04/13/07 – Butler Shaffer – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
You know, I've always regarded government as a necessary evil.
But as we get closer to completely lawless fascism like this, I have more and more trouble justifying the existence of the United States government at all.
I mean, I guess I would probably settle for a limited constitutional republic if I could get one.
But my first guest today, Butler Schafer, says I shouldn't have to.
Is that right, Butler?
Right.
Welcome to the show.
Butler Schafer is a professor at Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles, a regular contributor to LouRockwell.com, the very best libertarian site on the whole world wide web.
And he's the author of Calculated Chaos, Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, In Restraint of Trade, the Business Campaign Against Competition, and the Tax Exemption of Church Property in the United States.
Last one, I don't know where that ever came from.
People have asked me about that.
I never wrote such a book, so I don't know where that came from.
People keep asking me about it.
Maybe there's some other Schafer that wrote a book about that, but not I.
Well, I think I might be able to help narrow down the source of the mistake, at least.
Amazon.com, I clicked on Calculated Chaos, and then I clicked on your name when it took me to the list of all the books you've written.
That was one of them.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's a surprise to me.
I wonder what I had to say.
Yeah, well, all right.
Well, I take that back.
He's the author of Calculated Chaos and In Restraint of Trade.
Right.
How's that?
That's fair enough.
Now, did I get that right?
You don't think I should have to settle for a limited constitutional republic at all, huh?
Well, there's no way to limit it is the problem.
We've seen that the United States was probably the classic example of genuine good faith, intelligent effort to create a kind of constitutional system that would restrain power.
And what you find when you go through the cases that the courts have decided is that the liberties that are spelled out have always been very narrowly construed by the courts.
Free speech does not include freedom of the press does not mean the right to do such and such and so forth.
And then you read the powers that are given to the government.
They're given a very expansive definition.
You know, the necessary and proper clause is not limited to and things of that nature.
Right.
Yeah, it really should be the other way around, right?
Our rights should be interpreted most expansively and their powers in the most limited fashion.
It should.
I was saddened to see that the cartoonist Johnny Hart, who does used to do the BC and Wizard of Id cartoons, had died the other day.
And somebody sent me a cartoon that he had done one of his early ones on the guys trying to create a constitutional government.
They were spelling out all the things the government couldn't do.
Excuse me, a very long list.
And and the guy promoting it was saying that this is to guarantee all your rights.
And people said, that's great.
And then some some other one, some of the guy comes up right after the fact of a much shorter list of papers.
And I hate the wrong list.
Yeah, but that is true.
You get into constitutions and you find that, as Anthony de Jasse, a British current British philosopher, had said, there's there is no way to prevent a sizable number of people from doing whatever it is they want to do.
And writing words down on paper just doesn't doesn't do it, in part because the words that are used always have to be interpreted.
Guess who's going to interpret them?
The government.
Right.
Well, and that was if we go back in history, that was the complaints of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, right?
That the court was the final decision maker in disputes concerning itself.
Yeah, there's no way that constitutions will ever limit power.
OK, well, what's to be done then?
Because I think, well, I mean, I guess, as I said in the introduction, our government is regarded by most as, at the very least, a necessary evil.
If we didn't have a constitutional government in the United States, it would just be replaced by a different one.
Right.
Maybe worse.
Well, as my old definition of government was an institution of murder, rape, theft, robbery and predation, the absence of which it is said would lead to disorder.
Yeah.
That's the question becomes one of where does order in society come from?
Does it come?
Is it something that is imposed vertically from above, you know, that politicians and political systems will bring us to order?
This is the platonic model in Plato's Republic, you know, that the philosopher kings, you know, would set up all these wise policies and methods for carrying out those policies.
And this would be a way of instilling order in society.
What we're discovering now, we're going through a process in which the vertical structuring of order is being replaced by a horizontal system of order.
We're seeing decentralization.
The Internet is probably the best example of that.
You know, we used to just rely upon the television, news networks and major newspapers to tell us what it was that the political system wanted us to know.
And now we have the Internet where alternative voices are being expressed in a purely horizontal way.
You know, we communicate with each other in this manner in a very, very effective way.
So the old elites perhaps were right when they foresaw the fall of the nation state by the end of World War Two, but they just imagine things going in the other direction, increasing centralization of power until there's just one state on Earth.
