02/16/08 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

Because now it's time to talk to my friend Anthony Gregory.
He's some kind of fellow or assistant or some kind of thing at the Independent Institute, and he also writes for lubrockwell.com.
And he has an article celebrating Presidents' Day today called, Our Enemy, the Presidency.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
Hey, Scott, it's great to be with you today.
Today's Presidents' Day, huh?
I didn't even realize.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And so, basically, what?
Today's the day that government employees get a day off work in order that they may celebrate the head of state?
Sure, and a lot of other people get the day off, too.
It's a national event, and I thought I'd probably write a piece on Presidents' Day.
Of course, I wrote about the presidency itself.
I didn't actually refer much to the particular president we're supposed to celebrate, because, of course, this day falls between Washington and Lincoln's birthdays, and those two presidents are supposedly the kind of quintessential presidents, I guess.
Mm-hmm.
I think that today's a good day for equal opportunity, bashing, and distrust of all presidents.
People usually say, you know, I really don't like Bill Clinton, or I really don't like George Bush, or John McCain, or whoever, but you have to respect the office.
And, in fact, that was one of the big criticisms of Bill Clinton, was that he had diminished the stature of the office of the presidency.
Well, sure, and, you know, if you think about it, in their own way, the liberals are making similar complaints about Bush, this Bush, who the Republicans voted in because they wanted someone to get the stench out of the White House, as it were.
And so they put someone in who supposedly had honor and values and all the rest of the conservative love.
You know, liberals talk about how Bush has made them feel bad about their precious democracy, how he has gotten the government into disrepair.
Supposedly, he's eroded it, but, of course, he's expanded it.
Now, that might mean that he's made it worse, but liberals don't usually like that logic.
They're making similar arguments, including in foreign affairs.
Bush has squandered our international goodwill, and, of course, I'm very unhappy about the degree to which Bush has made the world distrustful of Americans and America, but I don't think that the extent to which he's made people distrustful of the U.S. government and the U.S. empire is a bad thing.
I think that's one of the few good things about his presidency, is he's made more people anti-president.
Yeah, well, and it is a shame that some people, anyway, I don't want to fall into the same trap as some people would have, trouble differentiating between the American people and the American government, and, you know, I've heard a lot of stories of people just traveling around the world, nobodies, you know, regular folks traveling around the world pretending they're Canadians and so forth, because Americans, in general, not just Bush and our government, but Americans in general are more hated now than ever before.
Yeah, now, I've seen polls that suggest that even in the Muslim world, somehow the foreigners are able to make a distinction between Americans and our government, and it almost seems at times that, despite everything, the foreigners are less collectivist than Americans tend to be in making this distinction, you know?
That's probably true.
Because the Americans, at least when the war was really raging and popular, it was almost like the Iraqis were all Saddam, and, you know, the Afghans were all Osama, not that that makes any sense, but there's almost more of a collectivism here.
It seems, though, it's true that our government is seen as something reflecting upon all of us, and there's even a kernel of truth to it.
I certainly don't think the American people are guilty for all the crimes committed by the government.
I think the people who are guilty are always going to be individuals, regardless of what costumes they wear, or regardless of what offices they hold.
But the American people are the ones who support the presidency, and, unfortunately, the public ideology and the political culture in which we find ourselves that reinforce this imperial presidency, they have not been shaken enough by the Bush administration.
So that's one thing I wanted to touch on.
What I fear is that in November, Americans are going to elect someone who's not going to be any better than Bush, but they're going to give this person a new chance, you know, a fresh chance to prove him or herself.
We have a real problem, too, when our government is going around killing people in the name of democracy and emphasizing what a democracy America is, which, you know, tends to mean that whatever it is our government's doing, not that this is necessarily true, but this is what people understand that to mean, whatever it is our government's doing, that's what the American people want it to do.
And, you know, at some point, there is sort of a level of collective guilt in there, where, you know, the peace candidates are thrown overboard, and, you know, people like Bill Richardson on the Democratic side was the most anti-war candidate, and he got absolutely nowhere.
And, you know, Hillary Clinton and, well, we'll get to Obama in a minute, I guess, but Hillary Clinton is the leader of the pack over there, and John McCain won out over all the Republicans, it looks like.
Well, that can, I guess, go ahead, we can say that definitely at this point, that, you know, he's got the Republican nomination locked up.
Bush was re-elected after lying us into a war and getting all these people killed.
