Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org and especially FFF.org/blog.
And the Future Freedom Foundation, of course, has as fellows and writers, real libertarian greats like Anthony Gregory, James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, and on and on like that.
And it's a great place to learn about liberty.
Tell your friends and neighbors about it, FFF.org.
Which actually, with a web address like that, Jacob, first of all, welcome to the show.
Hey, great.
Nice to be back, Scott.
All right, now, first of all, what I was going to say there was, if FFF.org is your URL, that means that you must have got that thing back in 1994 or 95 or whatever when they were first inventing those, right?
Yeah, we were really lucky.
One of our supporters of the Future of Freedom Foundation at that time came up and said, hey, there's something called the World Wide Web and I'd like to do a website for you guys and we have to choose whether you want FFF.org or FFF.com, which one would you like?
And we said, hey, whatever.
Just go ahead.
You've got full authority to do whatever's necessary.
And he was doing it for us for free, so we had no idea.
But I wish now we'd gotten FFF.com and a bunch of other URLs.
We'd be rich.
Yeah, right.
Well, or at least have them redirect.
But anyway, that's a really cool story, but it brings up the question of when was the Future of Freedom Foundation founded?
Founded 1989, just about 21 years ago.
Now, you used to be a lawyer.
What was it that made you change from being a lawyer to being, or was there something in between to becoming the head of this institute?
Well, I discovered some books that had been published by the Foundation for Economic Education.
I was just a liberal Democrat in South Texas practicing law as a young man.
So I found these books and the scales just started dropping from my eyes.
I mean, this was just pure, unadulterated libertarianism, especially on economics.
And I was just flabbergasted.
So I went up to see quickly for a weekend seminar and then a week-long seminar.
And I could just tell my life was changing directions.
I put all my trial books aside and started reading nothing but libertarian books.
And ultimately reached a crossroads where I said, you know, I've got to choose what I want to do with the rest of my life.
And I chose to go with my heart, and that's where I ended up.
Wow, that's great.
So now tell me more specifically, what books were you reading that really made you think that things were different than you thought they were before?
Well, there were a series of books that Fee had published in the 1950s.
And I discovered them in the late 70s.
They were called Essays on Liberty.
And they were a compilation of essays that I think most of which had been published in the Freeman magazine.
And they had just been put in these little bound volumes called Essays on Liberty.
And I think they started in 1950 or 51, somewhere right in there.
I think it was like a 12 or 13-volume set.
But my public library in Laredo, Texas only had the first four volumes.
But that was enough to change the course of my life.
Very cool.
And now I hear people say about you that one thing, well, for example, Anthony Gregory I know has said to me before, man, you know Jacob Hornberger, right after 9-11, he was excellent.
He was perfect on the war on terror issues in every respect from day one.
Now, I guess if the whole country kind of knee-jerked and let the scales go up before their eyes on that, for you to not allow that to happen to you the way it happened to everybody else or seemingly everybody else then, you must have been grounded in something that would make you confident in your opposition.
Because, you know, most people don't really know what's going on.
Planes come out of the clear blue sky.
Everybody freaks out and says, all right, leader, lead us, and that kind of thing.
You already knew something or else you would have gone along too, I guess is what I'm getting at, right?
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, you know, for people that were unaware of what the U.S. government had been doing in overseas affairs prior to 9-11, they immediately fell hook, line, and sinker for the official version of, hey, we've been attacked.
The terrorists have attacked us, and they've attacked us because they hate us for our freedom and values.
And so people said, oh, wow, you know, this is like World War II.
We got all rallied together and stuff.
Well, you know, we had been publishing articles on U.S. foreign policy since the first year we got established, 1990.
And leading up to 9-11, we had been talking about what the U.S. government had been doing in the Middle East, especially like with the Persian Gulf intervention, then the horrific sanctions that had been enforced against the Iraqi people for some 11 years.
We showed that these were contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, that the anger was boiling over in the Middle East over this.
And then, you know, we pointed to Madeleine Albright's infamous statement that the deaths of these half a million children were worth it.
That was what she told 60 Minutes.
And so we were publishing articles before 9-11 saying, look, you've got to stop this because this is going to lead to a terrorist attack on American soil.
And I was saying it.
Sheldon Richman was saying it in the articles that we were publishing.
They're on our website.
So when 9-11 hit, it was like, we told you so.
I mean, we told you this was going to happen if you continued letting the government do these horrific things to people in the Middle East.
Well, of course, we got drowned out with all the, oh no, the terrorists and all this.
And we stood fast.