But you're saying that no power is spreading out and these states are fighting a losing battle.
That's right.
I think that the vertically structured systems are in a complete state of collapse.
In fact, I think that all of Western civilization is undergoing that right now.
But you see this even in the war system.
The more dramatic example of war itself has become very decentralized, hasn't it?
After 9-11, 19 guys with box cutter knives precipitated what is becoming World War Three.
But even before this, the British learned in the Revolutionary War about the disadvantages of vertically structured military systems compared with the colonials and their decentralized methods.
The French learned it in Algeria and Indochina.
The Germans learned it at the hands of the French underground during World War Two.
Israel just learned it in their struggles with Lebanon.
And the U.S. is, I shouldn't say learning it, we're experiencing it again in Iraq.
Learning it might be a verge too far there.
Yeah, but the Americans right now are getting the weight kicked out of them in Iraq by completely decentralized, I won't say unorganized.
It's organized, but it's organized on a very decentralized, horizontal basis.
And the most powerful military machine in the history of mankind can't deal with it.
Hey, the Ewoks brought down Darth Vader's evil empire, right?
That's right, yeah.
Well, you remember the line in Star Wars that I always liked was when Princess Leia, was that her name?
Yeah.
I was talking with one of the evil doers, and she said, you know, we're like sand in your hand.
The tighter you squeeze us, the more we slip through your fingers.
Right.
And that's kind of where we are.
And I think the political establishment is certainly aware of this.
Hillary Clinton is aware of it a number of years ago, as you may recall, she proposed that we needed a gatekeeper for the internet.
People should not be free to just get on the internet and say whatever they want to say.
Right, and in fact, you know, I looked at the Lew Rockwell blog this morning right before going on the air, and Lou had posted a quote from Brian Williams of NBC News, Tom Brokofsky's replacement, and he was complaining that all his years of hard work earning all his credentials to be the guy who tells us the news, and it's just not fair that now he has to compete with some guy named Vinny in his apartment in Brooklyn.
Yeah, well, maybe the guy in the apartment in Brooklyn has better sources of information, or maybe is more willing to speak the truth of what he knows than Brian Williams is.
Yeah, well.
I think when you're into that kind of institutionalized news, you're getting basically what your employer wants you to express.
I have a friend of mine who used to be a newscaster here in L.A., and he said, I was always tempted to go on the air some morning and say, you know, good morning, and here are the lies your government would like to have you believe today.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's basically where we are.
Yeah, now, OK, war.
We've got to try to focus this on war a bit because I've got to convince Eric to let me run this on antiwar.com.
So if I had an eye dream of Jeannie here, who called me master and did whatever I liked, and I had her blink away the U.S. government and it disappeared to be replaced with nothing, well, what's to protect us from the Russians and the Germans and everybody else, because they're still going to have their armies and their governments?
Aren't they going to come take us over?
Well, I think the interesting question is, first of all, why would they want to?
Apart from our capacities for free trade, where it would be advantageous to trade economically rather than to use coercion.
But one of the best examples of the alternative to the big standing arm of the big military structure and so forth is found in Switzerland.
The Swiss have managed to stay out of wars for I don't know how many hundreds of years, and they have a very decentralized kind of system.
Imagine yourself in that situation.
Let's say you're living in some city and some military structure wants to come in, the Chinese, the Germans, whoever it may be, wants to come in and take over.
And there's no political system to surrender you.
And this is one thing you have to kind of recognize is that political systems, by being centralized, have the capacity to surrender the rest of the country to an invader.
Look how quickly Hitler was able to subdue Holland and Poland and places like this by simply getting to the power structure and getting them to surrender the public to them.
The Germans were not able, fortunately, to overcome things like the French resistance.
There was a story told, I don't remember the source of it, I remember reading it 40 or 50 years ago, that some German army general who had been in Paris toward the end of World War II, and he said, we were trying to get out of Paris, but the French resistance wouldn't let us out.
In other words, they were just kicking the snot out of us wherever we turned.
I think it becomes a question of what it is people themselves are willing to protect themselves against.
If someone were to come over and do that, you see the example in Iraq.
The Iraqis did what I think people in most countries want to do.
If some foreign power comes in and wants to take you over, you resist.
