05/27/08 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

I'm not crazy.
You're the one that's crazy.
You're driving me crazy.
All right, folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing our guest today, it's my good friend Anthony Gregory.
He's researched something or other at the Independent Institute.for the Future Freedom Foundation, Strike the Root, and a bunch of other places.
And he gave a great speech, which I'm so disappointed was not aired on C-SPAN at the Libertarian Party Convention last weekend.
And it was published yesterday at LewRockwell.com.
Why do we choose to defend liberty?
And I like the speech so much, I figured I'd let Anthony come on the show and let those of us who didn't attend the LP Convention in Denver hear what he had to say.
Welcome back to the show.
Hey, Scott, it's great to be back.
And hi, hello to all your listeners.
I'm back from Denver.
All right, now, I don't want to go over all the doings and goings on at the convention, and I know you don't either, so forget about all that.
I want to know about this speech that you gave.
Why do we choose to defend liberty?
And if I remember my experience at the Libertarian Party Convention in 2004, I was kind of surprised, I think, to understand how few people in the libertarian movement really seem to actually even have a grasp of what libertarianism is, other than opposition to, you know, a couple of things in a group or something like that, you know, against economic restriction and against personal restriction.
So that's libertarian, but without any real core understanding of the philosophy.
And I guess that was the purpose behind this speech, is to get up there and remind people what it really means to be a libertarian and what's the motivation behind being a libertarian and fighting for individual liberty in this society, which so often denies it.
Well, yes, it's very interesting.
You know, Murray Rothbard's wonderful libertarian manifesto for a new liberty, which kind of is a very comprehensive treatise of very manageable size, but it addresses all of the issues that you could really think of, or almost all the issues, but it also discusses the history and the economics and the philosophy.
But I bring it up because, either in the introduction or the first chapter, Rothbard starts the book by talking about the Libertarian Party.
He says, this party was just founded, it's based on ideas, it's having some success, it's getting some attention, what is this all about?
And he segues into talking about libertarianism.
And of course, as you and I know, Scott, libertarianism preceded the Libertarian Party.
The purpose of the LP was to advance libertarianism, and libertarianism is a philosophy.
I understand that not everyone shares it.
I understand most people don't share it.
And I understand that people who are more for liberty are generally more our fellow travelers than people who are less for liberty.
So I'm all for the Big Ten.
You know, on antiwar.com, as you know, you guys are antiwar, but you're Big Ten.
You publish people who are a little interventionist, though you publish them where you agree with them, mostly.
And you've got leftists and conservatives, and we can all work together against the big issues of the time.
But if we're going to be libertarian, we shouldn't shy away.
I mean, we have little differences, but I do think that every once in a while, libertarians do need to be reminded that they're out there speaking on behalf of a system of thought, of an ideology.
Right.
And it seems like people talk about leaving the Republicans and coming over to the Libertarians or leaving the Democrats and coming over to the Libertarian Party, but the real question is whether they've left modern liberalism, left modern conservatism behind to come over to libertarianism, the philosophy.
That's the most important point.
Right, that is the question.
And I'm all for people who are particularly disillusioned with the two-party system.
I'm all for explaining to them that there's no real hope there.
And it's not just because of the two-party system, but because of the underlying philosophy and undermining, if we want to talk about freedom, the underlying philosophy of the GOP and indeed the Democratic Party.
They've never been libertarian.
And the GOP especially has never been classically liberal.
You know, a couple politicians scattered throughout the 20th century, and of course there's Ron Paul, but that man is an anomaly in so many ways.
He's more the exception, the proof, the rule than anything.
And look at the way the GOP treated him, because he was talking about liberty.
Now, yeah, I agree, the people who come in, I'm all for people coming in to the movement, but ours is a struggle of educating them and educating the people as to why we believe what we believe.
Let me ask you this, Anthony.
Brian Doherty from Reason Magazine wrote a book last year, published a book last year, I'm sure it took him a lot longer than that to write it.
It was called Radicals for Capitalism.
It wasn't called Conservatives for Gay Rights and Pot Smoking.
It was called Radicals for Capitalism.
Right.
I believe that was a, I'm not sure, but I believe that was an Ayn Rand phrase.
