the people right of center or they don't like Bush either.
Yeah.
So.
Well, and let's hope that they've, that they've learned the lesson now that, Oh, you know, it really, it wasn't just Bill Clinton.
It was the presidency itself that I had a problem with.
It was the laws that Congress passes that that presidency enforces that I have a problem with now.
I remember, or are they just going to be mollified when Giuliani takes power, you know?
Well, you know, Giuliani is what I fear because he has the potential of making liberal give the Republicans another chance too, because he's supposedly a liberal or a centrist, which really means he's for big government on everything.
Yeah.
You know, there was a poll, I think you saw it.
I think we talked about this, but Lew Rockwell cited where the poll specifically identified Southern gun owning conservatives and they supported Giuliani who pays for abortions with tax money, who is for gun control, who is, you know, formerly married to his cousin and not in a hillbilly way, but in kind of a weird Northeastern sort of way.
And, and they love it.
They don't care.
Incest, gun grabbing, you name it.
That's fine.
As long as you promise to wage total war.
Well, a lot of these people are kind of religious fanatics who believe that the U.S. government needs to secure, it needs to wage war in the Middle East to secure Israel so Jesus can come back and everyone else can go to hell and they can be raptured on.
So.
So through those eyes, this is a pretty smart foreign policy.
If you're, if you're pro-Armageddon.
That's not really a political platform that we can argue against.
It's hard to argue with someone who thinks that, you know, that That nuclear war is to be anticipated.
That nuclear war is to be anticipated and hoped for.
Yeah.
The nuclear war will bring about the second comet.
That's not really very, but, but, but then, yeah, you're right.
I mean, even beyond that circle, there are a lot of people, gun owners, they like Giuliani, but gun owners have always done that.
They've always preferred Republicans, even though Republicans betray them on guns.
And you know, the scary thing is I know liberals who said they, they'd like Giuliani more than Hillary.
Did you see Ron Paul's speech in Iowa where he said, you care more about your guns than your own sons?
You won't, you'll die before you let them register your firearms, but you'll sign your son right up for selective service.
What the hell is that?
Yeah.
Oh, that was beautiful.
That was, that was so beautiful.
And you know, it's true.
You know, the government can't have my guns, but it can have my kid and give him a gun to go kill people he's never even met.
Yeah.
You know, that's Over lives.
That's true.
But you know what?
Um, what I think, I think that a lot of conservatives and gun owners would support fairly widespread gun control too.
I don't think that they're, they're Well they think the gun laws will be for everybody but them.
In fact, you know, if you go back in history, all the first gun control laws in America were to keep guns out of the hands of blacks.
So that, that really is their tradition, right?
Gun control for you, not for me.
Same with the rest of this, right?
Well, and that's what, and that's, and that's how the gun laws are now written.
And of course, look at the NRA.
What's its main goal is to have the gun laws on the books enforced more, you know, strictly, uh, don't, we don't need more laws.
We just need to enforce the ones we have.
I'd prefer to have a million more laws if none of them were ever enforced.
That'd be much better than have one gun law enforced by the Bush administration and, you know, Alberto Gonzalez and those guys.
The, uh, uh, but it's true, you know, I'm hoping that, you know, you and I always talk about the realignment and we probably sound like some kind of, you know, astrologist, the way that we have our faith in some real life.
No, no, no.
It's, it's no hippie dippie astrological thing.
Tell them, Anthony.
Well, you know, we, we believe that there's the bad left and the decent left and there's the bad right and the decent right.
We all know this.
We know that Hillary and Giuliani and Newt Gingrich and George Bush and Bill Clinton, oh wow, I just mean two Clintons to represent the bad left.
Well, they, they, they, you know, they're, they're bad.
They're just bad people.
They have pretty much the same positions on almost everything, statism.
And there are people on the left that are very good on most issues of liberty now who've even opened up to question federal economic regulation and who are even good on guns.
You know, some of the people that counter punch, one of my favorite leftist outlets are good.
And of course there are conservatives who have come out opposing the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act and the Military Commissions Act.
And what we need is a realignment where people who believe in freedom join together and stop supporting monsters just because of the stupid culture war.
That's really the big problem is people think, well, you know, I don't agree with his policies, but he does have an accent that's kind of like mine and look at the way he walks and, oh, look, he's wearing a cowboy hat or, you know, I, yeah, I don't think he should have bombed Iraq, but he did admit to smoking pot once.
So that means he's really on our side.
I mean, this is the mentality that has dominated.
I don't care what someone's, you know, what they're, what they believe or what they want to do peacefully in their own home or, or what kind of car they want to drive or certainly what kind of music they want to listen to.
Nearly as much as I want to live in a society that respects freedom.
So we can all make our own decisions about this kind of thing and all these kinds of things.
But people are so caught up in having the government reflect their values that they don't see the government is always a threat to their, their values and imposing your values through the government is the, is the best way to destroy those values.
I mean, look at the way the conservatives have jumped on to the federal education leviathan.
They used to say, oh no, they're imposing, you know, leftism and cultural Marxism on all our rural schools.
But now that the Republicans control the Department of Education, they're saying, yeah, we're imposing standards where, you know, we're, we're imposing normal basic standards and all of these urban leftist schools everywhere.
And if people can't just let their neighbors and their countrymen be free, then they're never going to have the freedom that I think most people really deep inside do want.
Anthony Gregory, he writes for the Independent Institute, lurockwell.com, Mises.org, the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org, Liberty Magazine, the History News Network, the Libertarian Enterprise, Strike the Root, antiwar.com, and my blog, thestressblog.com.
His article on lurockwell.com today is called The Case for Independence.
Happy Independence Day, Anthony.
Happy Independence Day, Scott.
Thanks for having me.