The Americans did it with the British, although the British weren't an invading force, they were the established regime.
But most people kind of resent that.
It's easy for people to take over their own people, but when people come in from outside, there's a tendency to resist that.
We saw it in Vietnam, we saw it in Iraq, the Israelis have seen it in Lebanon.
So it becomes a question of what it is people are willing to put up with.
Well, I guess that does sort of imply, though, that the occupying army might very well be able to land their troops on our shores, but we'll beat them eventually, kind of.
Well, where would they go to take over a country?
You'd have to go door-to-door, wouldn't you?
Yeah, well, boots on the ground, yeah, if you really wanted to.
There's not even a mayor there to surrender the city.
Where do you go?
You go into ancient Chinese history and you discover that invading armies were able to come into China, but political power was so decentralized that there was nobody to surrender the population to them.
So the armies just kind of settled in and became absorbed by the culture.
They didn't take it over, they just got absorbed into it.
Interesting, yeah, I guess I need to learn more ancient Chinese history.
The people that tell us this, of course, are the state.
They want to give us the boogeyman.
If you don't give us the power, the nine bows from across the river are going to come over and take us over.
Well, the problem is, as we've seen now with the post-9-11 problems, we've already been taken over.
The war system has allowed us to be taken over by our own state.
Well, gosh, if the Germans came in, they might start holding us without right of trial, they might restrict free speech.
That's what the present government is doing.
Right.
So the question is, is there some advantage to being coerced and tyrannized and killed and so forth by your own government as opposed to a foreign government?
Or is there perhaps an advantage in examining the whole nature of political power, which begins with the war system?
Yeah, well now, if I can try to play my old monarchist self here, I'm going to be a lousy devil's advocate because I already agree with you, obviously.
But, okay, so what if I say, yeah, but look here, professor, the natural order came up with these constitutions.
These Westphalia-style nation-states of collective defense are the result of the long march of history and people learning from their mistakes and figuring out how things ought to be done.
And that's why they created these things in the first place.
Well, was it that or was it that some people saw the advantages, the Alexander Hamilton types, saw the advantages of using collective coercive power for their benefit?
I don't know that this is something that is sort of a natural process of development.
In fact, the natural process really is a very anarchistic one, isn't it, in terms of how we deal with each other.
Just walk yourself through your daily life.
Who do you coerce in order to get your way?
Who do you have to threaten?
Do you have a jail in your basement when you go to the grocery store?
Do you shove your way around, steal things, knock people over, do things of this sort?
No, you know, in terms of how we live our daily lives, we live it with respect for other people and without having to use coercion or threats with other people.
That's really the natural process.
And people say, well, you can't really live without the state.
We live without it almost entirely in our daily lives.
But then along comes the state with its boogeymen and say, yeah, but there's somebody out there who's going to come and get you, and if you don't give us the kind of authority that they might otherwise have, you're doomed.
And the problem is we believe that stuff, and we believe it to such an extent that in the 20th century, governments managed to kill off about 200 million people through these kinds of wars, genocides, and so forth.
How many people were killed by independent, decentralized, peaceful behavior?
Well, and I suppose your arguments really tend to be centered around more or less utilitarian arguments to make your case that it's less harm without a state than with one, is basically what you're saying.
That's right.
And now, well, so when you asked the question about domestic tyranny versus a foreign one, well, didn't the people of Iraq prefer Saddam to foreign occupation by the United States, for example?
They probably did.
But the question, should they, becomes a question of should you favor being tyrannized by anybody.
And this is a question that we need to face.
We've become so conditioned through the school system, the media, our parents, and others into believing this kind of boogeyman approach to life.
There's somebody out there that's going to come and get you that we don't bother thinking about it.
And if we stop to think about it, we would recognize that these people are, you know, the people who are holding up these threats to us are the ones who want to have control.
They're the ones who want to have control over our lives.
Right.
And, you know, when we look at history, we see that, you know, 19 times out of 20, they picked the fight.
That's right.
I mean, even the War of 1812 was picked by James Madison.
Yeah.
And they even pick who your leaders are.
I mean, look at the political process that's going on now.
It's fun to watch the media in terms of the question of, you know, who are going to be the likely presidential candidates.
It's more a matter of sort of a presentation.
