09/13/07 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, Antiwar Radio and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
That, of course, was fear.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
All right, next, what am I talking about?
First guest, only guest.
The guest today on Antiwar Radio, my good friend Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute, the Future Freedom Foundation, LewRockwell.com, Liberty Magazine, Strike the Root, the Libertarian Enterprise, and I'm probably left off a bunch, too.
Welcome back to the show.
Hey, Scott, how's it going?
It's going great.
How are you?
Good.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, sorry for getting you up so early this morning out there on the left coast.
I was actually up very early this morning.
Oh, there you go.
I was up about four hours before you called me, believe it or not.
Oh, geez, well, I don't feel bad then.
No, I don't feel bad about that.
All right, hey, so you got this article on LewRockwell today.
I love this title.
We have met the North American Union.
And I guess we all know how that ends, right?
Yeah, I was gonna put the, you know, the finishing touches on that title, but I thought it'd be better if we left it off.
And besides, you know, the classic, we have met the enemy, and it is us.
You know, being a non-collectivist, I thought even for a title, I was conceding too much to the social contract theorists.
It's not really us.
And yeah, I wrote an article about the North American Union and there are more precisely the kind of background history that relates to the drive to put all of the North American content under one government.
Now, this is something I talked about on the show with Will Grigg.
Yeah, I heard that.
A couple weeks ago.
And this is, for some reason, I can't really figure out, I haven't really been following the story nearly as closely as I should.
I know that there's been a push for a long time among so-called realist types to, you know, forge Continental Union to whatever degree they can get away with.
And in fact, I think Vincente Fox came right out and said one time, the former president of Mexico came out and said, look, the European Union is our model.
We start with a free trade agreement, and then we work toward over the long term, combining our governments together and so forth.
And Will Grigg talked about how they really are working towards this in these the prosperity partnerships and whatever they call it.
They're working on harmonizing the regulatory, the executive branch regulatory systems of the three governments together, basically.
Yeah, and there, you know, there was a meeting a few weeks ago, between Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Calderon, Mexico's president, on discussing the integration of these nation states You know, they didn't come right out and say, well, they want one government.
And, you know, in the short term, that's probably not exactly what many of these leaders want.
But there's been talk of this, and of course, the Council of Foreign Relations has ambitious goals of a North American community by 2010, which is only been a few years.
So there's a gap between harmonizing regulation and and actually making the enforcement one big agency somehow, which I think we're probably a ways from that, right?
Yeah, I think so.
And, you know, the, the my article isn't quite the, you know, the law, a lot of patriots, and, and, you know, America, first conservative type are worried about this, this whole plan.
And I think some of them think the plan is more It's going to happen sooner or more thoroughly than I would worry.
But my main point in this article is to put a different spin on it.
They seem to think that it's sort of a U.N. baby blue helmet takeover of America kind of situation, right?
Right.
As usual, they think that the international bodies are going to steal American sovereignty.
And the poor David, which is the U.S. government, is going to be destroyed by the Goliaths of these much smaller governments.
And this is what they think about the U.N., about the WTO, and of course there's always some truth to it, but my emphasis is that the U.S. government always wants to call the shots.
America is right now the empire, the global empire.
It's the biggest government in world history.
And if you're at the helm of the biggest government in world history, chances are you're not trying to find ways to reduce your own power for the benefit of some other criminal thugs in other governments.
I mean, you might make deals that enhance their power, but only if you see it as also enhancing your power.
So I don't see the big threat that we're likely to have in the near future, the U.S. relinquishing its sovereignty.
I mean, the U.S., in a sense, is all too sovereign over the whole world.
It's a government that doesn't, you know, it's kind of this...
It's like guilty projection, right?
Our government violates the sovereignty of every country in the world, and we're scared that we're going to have some comeuppance one day.
Right.
And yeah, that's exactly right.
You know, they talk about our country being invaded, but, you know, nothing compares to an actual armed, violent, murderous invasion like the U.S. engages in more often than a civilized nation should, if there is such a thing as a civilized nation state.
Probably not.
But you get the point.
There is some projection here.
It's funny when...
You know, I used to be more of one of these kinds of guys who was worried that the Blue Helmets would come in and they'd take away our Bill of Rights.
But the fact is, if the U.S. does give up what remains of our Bill of Rights, it's going to be done with the consent of the U.S. government and with the tacit acquiescence of most American people.
And in the Bill of Rights, for example, you know, they say the UN doesn't have these rights protections.
And yet here's the U.S. saying that it basically renders the entire globe its battlefield and the global struggle against extremism and all bad things that's supposed to go on for our lifetimes or longer whereby the U.S. executive has the supposed legal prerogative to detain anyone for, you know, basically and definitely without due process.