Now we're going to, you know, elect somebody, it looks like, who's just like him.
And at some point, it seems like, you know, Bin Laden's argument that the average American taxpayer is just as guilty as the government employees who devise the policy and carry it out, is going to start holding water to more and more people in the world.
Well, yeah, it's unfortunate, and there's a continuum, and again, I don't, you know, as libertarians, we don't believe in collective guilt, but we do understand that the state does require the tacit acceptance, or at least the acquiescence of a majority of the population.
Now, the funny thing is, the election obscures everything, and it's not actually true that everyone who votes for McCain in the primary should be held responsible for everything McCain does in office.
Surely, I mean, as we saw from some of the exit polling, oh, well, most of the anti-war Republicans voted for McCain, which baffles me.
I guess we could figure out some explanation.
McCain might have just seemed like a more liberal, moderate Republican, and they might have assumed he was going to be more moderate on the war, but as you said, too, I think it was when you were talking to Will Gregg, it's all those moderates, and I think you were talking about this with John Walsh, too, that I might be getting this mixed up.
The moderates are the extremists.
Yeah, the centrists.
Yeah, there's nothing moderate about them at all.
It's the liberal Republicans like McCain and the conservative Democrats like Hillary Clinton and, say, Joe Lieberman, for example.
These are the most dangerous people of all.
Therefore, every government program against anyone at all times, at least hard to the right or hard to the left, at least they believe in some kind of freedom.
The centrists don't seem to have ever even heard of it.
Yeah, I think it's telling that Joe Lieberman endorsed McCain and Ann Coulter says that she thinks that Hillary Clinton's more conservative than McCain.
It just shows that, you know, you look at these likely candidates and it's like, gee, do we choose the Coulter-approved Democrat or the Lieberman-approved Republican?
And, you know, see, I'm really bummed because usually, you know, I have the arguments right here in my shirt pocket that, like, hey, well, we didn't have a choice, but this time we did.
Yeah, of course.
Ron Paul was, you like to say, he was basically the Jeffersonian package presented right to the American people.
I'm not as disappointed in the turnout as some of my compatriots and comrades because I didn't expect him to do that much better, especially among Republicans at a time of war.
Right, I mean, we're talking about the peace candidate running to be the head of the war party.
That's not easy.
Yeah, I really feel a lot of, you know, like we owe debt to Ron Paul for all he's done and I also feel like it must have been very hard for him night after night to be up on that stage, you know, and especially the debate stage and saying all this unpopular stuff within the party that he had to say.
But he seemed, you know, to view it as just kind of his duty as a teacher of the theory of liberty and on peace and economics as he sees himself.
So I imagine he was happy to do it.
But though I wasn't disappointed, it was nevertheless sad to see people, you know, the other Republican candidates jumping over each other to show they were the strongest commander-in-chief of the nation, as they put it, as well as being the most pro-torture.
And what was sad was this strategy worked.
McCain, you know, the funny thing is McCain actually, for a while, seemed a little bit less bad on the edges of torture.
I was never, you know, totally in belief of his claimed position.
He is the typical politician.
But now, you know, it's worse for someone who's supposedly anti-torture to approve torture like he just did.
Yeah, and like he continually has.
In fact, just before you came on, we were discussing Philip Giraldi's new article in the Huffington Post, which is all about John McCain's hypocrisy on the torture issue, his support of the Military Commissions Act, which lets Bush define it, his silence when Bush added the signing statement to his anti-torture act that basically made it null and void, and then his negative vote in the Senate last week when they tried to apply the military interrogation manual to the CIA.
Right.
He said, you know, we've got to have good faith in the CIA and just...
Now there, you talk about responsibility.
John McCain is responsible for whoever is tortured by the American government personally because he's a senator and he's done everything he can to help George Bush and Dick Cheney torture them.
That ain't collective responsibility.
That's personal responsibility.
John McCain is a torturer.
He does have responsibility for his vote as a senator.
He's one of those desk murderers.
Like they talked about, was it Hannah Arendt, who talked about how the desk murderers in the Nazi regime were just as or perhaps even more guilty than the actual torturers since they sat in comfort at their desks and ordered the torture?
Well, yeah.
I mean, there's so much responsibility to go around.
And the problem with the presidency is it presumes that there's one guy who should have all this power that dwarfs by many times over the amount of power that's ever been held by anyone on Earth.
The president, first of all, to become president, you almost have to surely be a professional liar and backstabber.
And then you become president and the amount of power that the president has is just inherently corrupting.