And I could quibble with that too, but at least it really underscores that we're radicals in terms of, our philosophy is one that, like radicalism, it goes to the root of the matter.
We want to look at the entire state apparatus and conceive of a more just society from the bottom up.
We're not about, you know, tweaking things or cutting government by 10%.
Of course if government were cut by 10%, that'd be good, but what, would we be back to like 2005, 2006 levels?
Yeah, maybe 2007.
Yeah, or 2007 even.
Ours really is a program of, and philosophy, that puts everything into perspective from the bottom up.
And it came as the kind of culmination of hundreds of years of struggling within the liberal movement, as in the classical liberal movement.
And then the colonial cause against the king in America.
And then the abolitionist movement.
And then the anti-imperialist movement against the progressive imperialists like Roosevelt and Wilson.
And then the old right.
I mean, the thing about, which I think is the only period in our traditional history where I would use the right favorably, and I think it's a bit of a misnomer, but putting that aside, not only do we have this philosophical principle, but it came after hundreds of years of trying to figure out what the real issue was for everyone who wasn't more on the side of liberty than the status quo was.
And it came as a kind of point after a dialectic relationship between those who believed in liberty and the keepers of the status quo who didn't believe in liberty.
And what was the principle that eventually emerged that was embraced, I don't think consistently applied, but embraced by Ayn Rand, then embraced and more consistently applied and systematized by Murray Rothbard, and by many other heroes, Robert Lefebvre and these drawing upon the individualist anarchists of a past century, like Lysander Spooner, the old right individualist, like Mencken.
I could go on naming names, but I only mention the history because we've got a proud legacy, and what we came to believe is that the real issue here is aggression.
What we oppose is the initiation of force.
And some libertarians don't like going back to the philosophical foundation of our belief.
They want to talk about, you know, we want this policy to work better in terms of economic efficiency.
We want to protect due process rights a little bit here.
We think this war has been a big mistake or disaster, maybe even a tragedy, so we should rethink the extent to which the U.S. intervenes.
And these are all to varying degrees libertarian-type inclinations.
But it doesn't make any sense to put it all in those terms, because, again, what I said about 2006-2007 being a smaller government than we have now, our standard is one of universal fundamental principle.
We believe all individuals on Earth have a certain right, whether you think these rights are a product of the laws of physics or God, or are in some sense just a self-evident irrefutable truth.
This is what we believe.
And to an extent, we do kind of take this on faith.
Well, and you know what's funny?
It isn't just us libertarians that take it on faith.
This is what our entire system defines as crime, is when libertarian principles are violated.
Well, that's absolutely true.
The thing is, libertarians like to point out that in daily affairs, interpersonal affairs just with each other's neighbors and business, most people act in a libertarian manner.
But the radical implication of that principle for us is we apply it to the state.
And then when we apply it to the state, we realize that the state has always failed.
You know, the idea that there was ever a libertarian state is fallacious.
I mean, there were states that were far less aggressive than others because they had less power.
But the state itself should be our focus now, especially since most people do act in a more civilized manner.
In America, anyway, there aren't many bombings between religious communities.
There isn't chattel slavery.
The libertarianism and its interpersonal ethic has, for the most part, caught on.
But the state is where everyone has this blind spot, where everyone thinks the state needs the right to violate rights.
It needs to be able to pass laws that are above the law.
It needs to adjudicate disputes, including those in which it's a party.
And I mention law because we believe in law.
We believe in the laws that you say most people think are good laws against crime, like murder and rape and theft.
But we apply that to the state.
And then what we find is it's the state that actually creates the most lawlessness in our world.
It really is.
In fact, think about the nightmare anarchy where you're not even, you know, I don't mean to use even that term.
Just think of chaos.
I don't know, the second or third American Civil War and all hell breaking loose here.
People turning on each other.
Not even state armies, but just people going crazy in a state of lawlessness here in America.
The worst possible scenario you could imagine like that is nothing compared to the violence that our government meets out on people every day.
Yeah, sure.
And our problem, of course, as you know, is a philosophical one because people give excuses to the government.