Including Americans.
Including Americans, right.
So yeah, you know, I don't agree with the UN declaration of human rights.
I do think it's very much inferior to the language in our Bill of Rights.
But who has really effectively stripped down the Bill of Rights?
I mean, you don't see these third-world countries coming in and waging a drug war and stripping us of our guns and, you know, designating areas as free speech zones.
That's to say nothing of trampling around the world, detaining people, renditioning people.
The U.S. government is not really our protection against other governments imposing their sovereignty on us.
I mean, it's not like it's a theoretical impossibility for foreign governments to threaten our liberty and for our government to, I mean, it's not theoretically impossible for a government to stand as some sort of a bulwark or some sort of shield against foreign governments.
But in our case, I mean, you worry about a world government.
We have it.
And you worry about the North American Union.
We have it.
Its capital is in Washington.
Yep.
And it's been that way.
And what I really like about your article is you go back 300 years for us and say, look, let's get this straight.
The American so-called civilization, whatever it is, different form of government then, but that, quote unquote, Americans have been trying to steal Canada since, what, 1700, 1711 or something like that, you said?
Well, sure.
The belief that Anglo-Americans should rule North America goes back to England and the Puritan.
And, you know, increasingly they, you know, they really thought that Canada would be part of the same community.
Originally, large parts of what's now Canada were colonies of France.
And the original drive was Americans wanting to snatch Canada on behalf of the British crown, but at some point the Americans didn't want to be a colony themselves.
And so they started, all of a sudden, no, they wanted to drive the British out of Canada.
And so we, the Americans kind of took over part of the British imperial ambition toward North America.
And since the beginning of the United States, there was a huge, there was a huge drive to annex Canada.
Almost all of the American revolutionaries in the war, Revolutionary War Against Britain, wanted Canada.
It was the first major military operation by the U.S. was the invasion of Canada.
Yeah.
Wasn't that led by Benedict Arnold?
Yeah, that's the, I think, yeah.
Yeah.
And at that point, if I remember right, Canada was just two cities and they tried to take them by force.
They didn't try to march into town and say, hey, look, we're rebelling against the British.
Why don't you guys come with us?
And they tried to come in and take the towns violently and they lost.
Well, they thought that there'd be a lot of Canadians who wanted to go along with it because, I mean, a lot of the Canadian were English born, you know, they were of British stock.
But it turns out that just as the Americans started to develop their own nationalism, so too did a Canadian nationalism begin to develop where they didn't want to be part of the rebellion.
So there was always this rhetoric of let's liberate Canada from Britain, you know, at least going back to the American Revolution.
But that was, it was somewhat disingenuous given that they kept invading, silently trying to take it.
But, you know, this carried over to the War of 1812, one of the big reasons that America got in a war with Britain was because Americans all over the country wanted Canada still, and Britain had Canada.
And they invaded Canada in 1812, and, you know, the desire to have Canada continued into the 19th century in the late 1830s.
Under Martin Van Buren, there were a few incidents where war might have broke out.
In fact, Martin Buren's advisors really wanted to go to war to distract from domestic troubles, which, you know, is a very common occurrence in history.
But he, you know, Van Buren, for a few of his flaws, was actually one of our greatest presidents.
He resisted this.
And...
A president who resisted a drive to war?
Really?
Yeah, and he also resisted a war with Mexico, but that's another story.
And also around the same time, you know, much of what's Canada now wasn't Canada back then.
And in the Northwest, there was the British Columbia District, and into the 1840s, the Americans wanted that, and around that time, Americans got even louder and louder about wanting Mexico, including, you know, a lot of what's now the U.S., you know, California and New Mexico and, you know, big parts of Arizona and so forth.
But you know, California, they believe they had a natural right to it.
Going back to the Puritans, they thought, you know, the Pacific Ocean was their boundary.
So the Mexican War was largely a trick that, you know, there was supposedly a boundary dispute within Texas between the Northwest and Rio Grande River.
But that was just, you know, just the trigger.
Oh, you sound like Abraham Lincoln.
You know, I get that all the time.
I'm such a Lincolnian.
Well, you know, that's the irony of the Lincolnians and the Hamiltonians, which, as you know, Scott, on your show, we've spent at least a couple hours bashing these guys.
But...
Which is always great fun.
Which is great fun.
And in the conservative big... in the tradition of big government conservatism, mercantilist nationalism, in some ways, they were more wary of expansionism than a lot of the Jeffersonian Democrats.
The Jeffersonians wanted, though, the Kolkata from the beginning.
Thomas Jefferson thought it was preordained.
We have Cuba.
He thought that in the War of 1812, you know, taking Canada would be a mere matter of marching, as he called it, basically a cakewalk.