Well, is it going to be Hillary or is it going to be Obama?
Well, who decided it should be either one?
Does this come from you?
Does it come from your neighbors?
Do you go to the grocery store?
Do you see people talking about this stuff?
What about Ron Paul?
He's in that.
Of course, Ron Paul goes off in a completely different direction.
He believes in individual liberty and a very limited government.
But is he given any immediate time?
So it's a question of who's putting up the candidates.
I've always likened it to being a prisoner in the penitentiary.
And every four years, the system allows you to vote on who the warden is going to be.
And candidate A says, well, I promise you larger prison cells.
And candidate B says, well, we're going to improve the food in the cafeteria and you're going to have a longer time in the play yard and so forth.
But you get to choose between A and B.
But implicit in the entire arrangement is that you're going to stay a prisoner.
You don't get to vote on whether you're going to get out of prison or not.
You're just getting to vote on who your ruler is going to be.
And that's basically what the political process is in any country.
Yeah, I really like that analogy, too, because with the prison you have the totalitarian system and it's the perfect example of how little security totalitarianism provides when we all know that in pretty much every prison in the land there are rapes and murders and every kind of drug dealing and law breaking that exist on the outside.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's in lockdown.
That's right.
Exactly.
And that's what we've allowed our minds to get conditioned to believe is essential for our freedom.
You know, people talk about this.
I sometimes think that for most people the definition of freedom means that if you do what the government tells you to do, you'll probably stay out of trouble.
Yeah.
And that's as far as it goes.
Yeah, I think...
You know, it's a legalistic definition.
You know, just do what you're told, do what the law requires you to do, and the chances are you won't get bothered.
Wow, that's...
But even that's uncertain, isn't it?
Yeah, I guess, you know, I'm familiar with that concept, but I guess I've never heard that as the definition of freedom before.
Unfortunately, I guess that rings pretty true, you know?
And that's the way most people, I think, think about it.
Yeah.
There's a wonderful book that was written by Milton Mayer after World War II.
He went over to Germany and managed to become very closely acquainted with a lot of just ordinary German people, not government officials and people like that, just ordinary people.
You know, a guy who was a mail carrier, somebody who was a clerk, somebody who might have been a dentist and whatever, to find out, you know, what was life like living under Hitler?
And he would ask questions like, you know, what was it like living under this kind of tyranny?
And the universal answer he got, the answer he got from everybody, became the title of his book, which was, They Thought They Were Free.
This was a response, no, we didn't, we were free.
You ask most Americans now, in spite of all of the problems that we see from the Patriot Act, to getting on airlines, to free speech, to a lot of other things, if you ask people to describe that, oh no, that's freedom, that's what freedom means.
Yeah.
What do you think has made it possible for our culture?
I mean, I guess I always like to think of George Carlin when he's making fun of people who can't do the airplane seatbelt or something, and he says, we're talking about people who are partially educated, you know, people who presumably are grown-ups.
How can we have all these slogans about land of the free and home of the brave and then roll over on our backs like dogs for these politicians?
I don't understand it.
I think it's a question of awareness, a question of kind of being in focus of what's going on in your life.
For one thing, I have never had a great deal of confidence in formal education.
I don't see a connection between how much formal education you have and how wise and so forth you might end up being.
One of my best favorite examples of that was Eric Hoffer, who went blind when he was about eight years old and of course was out of the school system for about ten years, and when he became 17, 18, something like that, his eyesight suddenly came back, but he lost all of this opportunity for formal education, and so he was doing a lot of learning on his own and became one of the most observant social and political philosophers we had in this country, and much wiser than I say than most of the people are probably teaching philosophy in colleges and universities.
I don't find people in academia, for example, for the most part.
There are all kinds of exceptions, but for the most part I don't find people in academia that excited about alternative ideas, and I find this also with regard to people in general.
We get so attached to the things in our life.
We get attached to our house and our car and our swimming pool and our bank accounts, and all someone has to do is threaten that, and we say, well, okay, I will do whatever you tell me to do, just don't take my house or my car or my job or whatever it may be, and so we'll put up with anything.
Yeah, we're better off being poor.
At least we can stick by our principles then.
Well, that's not a matter of being poor.
It's a matter of not being attached to those things.