It is beyond the absolute power that Lord Acton warned about.
If Lord Acton knew that the leader of the free world was a button push away from annihilating millions of people by nuclear holocaust, that he could always just...
If he were determined and crazy or whatever, he could plummet the Earth into a huge nuclear war.
I mean, it's really beyond any of the power that the 19th century classical liberals used to warn against.
It's like Jefferson's nightmare.
And of course, on an individual level, this claim that he can detain anyone on the battlefield in the war on terror, which is the whole Earth, and he can detain them without cause if he says they're a terrorist and torture them.
I mean, this is just...
It's hard to imagine a more tyrannical office than the modern president.
You know, there's been a couple of anecdotes that have come out about Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war.
If I remember right, one of them was Rumsfeld and the other was Rice, separately and privately.
That Bush asked them, Hey, you really think that we should do this?
You really think this is a good idea?
And Rumsfeld, of course, not wanting to accept any responsibility that any of this was his idea at all, said, Well, gee, Mr. President, I'm only here to carry out your orders.
You have to decide whether it's the right thing to do or not.
I'm just a technocrat.
My job is getting the job done.
You decide what the job is.
And refused to give advice on that.
And apparently Rice told him, Yeah, of course, let's do it.
Whatever.
But here's George Bush.
I mean, think about this guy, George Bush Jr., whose IQ is probably a little bit over 100, but not much higher than that, who has the fate of, we now know, at least somewhere near a million people in his hands, trillions of dollars.
And it comes down to this dimwit asking Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.
These are the people making the decision.
You really think we should start this war or not?
And they go, Yeah, sure, why not?
And he goes, I guess so, let's do it.
And that's how this decision was made.
And, you know, there's been a lot of talk in the last several years that Bush is just a figurehead.
And you hear people say, The President doesn't really have that much power.
He just does whatever his handlers or Wall Street or whatever.
And the problem with this analysis is, even to the extent it's true, it ignores the reality that the presidency, as an office, however much the person in charge, however strong of a personality is and how much, however he delegates that power and administers his office, the presidency has this power to just wage preventive, aggressive war, destroy a country, kill a million people, leave two million people exiled out of the country, two million within the country homeless, this huge humanitarian evil, destructive atrocity.
And the fact that the presidency can't even do this is a huge problem.
So, to add insult to injury, we have a character like Bush, of all people, deciding this.
But, again, at this point, I'd rather keep the smirking chip than have someone come in with a higher IQ.
It seems to me that Hillary and Obama, at least, seem more intelligent than Bush.
You don't want a new team with new credibility.
Right.
And, you know, this sounds really odd, and when I say this stuff, my friends think I'm being tongue-in-cheek, and I do not subscribe to the view that the worse, the better.
I'm not saying I want someone to go in there and kill even more people, but what I'm saying is, given a choice between two people who are going to kill a bunch of people and who are going to loot the country and cause about as much destruction as far as we can tell, I don't really want the choice that's going to be more liked and more approved of by the people.
Yeah.
Because, you know, this is why I wanted Bush to win back in 2000, was, you know, September 11th, notwithstanding, I couldn't tell the future and so forth, but I just thought, look, this guy is such a dimwit that he'll have no credibility.
I mean, the guy's a clown.
He can't even talk out loud without just making an absolute fool of himself.
So that's who I want to be the president, is somebody who's going to be a weak president.
Of course, September 11th changed all that by 100%, but I think Gore would have been even worse, because he'd have had more credibility with a greater percentage of the population of the country, I think.
I think that we're actually lucky that, if you look at who many of the top contenders are in these elections, you know, lately I've been, the last several election cycles, I've thought, wow, these choices just get worse.
And they do, but on the other hand, they're also obviously not the biggest intellectual elite in our society.
It's almost like they're becoming the inbred impotent royalty.
And of course, they still have far too much power, and they cause much damage, but there might be a bright side to having president after president that at least half the people can't stand.
Yeah.
You know, Carol Quigley wrote...
But then again, it's those moderates.
It's the people who liked Bush and Clinton that...
Yeah, the swing voters.
The worst.
Yeah, the swing voters.
Well, Carol Quigley wrote back in 1966, Anthony, that the only real reason that we have two parties, one to represent the liberals and the other the conservatives, is so that the American people can, his ironic quotes, throw those rascals out every eight or even four years if necessary, without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy.
But then he'll come in and bring in his new, fresh team with newly established credibility to carry out the same basic program.