You know, you're getting to hear something that I learned in high school, and it's kind of a bitter pill, I think, for some people.
I guess it's pretty easy for others.
It was a bitter pill for me, but I eventually accepted it, because, hey, it's just the unavoidable truth.
There is no republic.
The Constitution created an empire, and it's been one.
And hell, you know, you could probably even make the case that it was an empire under the Articles of Confederation.
But under the U.S. Constitution, this is an empire.
It always has been.
Yeah, one of the books that I used for my article, Richard W. Van Alstine or Alstine, The Rising American Empire, is a great book about the very early American diplomatic policy and how, from the beginning, there was this conception, yes, that the U.S. was an empire.
I mean, some people thought of it this way.
They didn't think of it the way that people think empire now, where it's, I mean, of course, some people don't even think America is an empire now.
They would think that nothing is short of, you know, having a huge moon-sized battle station capable of destroying empire planets.
If you had that, maybe you'd be an empire.
But no, there's a very real sense that from the beginning of expansion, you know, a lot of Americans and anti-war Americans, and of course, you know, we know Libertarians and paleoconservatives, when they talk about the U.S. development into the empire, they draw the line at 1898, at the Spanish-American War, which is the very...
Or even at 1917, an entry into World War I.
Yeah, I mean, that's right, 1917, you know, we could draw the line, I mean, some will say that it wasn't an empire until the Cold War, and of course, some will say it wasn't an empire until after the Cold War.
I think they're going way, they're being way too generous to the past.
But 1898, the better starting point in terms of global intervention, and yet, you know, the U.S. government was interventionist from the beginning.
I mean, in 1850, I believe, or 1851, the U.S. government bombed Nicaragua.
I mean, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't, we're not talking Dresden here, by any means.
We're not talking, you know, 20th century horrors of total war.
But the U.S. was always trying to snatch the entire Western Hemisphere.
You look at the Monroe Doctrine.
And a lot of this goes beyond the scope of my present article, which I'm glad about, because I want people to read it and not just assume that, and get something slightly different from this conversation.
So this is great.
But yeah, you know, the Monroe Doctrine was an imperialist statement that said that basically we are the Western Hemisphere, and, you know, European countries stay out, and like every American imperial move, whether we're talking the World Wars, the Cold War, the Spanish American War, the intervention for empire early on, and the statements on behalf of American empire, were made in the name of anti-imperialism.
I mean, we have a great heritage of being the first anti-imperial empire, the first, you know.
Well, no, it's true, we've become what we swore to destroy.
Yeah.
That's the way it works.
So yeah, we were interventionists in the beginning, or rather the U.S. government was, of course, you know, not, you know, you look at what the U.S. is now, and you think back to when it was 13 colonies, and, you know, sometimes the leftists overstate this somewhat, or they say it's unique, like America's the only force that's done this, or the only power that has done this.
And sometimes they overstate it.
But on the other hand, if we're going to be talking about history, and we want to be accurate about, you know, belligerents in the past, the U.S. didn't take that radical a turn at the dawn of the 20th century in, it was just extending the manifest destiny principles of the mid-19th century to a more global, you know, playground.
They had the technology to do it, and so they did it.
And again, this isn't, there is some aspect of this that's distinctly American, this, you know, we're the shining city of the hill, and we're going to spread liberty everywhere.
So there is that, but we need to remember that this happens with a lot of cultures and societies.
I mean, America just happens to be the big empire now.
Yeah, I mean, and look, if this was a republic, then the government would exist to protect our property from crime, basically, from other people using aggression against us.
But from the very beginning, and as mentioned in your article in a few different places, from the very beginning, the idea was the national government's job was to steal property, to turn it over to private Americans, and they are the, they're an aggressive force, and always have been.
They call it, I guess the euphemism for empire back then was the commercial republic, which just means that the national government is actually, you know, it's just soft fascism is all it is, the national government in the employ of the favored private interests, using tax money, you know, the socialist system of supporting the state, the collective system of supporting the state, to intervene violently on behalf of private people.
Yeah, you know, the, the, the idea is, you know, Britain had this mercantilist, kind of quasi corporatist, hypocritical system, the Americans rebelled against it and made their own country.
But it's not as though the Americans had a comp- I mean, there was an ideological moment of clarity, I would not want to say the American Revolution was not without its many merits, but it's not as though that, you know, very Anglo-American expansionist imperialism that the American colonists were going along with during the 18th century, up until the revolution, disappeared when America revolted.