When the government bombs, let's say the government has one of those relatively small, measured, restrained bombings, the ones that the more humane conservatives and liberals favor as opposed to the all-out neocons or crazy Tehran-nuked, happy warmongers.
You know, like just those tactical bombings that only, and I put that in quotes, kill a few innocent people or ten or a hundred innocent people.
You know, like the first bombings in Afghanistan, right?
There's still murder.
And this is our problem because if there were someone down the street who had a grudge against his neighbor and bombed his neighbor and killed his infant, that guy would go to jail.
I mean, that is if the police were able to connect the dots and the prosecutor were competent.
But the point is society, or almost all people in a civilized society look at that as barbaric.
And certainly if you loot someone, it's theft.
When the state does it, it's taxation.
If you were to put someone in your basement because you don't like the drugs he consumed or you didn't feel comfortable with something about his personal life, if you stuck him in your basement, you'd be considered a kidnapper.
But that's the way the criminal justice system works.
If you were to force someone to work, it would be seen as slavery.
But when the state does it, it's just conscription.
In fact, the state not only can force people to work, it can force people to kill and to die in war.
And even though now we don't have a draft, soldiers can't even quit their job.
We got rid of private indentured servitude long ago because people thought that it was an affront to liberty.
So if I can't hire you in such a situation where you're not allowed to quit or I could kill you or whatever, then even the stop-loss system or just the military contracts for a term of service aren't consistent with the way we treat each other.
And of course, as I said, war is just basically murder, except on a much larger scale.
But when the government does it, it's foreign policy.
It's not seen as a moral issue.
And, you know, the liberals today and some of the conservatives, they are better on war than the McCain Act.
But they don't really see it in the sharp terms of the moral outrage because, you know, when you see those, you know, they say, 4,000 Americans have died, right, or 5,000, 4,500.
I know it keeps going up, and this is a huge tragedy, but then it's almost like a parenthetical.
Oh, yeah, and there's a million Iraqis who died because of this war.
But many of those Iraqis were just directly slaughtered by the U.S. state, and it's including the Iraqi soldiers in the beginning of the war.
So the idea that the U.S. state killing these people is just something to count in some sort of, like, accounting mechanism to determine how well this war is going, you know.
Well, and that's certainly true for the Democratic politicians who would rather keep the war going and have it as an election issue.
I'm not certain that that's really true among the grassroots, but, I mean, I'm sure it is to a degree.
I want to emphasize, I do think there is a moral element in the grassroots liberals who oppose the war, and I think that's wonderful, and I rather would talk with them than...
And especially among the real leftists, not so much the liberals, but the leftists.
Yeah, well, I'm not talking about, say, the left as a counterpart.
I'm talking about the majority of the Democratic Party, not just at the top, but the majority of the people who just vote Democrat.
I don't want to condemn these people as people, but they're not condemning the war in the right terms, I think.
This isn't just a debacle that Bush messed up because he mismanaged it.
I mean, could you imagine someone criticizing Charles Manson and saying one of the big problems was he mismanaged his attempt to start a race war?
Thank goodness he didn't do better at it.
All right, well, let me ask you about domestic policy, because, gee, you sure sound like a nice kid, Anthony, and yet, you know, when it comes to these poor Iraqis being humans and having natural rights and so forth, as you outlined there, and, you know, the Iranians, for that matter.
But what about domestic politics?
Because, well, I was taught as a young man that libertarianism is the rich white man's anarchy.
Oh, yeah, it's great to have liberty if you're already born rich and you own property and have a trust fund and a good education and a good job.
You're going to do just fine, but everybody else can just go to hell as far as you're concerned, right?
Well, okay, first I'll defend the hard principle.
Yes, I believe that if there's someone who's rich, who's made his profits on the free market through mutual exchange, and who lives on property that was acquired as justly as possible, as far as we can ascertain, as far back as we can go, you know, in a sense, all the land was stolen at some point, which is a problem.
But insofar as he's basically a just actor in the market who's made piles of money offering goods and services to others at a mutually agreeable price, I think it is very immoral to tax him or regulate him, to attack him in any way.
That being said, the reality is, when you give up this principle, what you let the state do is use taxes and regulation against people.