So it looks like that's where we are now.
And you know, as I mentioned in the article, that's on Lou Rockwell today, and you hinted at, that you wanted to talk about a little bit, Obama does seem, you know, superficially, to be a little bit different than some of these others.
And that's exactly why he terrifies me.
Well now, talk to me about that, because honestly, I have to admit, I have not been...
I mean, I've read about him some and what have you, but I have not paid much attention to Barack Obama, you know, on TV.
And I know that that's really what matters.
I mean, this guy, his speech making just wows people so much, and they're just flocking to him like he's the Beatles.
Girls are fainting at his speeches and all this stuff.
My problem is, he sounds so patronizing to me, that I literally would rather listen to John McCain sit there and lie to my face, than listen to this guy blow smoke up my ass about nothing.
And so, I just haven't had the patience to sit and even listen to this guy, Obama.
Because I just have a sort of visceral, I don't like or trust this guy or believe anything he says kind of reaction.
So, maybe you can help explain to me, what is it that is so appealing about this character?
Well, I understand your reaction, because for a while, I had that same immediate reaction.
I just really didn't like him.
And in the last couple months, I've been paying more attention to him.
And, you know, trying to overcome my short attention span and low tolerance for his patronizing speeches to listen through to them.
I even flipped through his book, one of his books.
And he, you know, I think that Americans like him, because he's really good at restoring people's hope and faith in political culture.
In thinking that the nation, that America is still good, that he can come in and, you know, wash away the Bush years and the Bush legacy, and we'll all feel united.
And he has this thing that appeals to a lot of liberals and centrists and progressives, in that he's not demonizing the right.
So, he actually claims to want to unite people.
I mean, his book, there's a small part where he talks about how he understands why people like Reagan.
Because the free market appeals not just to rich people, but to average store owners and average workers.
And he's got this ability to triangulate that is kind of uncanny.
Now, you have to, you know, get past the visceral disgust with anyone, because we know that whenever a Democrat talks about making our lives better, he's lying.
But if you can look past that, you can see how people can kind of like him.
And, you know, as a libertarian, I agree more with him or with what he says about war and civil liberties than McCain.
Now, this isn't saying much, but in the context of an election, if you're going to root for one side, I would never vote for him.
I mean, I imagine that goes without saying.
But if you're going to root for one side on an important issue like war, he at least seems a little better.
Now, would he be better?
We can never know.
And that's another problem with the presidency.
You put them in charge of the presidency, and then unless they do something really terrible, like break into the other party's office, they're going to stay in power for the next four years at least, and you lose all your leverage over them.
You know, the voting lever only has power of leverage on that one day.
So who knows what he would do?
Maybe McCain would be a peacemaker compared to him.
You never really know.
I noticed that Justin Raimondo seems to think that even if he's not genuine, he sounds genuine enough to elicit attacks from the war party.
So in some ways, Obama might have enemies.
He might have the right enemies compared to McCain.
Yeah, well, he's aligned himself with the realists rather than with the neocons, which the realists are imperialists too.
It's just they're not insane, and they're not Israel firsters.
They put their own interests, not necessarily America first, but their own business interests first, unlike the neocons are not intricately tied with the Israeli military industrial complex.
So that makes him different.
But I guess what you're really driving at here is that there's a danger that Obama could restore faith in government.
Really, that's the problem with this guy.
Our high priest of our state religion has been defrocked for raping our kids, and this guy's come to save our faith.
Right, and I think that he'll of course have conservative enemies who will, their dissent will have some restraining effect on him.
You know, the last thing we want is a president who really unites this country like FDR and has 90% of the approval.
It's kind of nice being a libertarian when 70% of the people hate the president.
You know, we don't want to live in a country where 90% of the people love the president.
But the thing is, I think the conservatives would oppose him, many of them.
But I don't know if they would oppose him more than they'd oppose Hillary, though some of the hawkish conservatives might actually support Hillary like they did her husband in the 90s, when she was more willing to kill Serbians than the Republicans were.
Well, and they're relying on her to be a foil so that they can try to reunite the Republican Party.
Yeah, the fact that it is possible that Obama could be the worst, even though his rhetoric I truly think is the least bad on the crucial issue of war, illustrates how terrible the presidency is.
Remember, Bush ran on a more humble foreign policy, which was about as wishy-washy a statement, or maybe even a stronger statement, than Obama's.
You know, somewhat restrained statements about foreign policy.