And just like pretty much every war, the American Revolution, in effect, brought a lot of the worst Americans to power, all these, you know, all of the nationals, the Franklin, you know, Benjamin Franklin, who originally, by the way, I touch on this in the piece, you know, he had, before the revolution, he was talking about being a loyal Briton and how Britain had an obligation to help America expand throughout North America, kick out the French, and, you know, because the Americans would inevitably need more living space.
And when, you know, so when they revolted and decided they didn't like going along with the British Empire and started blaming the British Empire for things like the debts collected or the debts that accrued because of the Seven Years' War, which, incidentally, the Americans had a huge hand in, especially George Washington, there is this mercantilist, imperialist, horrible ideology that the Americans were pointing out was incompatible with Republican liberalism.
It was still, it still was latent in the American society.
And before you knew it, we had a constitution that very quickly turned the American president into someone as powerful as the British king.
And I mean, it wasn't supposed to, and Hamilton said it wouldn't in the Federalist Papers, but you look at what Washington did suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion, you look at Adams' Alien Sedition Acts, you look at Thomas Jefferson's very vicious embargo, where they searched people without what I'd consider just cause for the crime of trading with people internationally.
And these are some horrible executive violations of liberty.
These were the first three presidents.
Yeah, and then Madison came in and got us into Mr. Madison's War, which of course is where Andrew Jackson got on his ladder to power.
More history there.
All right, hey, let's take some calls from some folks.
The number here is 512-646-6446, 512-646-6446.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with my buddy Anthony Gregory on Antiwar Radio.
And now, oops, I'm clicking the wrong button here, folks.
Let me click the right button and welcome whoever this is to the show.
Hi, this is David Badeau.
Hey, David, how are you?
How's it going?
Great show.
I'm enjoying this stuff.
Good.
And I'm looking forward to the second hour, too, because I've let some people on my Ron Paul list know about your show today because some of them are sympathetic to truth and theories.
So I'm looking forward to some debunking.
Reason I'm calling is just brought to mind a friend of mine who's one of the three or four antiwar professional libertarian historians in the world named David Fitzsimons has a book coming out on Tom Paine, and David went into this thing thinking, oh, boy, Paine, you know, this great classical liberal and everything, and he read Common Sense, it's wonderful stuff.
But Paine was really the first neocon in a lot of ways.
I mean, he wanted...
He wanted...
He wanted...
What?
I'm sorry.
I don't think...
Don't tell me that.
He's one of my last...
Well, he got to shoot it down.
He was a worldwide kind of democratic revolution led by, you know, the state, and in fact, cooperated with Napoleon, who's a big fan of Napoleon, and was sending Napoleon letters like, you know, I'm a native of that part of England.
If you want to invade, you know, here's how you can do it, here's how Peace Harbor is, that kind of thing.
So I started to be a downer, but I'm a bad-fear, faithless person.
Well, you know, I was always a little skeptical of Paine because he was the tax collector.
Boy, he supported the Constitution as well.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, I seem to remember from some class I took a long time ago that Paine's first big piece of writing was a complaint that the tax collectors weren't being treated well enough.
Well, these guys often have a kind of double right in a way.
I mean, if you look at John Locke, I mean, he has a wonderful statement against slavery, but the guy who helped write the South Carolina Constitution, you know, which, you know, set out a whole system for, you know, keeping the slaves down.
So, you know, I guess we want to find heroes, and there's some out there, but, you know, it's hard sometimes.
It is hard.
Well, you know, my thing is, I learned all my libertarian theory from reading Jefferson, and yet every other page is some great libertarian writing, and then all the pages between those are full of, you know, yes, I went to the market and bought some human beings today.
Well, you know, hey, we're not supposed to talk about slavery until the 1850s and 60s when all of a sudden it justified Lincoln's dictatorship.
So when we're talking about the, you know, the founding American generation, which revolted against Britain, yes, they had slaves, but, you know, that's not really important.
But then, you know, when we're talking about Lincoln, sure, he might have murdered a bunch of people, but he was fighting a seceding nation that had slaves.
So, yeah, that is interesting, and of course I think we should be very sensitive to all of this stuff and try to be truthful, but that's a shame, because Thomas Paine does have some of the better writing of some of the, you know, some people don't consider him a founding father, but I always did, at least in spirit, but yeah, maybe he was the first neocon.
Well, a lot of times, I mean, I, in a positive way, say he was our Trotsky, but maybe there's a negative aspect, maybe he was our Trotsky in other bad ways as well, you know, the kind of guy that was the big, you know, the big rabble-rouser in promoting worldwide revolution, because he very much had a state involved.
Well, these guys were very flawed, but they did create something called the Articles of Confederation, which, you know, reading that thing over, I mean, it was a pretty good system, and it had implications for the slavery issue, because there was no future slave clause in it, and you could have imagined, I think, slavery petering out under a system like that over time.