We published an article right away, I did, that said, is it too soon to start questioning U.S. foreign policy?
And, of course, we were getting inundated with hate mail and, oh, you know, hate America and all that nonsense.
Well, now, you know, 11, 10, 11 years later, you know, we're getting a lot of people back saying, you guys were right the whole time.
And so the invasion of Iraq, invasion of Afghanistan, all the stuff that's gone along with it, it's just been a continuation of what the U.S. government was doing prior to 9-11.
I mean, they used 9-11 as the excuse to do what the sanctions in Iraq had not done, gotten rid of Saddam.
That was the whole thing.
It was a regime change operation.
So, yeah, we weren't surprised.
We were warning that this was going to happen.
Well, and I guess Chalmers Johnson emphasizes that the reason that they call blowback blowback and not just consequences, it kind of has its own little special definition, which is that it's consequences of policies that the American people don't know about.
Usually, I guess they mean covert operations, but even still like the strangulation of Iraq through the 1990s, that wasn't a topic of discussion really at all.
And, you know, of course they tried to tie the 9-11 attack to Saddam Hussein, but it wasn't Iraqis who did it.
It was Saudis and Egyptians and Yemenis who did it, but partly as revenge for what was being done to the people of Iraq.
Well, yeah, and Chalmers Johnson's story is really interesting too because he was actually doing the same thing prior to 9-11.
He had published this book, Blowback, where he predicted, this is what's going to be the outcome of this U.S. foreign policy.
And Chalmers Johnson, I mean, this is a guy that served as a consultant to the CIA.
I mean, nobody doubted his credentials.
Well, like us, everybody ignored the book, but as soon as 9-11 hits, all of a sudden people start realizing, my gosh, Johnson was predicting this before 9-11, and so the book soared.
And since then he's published three fantastic books.
I mean, I'd recommend them to everybody.
I think they're sort of like the definitive case, even though he's a liberal, it's the definitive libertarian case against the U.S. empire and the U.S. government maintaining an empire, that this is what empires lead to.
They lead to bankruptcy.
They lead to death and destruction and terrorist blowback, terrorist retaliation, which then is used as the excuse to take away our civil liberties and all the stuff going on at the airports with the TSA and so forth.
It's all rooted in that U.S. foreign policy.
And you're right.
They were trying desperately to link Saddam Hussein with the 9-11 attacks.
I mean, it was a logical deduction they made, that we've been killing all these children, so it's logical to think that Saddam Hussein would be the one who retaliates.
But they were also trying to find the link so they could say, we've been attacked, now the Department of Defense is defending us in this invasion of Iraq.
Well, they never found the link.
That's why they had to concoct the WMD excuse, and then later on the democracy-spreading excuse, to really wage just a war of aggression, regime change operation.
Yeah, I mean, that's really the core of it.
While various Americans were expecting this or shocked by it, just taken aback, horrified, others were high-fiving each other inside the government, because war is the health of the state.
They know it well.
We'll be right back with Jacob Hornberger on Anti-War Radio right after this.
All right, y'all, it's Anti-War Radio.
Talking with Jacob Hornberger, Founder and President of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And, you know, Jacob, you were talking about Chalmers Johnson and the blowback trilogy there, and now he's actually got a fourth one out.
I don't have it right in front of me.
I forget the title.
It was Dismantling the Empire.
Right.
Well, I see that was exactly where I was going.
Good title.
He said on this show, as he says, and especially, I think, in the third book, Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic, that you could look at Rome or you could look at Great Britain as models for what to do with your empire.
And basically the Romans just pushed it and pushed it and pushed it until the whole thing completely exploded.
The British, on the other hand, decided, you know what, let's just cut our losses.
You know, forget it.
And the way Chalmers Johnson puts the choice is you either give up your empire or you live under it.
And the Brits decided that they would rather have at least a semblance.
Maybe this is outdated now, but back then at the end of World War II, they decided they would rather have their English liberties than their English colonies.
And they made that choice, and maybe they had to anyway.
But they turned it over to us, and we grabbed it and inherited as well the colonies of virtually all of the European empires and the Japanese too, and now rule the world.
And the question is, it seems like, as you were saying when you tie in the TSA and Homeland Security and the rest of this madness, that this is the choice that we face.
We either give up our empire or we live like Fallujans under the boot heel of the American military national security police state.
Well, that's right.
I mean, you know, that's the real choice facing Americans.
I mean, I know there's a lot of people getting mad about the gropers at the airports and the body scanners where the people are peering at what people look like and stuff.