Right, that's true.
I mean, Obama's pretty openly said he wants to end the error in Iraq so we can shore up other parts of our empire in Africa and Asia and everywhere else.
And he's also been saying that the president's neglected Afghanistan.
Yeah, tell that to the Afghans.
But it really frightens me when the Democrats talk about Afghanistan.
And when liberals listen along, it's as if they don't realize, thank goodness Bush has neglected Afghanistan.
That's the only reason that Afghanistan's not as bad off as Iraq.
Yeah, it's like on MTV when the girl asked Ron Paul about, what will you do about Darfur?
And he said, well look, the power of the president to do something about Darfur is the same power that we're using in Iraq right now.
Seems like somebody would be able to learn that lesson after five years of this mayhem.
Well, you know, many of the liberals still haven't gotten over their, you know, their kind of myopic, naive view of Clinton and his war.
You know, they were on a smaller scale, obviously, but, you know, bombing children is bombing children.
You drop bombs on civilians and kill them, it's going to be bad in any circumstance.
Well, now let's get to Article 2.
I'm kind of torn about Article 2 of the Constitution.
On one hand, there's really not that much power that's given to the president.
On the other hand, it's pretty vague, and I think even, you know, I'd even have to give it to Hamilton that there's a lot of implied power in there.
For example, it doesn't say anything about cabinet departments at all.
And so it's basically just left to the president to create whatever cabinet department he wants.
He has the power to negotiate the treaties.
Of course, you can't make them the law without the Senate.
But he has vast powers of appointment and of regulatory power under executive orders and those kinds of things.
A lot of that power, if not all of it, quite a bit of that power is actually right there in Article 2 or it's between the lines in Article 2, isn't it?
Mm-hmm.
And from the beginning, the American president, even from the good supposedly constitutional founding father generation, had too much power, and then they stretched that power.
And they had somewhat credible arguments for why this power, that power, needed to be taken on or was a corollary.
No, I agree.
I think the Constitution gives way too much power to the president.
I don't think we should have a president.
I mean, the thing is, it's supposedly the president is the president of the executive brash of the government.
We think of the president as the head of the federal government.
But under the Constitution, he's more the head or simply the guy who presides over one-third of the government.
Right.
And his power to execute laws is supposed to be restrained, first of all, by the restraints on Congress to only pass constitutional laws.
But we all know all these arguments about how much more limited he should be, but he was always too powerful.
Or from the beginning, the presidency started usurping power.
You know, Jefferson said, warned George Washington when they were fighting over the central bank, of course, Hamilton was the secretary of treasury and Jefferson was the secretary of state in the first Washington administration.
And Jefferson resigned over the creation of the central bank.
And before he did, he warned Washington that if you sign this, this banking act, which he explained why central banking was a bad idea, as they had learned from the continental dollars and so forth.
But he said, more important is the principle at stake.
There is no central bank allowed in the Constitution anywhere.
And if you do this, you will be setting the precedent and stepping onto a boundless field of power from which, that was the quotable part there, the boundless field of power from which there will never be a return.
And Washington did it and Jefferson quit.
Well, yeah, Washington was a terrible president.
And he was the first one.
And, you know, they've just gotten worse in absolute terms.
I mean, he did all, that was arguably his worst act, you know.
It was a bad precedent in just the national police power for him to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, too.
Yeah, you know, I just read the probability broach where the guy goes into the other dimension and all the anarcho-capitalists say, in your history, the Whiskey Rebellion was lost?
Oh, no.
Yeah, yeah.
That was cool.
All right, well, tell me, who are your favorite presidents?
Do you have any favorite presidents, Anthony Gregory?
Yeah, I guess I like, well, of course I like William Harrison because he only lived 30 days in office.
Didn't have a chance to kidnap, torture, or murder anybody, huh?
Start any aggressive wars in his 30 days?
No, no, he had a bad agenda, but he didn't get to do it.
I think he caught pneumonia at his inaugural address by giving this long speech, and then he died.
But I like, you know, Grover Cleveland, you know, Martin Van Buren.
Presidents that don't really get much credit, but ones who didn't expand the government much, or in some cases even cut backs and stuff.
In the 20th century, Harding might have been the president that cut government the most after Wilson, and he let a lot of people out of prison that Wilson put there simply for opposing World War I, or for lesser crimes than even that.
Yeah, he presided over the return to normalcy.
Right.
But, you know, he was still a protectionist, a prohibitionist.