Well, sure, then, you know, Jeff Hummel, who actually is very, who, the great libertarian historian who criticizes the Articles of Confederation for being too centralist, argues that slavery depended a lot on federal subsidies, the Futures of Slave Act, and it is, you know, it's very possible to think that America would have gotten rid of slavery earlier if it weren't there for the nationalist counter-revolution of the Constitution, which, you know, of course, we sit here now thinking, boy, would we love the nationalist reactionary constitution compared to what we have, but...
Well, they got it, it was, they got the Northwest Ordinance under the Articles, which got rid of it, and it lost by only one vote in the Southwest, one vote, and that, you know, would have been kept out of the Southwest.
But anyway, I'm enjoying the show, I'll let you guys keep going on.
Thanks for the call.
Hey, thanks very much for the call, Dave.
Thanks, yeah, that was great, thanks for bursting another bubble.
All right, I can burst some more, don't worry.
Thanks, Dave.
Talk to you later.
All right, everybody, that was David Beto from the great blog Liberty in Power at the History News Network, and he's a professor of history at the University of Alabama, is that right, Anthony?
Yeah, I think so.
Sorry, David, if I got your university wrong.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's over there, and I think that's the university, but I, yeah.
Well, I don't know if I ever told you this story, Anthony, but you know, I live here in Austin, Texas, and not too many blocks away is the corner of 11th and Congress Avenue with the Texas state capitol building there, and it's on a hill, basically overlooking the Colorado River, not the same one that hits the Grand Canyon, you understand, but the Texas one, just means color red in old genocided Indian language.
But anyway, so it was on that hill where the capitol now sits that a man named Mirabu B.
Lamar stood and said, here shall be the seed of empire, as they went to create their own little imperial vision down here in Texas.
And then I guess it really wasn't long before they sold out, only 10 years before they sold out to the American empire, because they wanted help stealing the land between the San Jacinto and the Rio Grande, as you mentioned in your article.
And then, oh wait, I'm sorry, did we do the part about the spotty Lincoln, how Lincoln came out and said, wait a minute, President Polk, where exactly did this firefight take place?
Yeah, he was, we didn't talk much about it, but yeah, Polk was of course trying to get the US into war on behalf of Texas against Mexico, and his real plan was to use it to seize California.
But you know, he was saying there was this, but he and his predecessor, President John Tyler, had been sending people to agitate on the disputed territory to provoke a war.
And yes, there was a point where Abraham Lincoln challenged Polk, Polk's war propaganda, and said wait, where was the shooting?
Because actually the first real battle there was south of the border, and I think Polk was pretending it was further north.
And so Lincoln, and a lot of the, you know, you mentioned Madison's war, the irony of some of the Federalist types and the Hamiltonian types were less expansionist, less belligerent war, but Lincoln changed that.
From then on, it seems like both parties of the war party.
Yeah, yeah, ever since Lincoln, though, you know, as much as, you know, you were, you know, in the last several years I've come on your show a couple times at least to just bash Republicans, which is always a good thing to do, but over the sweep of history, it's possible that, you know, putting aside that huge calamity of Lincoln's war, which was our biggest war by far, in terms of foreign wars, the Democrats, who still retain some of that rhetoric of, you know, liberation of the masses and all that stuff, I mean, I'm not saying they believe it, but they've always, there is somewhat of a continuity in the rhetorical apparatus from the Jeffersonians to the classical liberals to the modern liberals.
And it's interesting, the more I study this, it looks like there's always been this kind of progressive, you know, neo-liber, you know, this liberation imperialism that that party and tradition has always stressed.
And but after the Civil War, we had a united, America was more united and could once again focus not on killing each other, but killing other people.
Right.
And that's really what happened after the Civil War was, hey, let's all let bygones be bygones and go stamp out the remaining red Indians.
And that's one of the shames of, you know, one of the great things that might have happened if the southern secession was allowed to happen in peace is that the belligerent kind of imperialist expansionism of a lot of southerners would not have had the complimentary backing and encouragement of the mercantilist, corporatist Yankees, but once they team up, boy, are they a horrible, you know, they're a terrible thing to deal with.
And all of the warmongers in the United States team up and we get the, you know, the New York intellectuals with the, you know, the rah rah god and country type in the red states.
Yeah.
You know, maybe you can remind me who it was that wrote this great article on LewRockwell.com one time.
And I think we talked about it where he divides the American population basically politically into Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, Hamiltonians and Wilsonians.
Yeah.
Was that McCarthy?
Very well may have been.
I don't know.
I think that was Daniel McCarthy.
Yeah, that sounds right.
I think it was.