Are you willing to risk all of that in order to maintain your liberty?
Keep in mind the line from the Declaration of Independence, we pledge our lives, liberty, and our sacred fortune, and pay sacred honor and so forth.
We're willing to give all of this up in order to maintain our liberty.
Now people, you know, most of us don't even want to be challenged by the reality of what's going on in the world around us.
You know, you turn on a newscast and they're talking about either Don Imus or Anna Nicole Smith.
Yeah, or American Idol.
Yeah, or American Idol.
You know, this is the mindset.
I would waste my time on that kind of nonsense rather than focusing on something that's going to make me uncomfortable.
Yeah.
And now, you know, I'm completely melodramatic about such things, but when I turn on the cable news channels and it's literally Don Imus four times a cycle and Iraq no times, and then they come back from the top of the hour and it's straight to American Idol, like, to me that heralds, it must be tomorrow that Western civilization collapses.
How can we possibly continue to go on like this?
Mm-hmm.
I mean...
Well, I think Western civilization, I would almost say, is in the process of collapsing.
I think it has collapsed.
And in a healthy way.
You know, we've had what historians tell us about something like 35 great civilizations, about which 34 of them have previously collapsed, or we call it a collapse.
It's really not so much a collapse, as much as it's a transformation.
You know, you can say, well, Greece and Rome collapsed.
Well, did they?
You go to college and take a philosophy course, you begin with Greek philosophers, so forth.
Greek mathematics and geometry is still rather prominent.
Roman engineering, Roman law still influences this.
So these systems, I think, diminish in importance as structured systems, but they still maintain an influence.
When medievalism got transformed during the Enlightenment, for example, we get the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Scientific Age, was a significant change from what had been there before.
And of course, this transforms into the Industrial Revolution, which effectively destroyed feudalism.
You could not run an industrialized society on feudal principles, that your authority depended upon the accidents of birth and so forth.
Well, you get to be the owner of this textile mill, Scott, because your father was Lord Upton or somebody like that.
The industrial system doesn't work that way.
And so feudalism gets transformed, it basically loses much of its power, although we still see it in landlord and tenant law in our country, but just the terminology is based on that.
So civilizations go through this process of transformation.
I think, as I read history, because the institutions become ends in themselves, suddenly this state or major corporations become ends in themselves, and we want to preserve those, rather than preserving the processes that created the goodies that we get out of this behavior.
So if the state were to finally set about its course and wither away or even just completely overextend itself in South Asia and implode and collapse, what's to replace the USA in the land between Canada and Mexico?
How do we have a stateless free society here?
That's a good question.
Whenever I'm asked questions like this, I'm always reluctant to give an answer for two reasons.
One, I don't know.
We've got five or six billion people on the planet, any one of whom or any number of them, being capable of coming up with all kinds of alternatives that neither you nor I could even imagine.
I couldn't have imagined the Internet 20 years ago.
When I was growing up, the fear was that you were going to have about five computers in the world.
That was a statement made by President Eisenhower, I remember, when I was still around here in the 1950s.
We were going to have only about five countries capable of having computers, because computers at that time were thought of in terms of these big, massive systems that would take skyscrapers of space to occupy.
We saw that in the old Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn movie, Desk Set.
We're going to have this big, huge computer that's going to gather information.
There are only going to be about five systems in the world capable of generating the wealth to produce that.
Then, all of a sudden, along comes miniaturization, which is another form of decentralization.
With it, we get the Internet.
Nobody anticipated that.
Orwell and his big brother, Society, was premised on the idea that computers were going to be completely in the hands of the power structure, and we were at their mercy.
I don't know.
I don't know what people will come up with.
When you get into the study of chaos theory and complexity, two topics I'm very interested in, this is what we find out.
This is part of the reason that political systems are both useless and dangerous, that the assumption is that we can predict the future of complex systems.
Chaos theory says, no, you can't do that.
There's just no way you can gather enough information to be able to make predictions longer term than maybe two or three days.
The weathermen know that.
We can only predict the weather at the best, and even then it's not precise, but at the best for two to three days after that, it's just guesswork.
So, I don't know.
I suspect if you turn five or six billion people loose in the world to think about things, you're going to get all kinds of alternatives, including a lot of very dangerous people.
There are always going to be dangerous people out there in the world.