And as it turns out, not just here now in America, thanks to the Republicans, but throughout the history of government, governments are always on the side of the connected, the privileged, the wealthy.
This idea that you can separate the state from the most influential, powerful people in society seems to me somewhat absurd on its face.
And so when you abandon that principle, what happens isn't rich people are robbed and poor people are benefited.
What happens is we end up with this monstrous, oppressive, regulatory, corporate state.
And more often than not, a lot of the rich people that some of the leftists find the most offensive got rich because of the state.
And they got rich by crippling their smaller competitors, keeping people out of the market.
And the fact is, if you really want the poor to be less poor, for the middle class to have more prosperity, for there to be more real-world freedom in the sense of being able to live and access shelter and food and healthcare and things that we all want people to have more of, you can't do it by the state, because the state operates on the negation of civilized conduct.
And the people whose rights are always the least vulnerable.
This is where I disagree with Ayn Rand, who said that the big business was the most persecuted minority.
No, the people whose rights are always the least vulnerable aren't the big corporate fat cats.
They're the people on the street.
And for them, the difference between life and liberty, or between liberty and state oppression, is often the difference between life and death, because at the margin, when you inflate the money supply, well, sorry, Scott, not you, but when the Republicans inflate the money supply to cut taxes some small amount for the higher-income people, and they still want to pay for their wars, which cost even more than Clinton's big government stuff, they do it by inflating the money supply, which shrinks the value of the dollar, and the first people to get the new money tend to be the rich, and the people who are hurt tend to be the lower middle class and the poor.
I mean, this isn't...
Rocket surgery.
It's not completely exact, but it's pretty close, wouldn't you say?
Oh, sure.
What happens, I mean, all of these regulations, these business regulations, you think the big businesses oppose them?
They're the ones that can hire a team of lawyers and accountants to deal with them.
And the lobbyists to write them.
The lobbyists to write them in the first place.
It was one of the heads of GE, not exactly a small mom-and-pop shop down Main Street, but GE, he wrote the regulations and the design, or he helped in a large degree create the National Recovery Administration, FDR's big agency that was supposed to even out the economy, and that was eventually ruled unconstitutional.
And this was the new deal.
This is the guy that the liberals say that the Democrats should be more like, you know, that we've sold out since FDR.
No, FDR sold everybody out, and he sold them out to the corporate state, and he's the one who created the modern military-industrial complex, and then that liberal Truman's the one that made sure it wouldn't go away after World War II.
So you've got to keep in mind, these people with power, including, you know, Republicans or Democrats, their constituency isn't people with no money.
Those people have votes, and so they try to do what they can to buy a few votes or scare the hell out of them to say the other side's even worse.
But in reality, if there is a class struggle, it's always in the classes that have been privileged by the state against the disenfranchised classes.
And the classes privileged by the state, either they're the ones who already have authority and money in society, the wealthy merchants, or in some cases in history, in some cases of the world, you know, clergy or whoever, the people that are already on top, so to speak.
Or if you completely revolutionize society, and you actually do, you know, go in there communist style and put the proletariat in charge, then they're the ruling class.
And history has just shown this over and over.
The idea that the state is going to put the oppressed people in charge is a contradiction.
The ruling elite will never be the underdog.
You know, I met a communist one day who, he called himself a Marxist, and that was different, I guess, whatever.
But anyway, so I made the point to him that like, you know, Rothbard would say that if you want to be a commie and you really want the state to wither away, and you really believe that there will be, you know, a stateless brotherhood of workers and all that kind of thing, don't you think it'd probably be the best idea to wither the state away rather than building it up into a monolith in the hopes that then I Dream of Jeannie is going to make it disappear?
Totalitarianism isn't a path to liberty.
You have to wither the state away, even if you're a commie, even if you hate free markets.
If you want to get rid of the state, well, stop asking it to do everything for you.
Well, the thing with Marx, and that, you know, of course I agree with Rothbard here, which isn't the first time I've said that, but the thing with the Marxism is it poisoned the left in the world.