And yeah, that was a great article about the those four traditions and, you know, when we're splitting up the traditions, we have to, we have to kind of be a little loose, you know, the Jeffersonians at their best, you know, putting aside Jefferson the man and some of the worst things he did.
The Jeffersonian tradition is, of course, in theory, the tradition closest to what we believe.
And then there's the Jacksonians who are different.
They're kind of a just belligerent nationalist.
They're kind of like, you know, just the thuggish, a lot of the conservatives that support Bush now, they're not, they're not really the intellectual Wilsonians who, you know, think that they're spreading liberty as much as they just want America to kick ass.
Right.
It's a little bit of a, no, I've, you know, I'm not going to mince words, it's not an unfair characterization.
That's what they want.
No, no, it's not at all.
And see, this is really the bad thing is when the best of these four brands is Jeffersonianism and Jeffersonianism is basically just as imperialist as the rest of them, maybe even worse than the Hamiltonians.
Well, it can be, it's tainted, you know, there's always been this unfortunate warmongering streak in some of the liberal tradition, though I'd like to think that our true, you know, libertarian flash classical liberal tradition has by far mostly been on the side of peace, but nothing is as good for American wars as Jeffersonian rhetoric.
They always use our rhetoric, right, to justify war, because if they say they want to go, you know, attack Iraq so they can enslave the Iraqi people, no one's going to go along with that.
You know, no one having read the myth of America's founding, and by myth I mean, you know, some of it's true, but Americans don't want to think of themselves as a non-open, non-liberal society, so the rhetoric has always been Jeffersonian, and of course Wilsonianism has kind of extended Jeffersonian Madisonianism to the whole world, because, you know, during the 1812 war they were talking about the, you know, the freedom of the seas, and it's, you know, it's a lot of what they say they want the world to be more like, you know, more free.
You can't disagree with this, I mean, who wants Saddam torturing people?
Nobody.
Well, okay, maybe Saddam, and maybe, if you go back far enough, some of his US supporters, for all I know, but no one wants to think that that's what they, that they're supporting tyranny.
So Jeffersonian rhetoric has always been a cover for Hamiltonian government at home, and Wilsonian aggression abroad, and that's really the tragedy of America, that America, and one reason we have this powerful empire now, is because we are more free, in a lot of ways, than some of these other empires are, and more freedom, as Adam Smith pointed out, means that the nation, and the nation state, have, are stronger, because people produce more wealth, and it's tragic, it's, I think, Lew Rockwell says that one of the, the one thing that we can criticize about capitalism, and it's not about the market itself, but one unfortunate thing about it, is it provides the loot for the state to be very aggressive, especially abroad, because if it's, you know, if it loots us too much, the taxpayers, it, it dries off, the parasite doesn't want to kill the host, but as long as the parasite, and the host are getting fat, you know, I don't know how much I want to extend this metaphor, but you get the point, it can, it can be aggressive abroad.
Well, and I think the reason so many people are freaking out now, is because they feel like we are getting to that point, it's not just that we've lost our Republican liberty, that little our Republican liberty, it's that we're about to lose our empire too.
Mm-hmm.
Well, you know, that would pretend all sorts of negative things about our, you know, American society becoming poorer, but I'd say if there's any bright side, if there's any silver lining to the neo-con policy, it's that it's discrediting the American empire, it's going to make it harder, maybe, to wage war, to get people on board to future U.S. aggression, so the irony is, a lot of the people who are now turning against the war, finally, are turning against it, for what I consider to be not my reason, you know, the, the, you know, the idea, right?
Huh?
Yeah.
It's not the right reasons, but good enough, as long as they're...
Right.
Well, I'm not going to tell them to support the war, but it's a delicate thing, because, you know, when we're talking about the health of America and the health of the U.S. government as if they're the same thing, it's not as though it would be good for us Americans, you know, on a methodological, individualist level, like, person by person, for the empire to completely collapse tomorrow in a terribly calamitous manner.
I mean, that goes without saying, but we are kind of, now, our society is all interwoven with the state, so, now, that doesn't mean, I don't think, depoliticization, or, you know, getting rid of the state, reducing state power, couldn't be done in a peaceful way that would minimize the transitionary pain.
I think that it could be done.
But it would have to be done carefully, and the people would want, would need to want it.
But if the way that we're actually going to end our imperialist foreign policy is the way that Ron Paul sometimes hints that we're going to run out of money, that's not going to necessarily be good for Americans to go through.
No, it certainly will not be.
I don't think anybody favoring libertarianism wants to see a traumatic shock.
Look what happened during the Great Depression as just one example.
Right.
You know, what we need is to, you know, quadruple our efforts.
Yeah, and we need to explain to people what's going on.