I just don't want to give them power to carry out their dangerousness with.
We're seeing that right now in the war system.
So basically, as long as it's not a monopoly and it doesn't have the power to tax people and compel them to pay for its service, that's basically the only two qualifications of what you'd like to see, basically, to get it started.
Well, I think it was Leonard Reid that had a book that was titled Anything That's Peaceful.
Some of the others have said anything that's voluntary.
If arrangements are voluntary, people are doing things by choice.
I'm not compelled to join your club or your church or your corporation or your association, whatever it may be.
As long as I'm free not to have to participate in that, they don't let people do that.
If people want to get together and have their own private little wars on their own property, they're not imposing their costs on other people, I may think they're kind of crazy, but fine, go ahead.
And ultimately, I guess it would still be less violent than the U.S. government.
What could you begin to imagine in terms of the destructiveness of a political system than one that has generated, as I said, about 200 million deaths in the 20th century?
That's the equivalent of about 2 million per year.
What gang of murderers or other private criminals could even begin to match that?
I think when I bring up completely abolishing the state to people, it seems like they usually have an idea that what I'm arguing for is something that would end up looking like Robocop or something, where this evil corporation owns all of Detroit and is just as bad as the worst government they ever had.
Well, the sad part of it is that the large corporations are the ones that basically own the government, aren't they?
Yeah, well, and that's why they're still large.
That's right.
I mean, you take a look at the technology that's generated today.
So much of it is in terms of destructiveness, it's military technology, it's control technology.
You know, you see things on the Internet.
We've developed a system that would allow us to get inside people's brains and find out what it is they're intending to do.
Who would have an interest in having that information?
You know, I don't.
I don't care to know what's going on inside your brain, the state might.
Yeah, the assistant district attorney is the one.
Yeah, exactly.
I heard a figure on the radio yesterday on some newscast that said that of every dollar that you pay in the form of taxes, 40 cents of that goes to the military.
And there was a time, when I was a kid, I grew up during World War II, and you may recall that in World War I, there was a sense that war was kind of a temporary thing.
World War I, or what they called then the Great War, was a war to end all wars.
We're not going to have any more wars after this.
Well, that was somewhat naive, and we ended up with World War II.
But even then, I recall the mindset was, this is something we have to go through, but when it's over with, we'll go back to being free and peaceful and productive, creative, and all of that again.
Well, now we have a war system where the government tells us, Bush and members of Congress and so forth, that this so-called war on terror is going to go on forever.
Yeah, World War II has really never ended, has it?
No, that's right.
World War I never ended.
World War II was sort of the outgrowth of World War I.
The Versailles Treaty, the consequences of World War I led us into World War II.
And part of it is, it becomes very lucrative.
It becomes, remember back in the days of Watergate, the old saying was, and I think it's as wise a statement as you can make as a short-run proposition, follow the money.
Wherever the money is going, you can see where the motivation for all of this stuff is.
Talking about freedom and democracy and so forth, when it comes out of the mouths of politicians and government officials, that's part of the sales pitch, that we're going to promote your liberty and your security and all of this sort of stuff.
But what's really happening is that the people who are promoting that are doing it because it is financially beneficial to them to do so.
And didn't Alexis de Tocqueville say that, wow, this is a pretty free society now, but boy oh boy, once these people figure out that they can just bribe each other with their own money out of the Treasury, this experiment and individual liberty is going to go right down the tubes.
A number of people said that.
Lord Macaulay had said in the early 1800s, talking about the US Constitution, that it's all sale and no anchor.
And that's essentially what it is.
If you just read the Constitution, you see that it gives the government the power to do basically whatever it wants to do, particularly when you give to the government the power to interpret what those words mean.
I remember a long time ago, I just found a page, this is maybe 10 years ago now or something, when I first got the internet, I found a page that was called miscellaneous Jefferson.
And it had no punctuation or capitalization or anything.
It was just a ton of Jefferson stuff all crammed together on this one page.
And I'm just kind of scanning through it and I found Jefferson describing confronting Hamilton on the steps of, I guess, the Capitol building in Philadelphia or something and arguing with him about the central bank and explaining to Hamilton, I guess paraphrasing his own warning to George Washington, that he had told George Washington, if you sign this act, you're stepping onto a boundless field of power from which no president will ever return.