But, you know, that's just hitting the branches of the weed that people ultimately have to understand is that the root of this is the existence of the American empire, and that if you want this empire, if you're really pleased with an empire as compared to a republic, then you better just get used to the body gropers and the body scanners and stuff, because that's just part of living with a constant, perpetual terrorist threat.
Because as long as you have an empire doing bad things to people overseas, you're going to have people retaliating.
So we keep saying the only solution to this is to dismantle this empire and restore a republic to our land.
Now, when we talk about empire, again, Chalmers Johnson's four books are the thing to read if people want to learn more about how this empire works.
But he's essentially talking about that this empire doesn't work like it did in Rome where you put an American in charge of these countries.
It's more modeled on the Soviet empire, where the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe, but they let locals run the show as puppets.
Well, that's essentially how the U.S. empire works.
It tries to get its people in public office through coups, assassinations, embargoes, invasions, occupations, as well as, as Chalmers Johnson points out, 700 to 1,000 military bases in more than 130 countries.
And so conservatives call this projection through strength or peace through strength and stuff like that.
It's ridiculous.
This is the way the empire works.
And then finally there's the problem of the bankruptcy.
I would argue that the British empire led COVID colonies because it was broke.
It couldn't afford to maintain these colonies.
The Soviet empire went broke.
The Roman empire folded from within.
And that's what America's facing now.
Financial bankruptcy is on the horizon, just like Greece, because we not only have a welfare state, we have a warfare state too.
And so I think for all these reasons, Americans ought to be listening to us libertarians and saying, you know what?
You guys have proven right.
You were right 20 years ago and so forth.
And it's time that we start moving this country in the direction of the principles on which America was founded, individual liberty, free markets, peace, a republic.
Well, here's the thing about that, though.
Aren't we already standing at the bottom of the slippery slope talking about how we're sliding down it?
It seems like we're too late.
You know, you look at the relationship between big business, relationships between the biggest businesses in the country and on the planet and the U.S. government and the system in which the laws and the policies are created.
There's no way to undo this, not through voting or citizen action or whatever.
There's no democracy here.
This is a participatory fascist state, I think, is what Bob Higgs calls it.
And isn't it all too late for this?
We're going to simply just have more and more and more national police until, as you say, the dollar just finally breaks, and then they can't pay them.
Well, you know, that's an interesting question on the timing.
I mean, definitely we're now seeing the possibility of governmental bankruptcy on the horizon.
The government's spending $1.3 trillion more than what it's bringing in.
They're not going to do anything significant in that regard because they're not going to touch the welfare programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
They're not going to touch the military.
There's like 70% or 75% right there.
They're not going to touch the drug war.
And so things are looking pretty bad.
But, you know, there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
And if people discover libertarianism, and there are a lot of them discovering it every day, then all of a sudden you never know when you may suddenly reach a critical mass that we've all been working for in this movement for 30, 40 years.
And if that critical mass is reached, you could see a very sudden shift.
I mean, I remember people saying the Berlin Wall will never fall.
The Soviets have all the guns.
They have the monopoly over it.
They have total control.
You will never see the Berlin Wall fall peacefully.
And yet, very suddenly, it just whoosh, everything's gone.
And I think that very well could be what happens with the welfare-warfare state, is that people finally say, we've had enough of your statism.
We've had enough of your socialism, your interventionism, your imperialism.
You're out of here.
We're going to restore our liberty and a constitutional republic to our land.
Thing is, though, I'm looking at an article right here from The Lookout, Yahoo News, The Lookout.
Poll.
Americans don't share Washington's deficit obsession.
In this case, at least according to this article, the politicians are way ahead of us on how dangerous this national bankruptcy thing is.
And when you ask the American people, they say, nah, make somebody else's kid pay for me.
I don't want to give up a thing.
I never will.
Well, that's the welfare state mentality.
I mean, that's what's inculcated in every kid from the time he's six years old, that the purpose of government is to take money from one group of people and give it to another group of people, that that's freedom and free enterprise, that freedom is having all these troops overseas that are dying for our freedom.
I mean, they inculcate all these myths, but again, nothing is set in stone.
Sure, we live in a society in which people love their welfare, they love their warfare, but now they're getting mugged by reality.
They see what the Federal Reserve is doing to destroy this currency.
I mean, they're flooding newly printed money into this society that is at an incredible rate, that people are seeing the gold market, and they're getting nervous.
I mean, that's what's interesting.
People are getting nervous, and they're getting angry, because of what's going on at the airport with the body gropers and the body scanners.