You know, if America suddenly, if the dollar falls, and America becomes poorer, we need to know, help people understand why.
And that's why us being against this war from the beginning, and certainly now, is very important.
Because, you know, when the, you know, libertarians, since we, you and I, believe we're right, obviously as most people do, that most people think they're right, right?
We shouldn't be afraid.
I know I am.
No, I'm just kidding.
We shouldn't be afraid to tactfully say, I told you so, when it's appropriate and when it's germane.
And you know, when we were against this war from the beginning, you know, not exactly predicting every precise problem, but knowing that it would be a disaster, and you know, a lot of us warned about a lot of the specific problems that did occur.
And that's good, because then maybe next time people will realize that it's the policy.
As Ron Paul says, it's not the, it's not just this tactical failure to put, you know, we need 30,000 more troops, and then all of a sudden, Iraq will become the 51st state, and they'll all, you know, they'll all line up to vote for an Iraqi version of Obama or Romney.
It's the policy itself that's flawed, and it has a lot of horrible consequences.
And yeah, we need to be prepared to explain it if things really go south, which they might, because you know, during the Great Depression, there weren't enough voices that understood economics, that understood the full problem with a new deal and trying to deal with it.
And in terms of war, too, there are some ways in which we're better off than we were in a lot of previous wars in America, where, you know, there's a lot of information available.
There's a lot of very well-informed and insightful people out there explaining why this, why you can't fight a counter-insurgency with airstrikes, unless your plan is just to kill a lot of people, and that's your goal.
And so I do have hope, yeah.
We do have a lot better baseline from which to fight this time around.
Yeah, I think so.
And I think the anti-war movement, you know, there's, a lot of people are sad that there's not more of an anti-war movement on the streets, and I kind of am, too, but we have, I think there's more sophisticated critiques of this war than there were in the past.
And you know, on the left, there's a lot of good stuff on the war that doesn't, that isn't, that isn't too much burdened by some of the new left stuff during Vietnam, you know, where everything was about America trying to rule the world.
Of course, there's a lot of truth to that, and there's a lot of truth to that now, but for lack of better term, the anti-Americanism, if it's too extreme, it can be counterproductive in terms of convincing people.
But a lot of the critiques I've seen in the last several years have actually been quite measured, not to say not radical and not truthful, but really, you know, honest and precise and people are very careful in criticizing this war, and yet people aren't afraid to oppose the war, a lot of them, and that's all good.
Well, I saw something Noam Chomsky said before the Iraq war, which was, wow, look at all the people here, you know, six or eight years into Vietnam, I'd go to major universities and give speeches and have 10 people come out, you know, this is really something.
So I don't know really what effect we can have, it doesn't seem like much, but then again, who knows where this country would be without if we hadn't had the anti-war movement that we have had over these past years?
Well, that's exactly, you know, that's the important thing to remember, whenever we think that we're having no impact in all of our condemnation, or analytically careful scholarship against the state and its most egregious and murderous acts, whenever we think we're just failing and it's futile, we got to remember where the state would be without, you know, I'll have to, I'm going to have to quote Lew Rockwell again, because he had a very powerful piece about this, I think called the case for libertarian hope a while back where he says, you know, yes, we got to look at all the ways where society is not yet, it's far from conformed to the classical liberal vision all the way, but we've got to remember and take account of the ways it has not been shaped according to the vision of the state.
The state seeks total control.
That's just its institutional tendency is to expropriate and expand, because it is just a monopoly on violence, no matter who's in charge of it, that's its institutional inertia is toward, you know, government growing and liberty yielding, as the hypocritical Jefferson said.
Yeah, and you know, to tie it back to the beginning, if they really got it their way, we'd have had a world state 60 years ago.
If Stalin would have formed the one world commie states of utopia or whatever, and we'd all be dead by now, we would have invaded five countries after 911, nuked a few of them, there'd be, you know, full blown internment camps, Guantanamo wouldn't just be doubled as Romney said it should be, it would be, you know, 20 times the size.
And of course, there's a limit in terms of what humans can put up with and what the laws of economics will allow.
The state can't have total control of everything.
It just doesn't work that way.
If it could, there'd be more of a worry, but there'd also be more of a economic justification for socialist thought.
If the state could actually be, control most activity and regulate everything without completely killing off civilization, it would be a more, it would be a fatter world.
But you know, short of that, the state could be much worse than it is.
And one thing I try to remind my liberal friends, my less liberal friends, when they talk about Bush being the worst ever president, and I think you know, Scott, that I'm no fan of Bush, but it could get worse.
And until you recognize it could get worse, much worse, it distorts your perspective on where we are, whether we should have hope, whether what we're doing is having an effect.