And that was in the first Washington administration.
Well, keep in mind, going back to the war question, who was the first victim of American imperialism?
It was Rhode Island.
You know, Rhode Island didn't want to ratify the Constitution.
And the Constitution took effect when, I think it was 10, I believe it was 10 states had ratified it, 9 or 10, I haven't gotten the exact number, I think it was 10.
And 12 of the 13 states had ratified it, Rhode Island didn't choose to do so.
And the U.S. government, which was then in operation, threatened them and said, you either ratify it or we're going to come in and occupy you, we'll take it over.
Oh wow, I didn't even know that, that they were threatened with occupation.
I know that one of the first things Washington did was round up an army to go invade Pennsylvania to collect Hamilton's taxes.
That's right, the whiskey rebellion.
Well, so I get up every morning and I read antiwar.com and I got perfectly honest with you here, despair.
This country particularly seems to me to be headed over a cliff at light speed.
But if I can say I've really gained anything, well, I've gained many things.
But one of the things that I appreciate the most in reading Murray Rothbard and all you Mises Institute guys and so forth, is I've picked up this new long-term optimism that I didn't used to have, that ultimately all these systems of control don't work.
And that therefore liberty is going to win in the end if they don't nuke us all first.
That's right, and keep in mind too, I've been kicking around in this whole area of libertarian thinking for almost half a century now.
And years ago, back in the early 60s, there was just no interest in this at all, no respect paid for it.
You could more easily have gotten up and said that you were a child abuser or something than that you distrusted government.
And now it's very commonplace.
Libertarian and anarchist thinking is very, people are very open to thinking about this and talking about it.
And they weren't a long time ago.
People are willing to consider alternative systems of social order.
And they're finding those alternative systems really in their own lives.
It goes back to the point I made earlier.
Your life really is very peaceful.
At least mine, I don't know about you, maybe you have a different lifestyle than that.
But mine is basically very peaceful in terms of how I deal with other people.
I don't get into fights, I don't coerce people, they don't coerce me, nobody's pulled a gun on me.
And as a consequence, it's a question of how do we take that kind of living with one another that we do in the marketplace.
And this is the attraction of the marketplace.
The marketplace is based on voluntariness, it's based on respect for the inviolability of other people.
It's based on respect for private ownership of property and so forth.
How do we take that, the way in which we live our lives every day, and think of it in a broader social context?
And part of it too goes to the question of what do we mean by society?
We define society in terms of political structures, don't we?
Yeah, oftentimes, yeah.
I don't have much contact with people in Florida, people in North Dakota, people in Alaska, and so forth.
I don't know, when we talk about my social relationships, I don't include them.
I think in terms of some other states where some of my kids are living, one of my daughters used to live in Hong Kong.
I took a very decided interest in what was going on in Hong Kong when she was living over there.
So the definition of what we mean by society is even changing.
The internet is changing that.
We start living in these cyber communities of people who have interest in subject matters, in economics, in investments, whatever it is.
It's not so much tied to geography anymore.
Yeah, and even, I guess, Richard Mayberry pointed out that how many times has the government of France fallen and come back again, etc.
France is still France and the people of France are still French.
And just because their government went away didn't mean that the wheat stopped growing in the fields and that Paris was burned to the ground.
And so if we were to do away with Washington, D.C. and go back to the Articles of Confederation or even a private property anarchy, we'd still be the USA, just without this murderous federal government.
It's a question not so much of doing away with it, it's a question of doing away with the thinking that provides us.
Once we start thinking in terms of I am in control of my own life and I should be in control of my own life, we start thinking in terms of alternative ways of living.
This is what we're doing.
This is what's going on in the world around us.
There are all kinds of secession movements going on in the world.
You don't hear about it on television news because they're busy telling you about Anna Nicole Smith's baby and all this sort of stuff.
But you go on the internet, go to Google and just type in secession movements and see what comes up.
You'll be dumbfounded.
But of course the state doesn't want you to become aware of that, that there's an alternative.
And so we don't talk about that.
Well, my friends, you can find the alternative at LewRockwell.com in the archives of Professor Butler Shaffer from Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles.
Thanks so much for your time today, sir.
Well, thank you.
It was fun.