You know, the left and right, these are situational terms, I don't like them that much, but for the sake of description, it used to be the classical liberals, the people who wanted to elevate the common man and fight the Ancien Regime, fight theocracy and militarism, corporatism, and state-empowered patriarchy, the people who believed in liberalism were the same who believed in liberty, because they saw from Adam Smith and the levelers before him, throughout all the great liberals throughout the 19th century, they saw that the state and the businessman were in coup, and this was bad for the honest businessman, and it was bad for the people, and it was definitely bad for freedom, and it was also bad, as Smith and many other economists point out, it was also bad for the economy, and so it was the Marxists and the socialists and the progressives who kind of cozied up to the state in the name of helping the little guy, and I see a little tendency here with some of the libertarians.
Part of the libertarian movement's purpose was to reclaim the actual model for looking at this that makes any sense, which is that the state and the people with the most power in society, especially if the state's big, they're going to be in cahoots.
So if you want to believe in the interest of the average person, the state is not a positive sum game.
It doesn't elevate people on average.
It destroys wealth.
Its power flows out of that of a gun.
The state's power comes from threatening people with jail time.
Well, first, it might threaten people with fines, but if you don't pay those fines enough, it threatens you with jail time, and if you refuse to go to jail, it kills you.
This is the essence of the state, and trying to use this to somehow bring down the oppressive structures that have kept human beings from reaching their full potential for thousands of years, trying to tear this down with itself is lunacy, and it was the socialist movement, and this word, too, has some unfortunate implications, and it, too, is imprecise, but the Marxism really kind of drew this wedge, and I think it kind of made the left lose sight of their actual radicalism, because now, all of a sudden, they thought that if you took over the state apparatus and if you increased its power and abolished property relations, then the state would wither away.
Of course, we've seen where this experiment lies, and the leftists who said that they never really tried socialism correctly, well, you could respond that Bush never tried neoconservatism correctly.
We could reply that the fascists didn't try fascism correctly.
If it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck, and we know that state socialism is murderous and impoverishing on an unspeakable scale.
All right, now, you apply this libertarian principle to the actions of the state in such a way that they are left as nothing but exposed liars and murderers.
However, and this is a big however, what about criminal justice?
And here's my example, Anthony.
What about a homeless, family-less, desolate, hopeless person whose body is found murdered somewhere?
A person that no one cares about.
Isn't it in the best interest of society to make sure that we have a police department and a district attorney's office that will make sure to prosecute the hell out of even a millionaire who may have committed that crime against the person that the rest of society had basically shunned and deemed to be worthless?
There are problems I have with criminal justice, with jailing people, even people who are murderers.
I'm not saying that I have any sympathy for the murderers, but there are problems with criminal justice across the board.
There's the death penalty.
There's this invasive structure that violates the rights of all sorts of third parties.
But let me put that aside and let me take your hypothetical question here at face value.
Isn't it in the interest of people for the state to protect the poor homeless guy that nobody cares about from the millionaire who murdered him?
Well, how often has this happened?
Well, it happens sometimes.
I remember there were some rich kids who beat a homeless guy to death here in Austin and they went to prison for it like they deserved to.
But this guy didn't have any family, he didn't have anybody to hire, private prosecutors.
How often does it happen?
Would the poor people be better off in a world of freedom?
Would they be as poor?
They wouldn't be as poor in a society that was more libertarian.
And I agree that the fact is that a millionaire killing a homeless guy is as much of a criminal, obviously, as someone else killing an innocent person.
But the state is the worst instrument to try to level things out like that.
I mean, does anyone out there really believe that our prisons are filled with millionaires who killed homeless people?
Without the prisons, there wouldn't, you know...
Oh, come on!
The prison system is filled with poor people, people who aren't educated enough to deal with the criminal justice system.
For every millionaire who's in prison for killing a homeless person, there's probably like hundreds or thousands of homeless people in prison just for looking at a millionaire's stamp.
I mean, this is not a very good real-world example of the state doing much good in action.
Well, Anthony, the reason I use it is because this is my last excuse, right?
You have to have impartial, non-profit criminal justice, you know, or else how's anybody supposed to get a fair trial?
I mean, isn't the whole fantasy that we're brought up with is that the DA's office has unlimited resources, and if it takes $5 million to prosecute somebody who deserves to be prosecuted for a crime that they committed against even the least among us, they're going to goddamn get that job done.