And I do think it's having an effect.
If Bush had the approval rating now that he did on the eve of shock and awe, or on the eve of, or on the night of 9-11, or whatever, if he had that approval rating now, you know, they probably would have attacked Iran.
I mean, we don't know, I heard you talking about, you know, you think you're the boy who cried wolf, or you know, I don't know how tongue in cheek you're being, but again, if it weren't for all these people, perhaps, you know, making other people's ears tired with all this talk about how we might, the U.S. might attack Iran, maybe they would have attacked Iran.
And I hate to, I'm not trying to take any credit for myself or anything, but I think that's true.
I think that there's been so much great reporting about this story, particularly, you know, Seymour Hersh, and Larissa Alexandrovna, and Philip Giraldi, and some of these people who've come out with these stories, who have absolutely thwarted the course of history on the Iran War.
I think they'd have done it more than a year ago without all this opposition.
And of course they want to attack Iran, the neoconservative one, that's obvious, a lot of the republican one, all of the republican establishment, they're candidates, except Ron Paul, most of the democratic candidates want to, and you know, you know, the average bushbot will still say, you know, oh, well, Iran, you know, they're going to attack us, and you know, the same propaganda, almost, that we heard about Iraq.
But it's not sticking, and it's not quite, I think that it's very likely that as bad as the aftermath of 9-11 has been, it would have been worse if it weren't for residual memories of Vietnam, if it weren't for people learning something from history.
And I think it's important for us to keep this in mind.
We need to never give up in understanding the many horrors of the state and its wars.
But we also need to remember the other side, the side where the state, the fears of liberty, where the state can encroach because people wouldn't put up with it.
We don't have chattel slavery, you know, we don't have mass conscription.
And this is great that we don't have these things, and at base a huge reason why is ideology.
It's because people don't believe in it, they don't want it, they don't think it's necessary.
We have a lot more work to do, you know.
I mean, not having mass conscription doesn't alone mean you're a free country.
But there have been ways that liberty's declined ever since I've been born, to say nothing the last 100, 150, 200 years, there have been ways in which freedom has flourished internationally.
Much of the world is better off than it was.
And America, despite what we might think isn't the only country, and the only reason I bring this up isn't to say that I'm not an internationalist in the sense that I think that that matters more than individual liberty of Americans, but I mean, America is kind of in this really odd phase right now.
It's been expanding since, you know, it was 13 colonies, with varying degrees of belligerence, with varying degrees of duplicity and murderousness, and it's kind of, there's a pathetic element of it now, you know.
Bush has, what, a third of the people like him?
Well, a third of the people or close to him will like any president.
I mean, probably 10% of the Americans out there would like any president.
And then another 20% of Americans from either party would probably like almost any president from his party.
You know, like there are people out there, Bush would have to kill their family for the people to, I mean, aside from the Iraq war, because even that won't do it for some people, but Bush would have to personally do it for some people to stop liking him.
But we have a very low approval rating for the president, and this is a glorious thing.
You know, we should never, this is the time for libertarians and those who oppose the U.S. empire to say, this is what we want.
I mean, we want more of this, and of course what we really want is for peace, right?
But this is, given the post-World War II U.S. empire, this is a great thing, that Bush has, you know, you can't minimize all the damage he's done, the hundreds of thousands of people who've been slaughtered in his wars.
But, and there is a but, he's very unpopular.
And that's why we need to think long-term.
The next president might be one of these, you know, FDR types who's able to get 90 percent of the people on board, and that's when it's going to be really horrible for people like you and me.
You know, right now we've got to kind of savor this and use this as an opportunity to educate people on how it's not just Iraq, it's not just the U.S. bullying Canada and Mexico with its regulatory harmonization, it's the big picture, it's fundamental, it's the side of the American Revolution that all of us claim to take some pride in.
It's the principle.
And if we get that through now and people are very skeptical of the president, this is our chance.
We don't want another FDR type or Reagan type as he was, Reagan did this on the right, where he got people pro-government again.
And so we should savor these moments where two-thirds of it, where we can say something about the Iraq war and the average person on the street will say, yeah, I agree with you, because it can get worse, and it would be worse if it weren't for a lot of work that's been done in the past.
Everybody, Anthony Greger from the Independent Institute, LouRockwell.com, Strike the Root, the Libertarian Enterprise, Liberty Magazine, and everything else in the whole world.
Thanks a lot, Anthony.
Thanks.
Can I just say real quick that if people want to read my new piece, they should go to LouRockwell.com today?
Oh yeah, I forgot to say that.
We have met the North American Union by Anthony Gregory, it's at LouRockwell.com right now.
Thanks, that's been great.
Hey, thank you, Anthony.
No problem.