We got immigration control under the Republicans in the 1920s, who were otherwise better than the previous, you know, Democratic administration.
So even the good presidents are bad.
Well, now, as a laissez-faire libertarian, you must like Herbert Hoover, right?
Well, no.
I mean, I think that Hoover, in his post-president days, was very admirable in his advocacy for peace, but as president, you know, everyone says that he was a laissez-faire guy, and he kind of fiddled while the country went down the tube because of the Depression.
But, you know, in reality, as Murray Rothbard very trenchantly demonstrates in his book, America's Great Depression, Hoover started the New Deal.
He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, he increased spending on public goods, he increased taxes quite a bit.
He didn't expand government comparatively as much as George W. Bush has, but he expanded it quite a bit.
And, you know, the bank holiday, you know, putting all the banks on holiday, which FDR did in the first hundred days, that was also Hoover's idea.
And Hoover had tried to get the Democratic Congress to go along with it during his lame-duck period, but they wouldn't because they didn't want him to get credit, as they would call it.
And he even tried to get FDR to approve it before FDR took office, to show this bipartisan, you know, solution to the Depression.
But, no, a lot of the New Deal actually started under Hoover.
He wasn't laissez-faire at all.
If he had been, the Depression would have probably ended much sooner, just like the 1921 Depression, Recession, that Harding didn't really do anything to stop, and that's why it stopped.
You know, this idea that FDR got America out of the Depression is, you know, it's a timeless myth, and it's interesting that Americans think that our economy would really just be totally in the dumps for 15 years, and they think that that's the natural course, and that they still credit the New Deal and the World War II for getting us out of the Depression, when we were stuck in a Depression for all that time, while two administrations were doing everything they could to stop it.
So maybe, you know, if we look at the actual record, you know, Robert Higgs has done important work on this, too, in his book Depression War and Cold War.
In other words, we see that it was the interventions, it was the government interventions that prolonged the Depression.
So, no, I'm no fan of Hoover.
He set things up terribly for one of our most despotic presidents, and he himself was no free marketer.
Well, you're right, too, about the whole Depression and the war and that era as a foundational myth that is so persistent.
There's a new quote of George Bush, which I stole from the Lou Rockwell blog and immediately put on a bumper sticker, which is George W. Bush saying, I think spending on the war has been good for jobs.
And this is a guy who, if he knows anything about the Great Depression, it was that all the government intervention and especially the war is what solved the problem.
Well, all the most conservatives and Republicans are pro-New Deal, and they believe in the FDR legacy.
And why shouldn't they?
It just adds to the imperial presidency that Republicans have enjoyed ever since.
Hey, do you think that maybe if America had a queen to be the head of state, that that would diminish the president?
Like, maybe he has too many jobs, right?
He's the commander in chief of the military.
He's the chief executive of the departments created by him and or Congress to a degree.
But he's also the head of state.
He's also the guy that.
Well, I think you talk about this in your article.
People personify the nation as the president himself.
The famous I guess the reason this clip is so famous and people laugh at is because it's Britney Spears chewing gum while she says it.
But this is a sentiment that I think is shared by a super majority of the American people, which is, hey, the president's the president.
He's in charge up there and let him decide what to do.
And he's the head of state.
Why?
Who am I to question him?
Yeah, I think that we'd probably be better off with royalty instead of a president.
We'd probably be better off with a figurehead who lived in a palace, wore a gold crown, but didn't really have that much power.
And that people didn't really see as their leader of the free world, but as, you know, just just another member of a ruling class, because Americans don't really wouldn't want to be ruled by that.
But they somehow admire the president.
Now you say the president has all this stuff that he has to do.
But one thing that's interesting is during the presidential campaign, when the president, when the incumbent is running for reelection, he takes a lot of time off.
They take a lot of time off.
And the country doesn't fall apart.
And, you know, one thing, the liberals always talked about how Bush took all this time off.
Well, I wish he took more time off.
Right.
Yeah, that sort of goes to the Ron Paul presidency, too, which is he wouldn't have restored faith in the government.
He would have just proved how unnecessary it is.
He just said, watch how little I do and watch how much better all your lives get as a result.
I'm sorry, we're out of time.
We're up against the wall.
Somebody else's show is on next.
So that's it.
Thanks very much for your time, everybody.
Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute at Independent.org and has an article today at LewRockwell.com.
Our enemy, the presidency.
Thanks very much, Anthony.
Thank you, Scott.