I mean, I sympathize with the sentiment, but the state doesn't effectively do that.
The state is more likely to kill that homeless person that nobody cares about than a millionaire is.
All right.
I don't disagree with that.
I'm just pitching you softballs so you can knock them out of the park here, basically.
The state is not impartial.
This idea that the state can be impartial, here's something that people need to realize.
Whether it masquerades under democracy, and what's interesting is there's always been this movement of people who favor democracy in theory and yet claim that the democratic government in front of them isn't real democracy.
Well, you can't have pure democracy on everything because it's just incoherent.
As it turns out, who gets to decide on what to vote for in a pure democracy is the one with the power.
The state is not neutral because the state is just a bunch of people.
It's not even that exactly.
The state is this idea.
It's this grant of privilege that a class of people to varying degrees adopt for themselves and is tolerated by the bulk of society.
The state is just those people and those actions that are tolerated that would otherwise not be.
And how could this be the answer?
To make an exception to the law for the state, which has always been the enemy of the poor and mankind throughout all of history.
I mean, you could say that in the democratic state, the state is accountable and then accountable to whom?
The people that are supposedly too selfish to help the poor on their own?
So they're going to vote for congressmen who are supposedly going to be more angelic than themselves and turn themselves into becoming more compassionate?
That's absurd.
And empirically, the war on poverty that was started 40 years ago, it didn't stop poverty.
Thank goodness we didn't have the government in charge of technology even more than it has been or else there's been stagnant there too.
And the other thing is that you need to understand, the people need to understand, that the state cannot abolish selfishness and private interest.
All it does is put people who everyone is a mix between selfish and concerned with others.
I think that it's a fallacy to believe there's pure selfishness or pure selflessness.
But whatever the amalgam in your society, however civilized people are and caring they are or selfish they are, the state apparatus just puts people in a position where they can rule other people.
So why would you want the state to have all this power if you think people are selfish and greedy?
Now you've just got a way for selfish and greedy people to be totally unaccountable to the people through the state.
Well, I think people believe that democracy is a better way to hold people accountable than the marketplace.
In the marketplace, cronies will always protect each other, but at least in democracy, the people can have their vote, one man, one vote, no matter how rich or poor you are and set things back right again.
Well, you know, it's funny because whenever they actually come up with concrete examples of this phenomenon supposedly at work, if you look at them, you see the near reverse of what they're claiming.
Like Enron.
It wasn't the free market that allowed Enron to continue this.
It was the regulations of the Security Exchange Commission.
It were the deals between government and energy suppliers.
There's a reason Enron favored Kyoto because the Enron people knew that if the government implemented some big environmental policy globally, they would get the contract.
So we can't blame Enron, for example, on the market.
And yet, was it the government that eventually pulled the plug on the dishonesty there?
No, it was the laws of economics.
Even in a hampered market, eventually the laws of economics kick in.
You can't keep violating them.
If you move things around the economy, you can redistribute wealth, you can make some people richer and some people poorer, but you're always dealing with scarcity.
And absent the market, absent the feedback that happens between every person exchanging in the market, every wage and every price and every exchange, this wonderful network of voluntary transactions that creates the modern economy and lets us actually live, you can't eliminate these laws.
And it's this that eventually leads businesses to fail.
It's this that gloriously allows CEOs who are gobbling up too much money and mismanaging things to be taken over by other CEOs or other entrepreneurs.
It's the state that protects these businesses from failing.
It's the state that bails out Chrysler.
It's the state that bails out Bear Stearns.
It's the state that comes in and says, for the greater good, companies can pollute as long as they pollute according to our dictates, not their neighbors.
This is what happens over and over and over in history.
The state comes in, and when the market is finally catching up, when the market is finally taking a privileged corporation and saying, no, you've gone too far, this project is going to go bankrupt, it's the state that bails them out.
All right, everybody, that's it.
That's Anthony Gregory.
He's from the Independent Institute.
He's a research analyst there.
That's independent.org.
He also writes for lourockwell.com, lourockwell.com, Strike the Root, and a couple of other places.
I can't remember off the top of my head.
Thank you very much for your time today, Anthony.
Thank you, Scott.
It's always fun.