Well, when people get nervous and angry, maybe they'll start thinking a little bit and start to say, you know, the root of this is statism, and maybe it's time to adopt what the libertarians are saying, to dismantle these programs rather than reform them or fix them and so forth.
So, Jacob, here's the thing.
If we have a world empire, and it's making us broke, then I guess my best idea is that the truth, that the world empire is making us broke, would be the best weapon you and I could have to ending that empire and making us less broke, which I think would be our goal.
So, how do we do that?
Well, I really think our best weapon, I think that's maybe our second best, I think our best, best weapon is the moral argument, that it's just wrong, it's morally wrong for government to be going abroad and involving itself in the affairs of other nations, trying to influence elections, engaging in assassination, regime change, you know, like they did in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, like they tried to do to Castro.
I mean, and what they did in Iraq and then later in Afghanistan, I mean, all this whole process of empire, assassinations, interventions, I really think we need to question the morality of the right or wrongness of it.
And then secondarily, the financial debacle that's resulting from this.
I mean, that's a moral question, too.
There are people living in their Toyotas right now if they're lucky, in this country.
That's a moral wrong, too, isn't it?
Taxing everybody out of their house and home?
Well, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, because these things are not cheap.
I mean, George W. Bush, when he invaded Iraq, thought that he was going to get some coalition of the willing, and when they didn't show up, he thought, well, I can take Iraq's oil and this will be a self-funding operation, and that didn't work out.
And so who's paying for this thing?
Well, you know, the Chinese communists loaned him the money to do it, which is disgraceful in and of itself, that he would go to the Chinese communists to get the money to do this thing.
But now that they've got to start paying back this debt, and who's going to be paying it?
The poor people, and especially, I mean, that's where the inflation's most likely going to fall, on the impact on people that don't really know how to protect themselves from what's coming, and that's usually the poor people in society.
And yeah, there's a deeply moral argument there in terms of, and look at the young people in this country.
I mean, they're having a terribly difficult, they're essentially poor.
The ones that are, they're getting off their parents' allowance from college and so forth, they're now starting their lives out.
I read where 80% are living at home still because they can't afford to go out and get a place to live.
And in large part, that's because of this heavy tax burden of Social Security, Medicare taxes, the warfare state taxes and so forth.
So I'm not sure we really need to let people know of the financial consequences of this.
It's reality mugging people in the face.
I mean, reality sometimes has an interesting way of piercing through all the delusions of, you know, this is a Department of Defense.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's a Department of Empire and War.
Defense is sort of like what Switzerland does.
Switzerland sits back, doesn't involve itself in the affairs of any other country, doesn't assassinate people, and says, don't ever invade us because if you invade us, you're going to pay the price because they're all well-armed and they're well-trained, and they're citizen soldiers effectively.
So this is what's happening in this country.
But reality is mugging people, and they're starting to realize, oh, my gosh, this really is a bad thing.
But they haven't quite reached what the reason is.
They haven't drawn the link that this is massive government spending, not for freedom and free enterprise, not to establish peace in the world.
It's to maintain this gigantic monstrosity, domestic welfare empire, and a foreign warfare empire.
Well, you think that Noam Chomsky and them are right that really what this is is a class war.
It's the most powerful people, the people who are already the richest among us who control the state, and are using it against the poor.
And as you say, it's – well, you didn't use these exact words, but you described how inflation works as this hidden tax.
People know their prices are going up, but they don't know why.
And it's the people who, you know, have bread and milk as a major portion of their budget who are affected by this the most.
And then, of course, because people don't understand why the prices are rising, the central bankers always end up blaming the working people for finally getting a raise.
When really when it comes to cost of living increases and so forth, people who work for hourly wages are going to be the last ones to finally get a little bit.
Here's your $0.25 to try to keep up with the cost of living.
And then I remember distinctly Alan Greenspan testifying before the Congress years ago that, you know, if we have any more upward pressure on wages, that's going to cause inflation, when these are the people who are the last ones to catch up.
And it really does seem like, you know, the billionaires are just using the state to kill the rest of us.
They don't care if they turn this country into a rock.
They really don't.
Well, I really think it's a battle that is not so much a class warfare as much it is a warfare between statism and libertarians.
I think on one side of the battleground are the statists and mostly liberals and conservatives, the people that honestly believe that government should be taking care of people, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, grants, subsidies, foreign aid, bank bailouts and so forth, corporation grants, or that government should be punishing people for ingesting the wrong substances, or government should be managing the economy, and that government should be ruling the world, policing the world.
Libertarians oppose all that.
So I think this is the real battle.
It's statism versus libertarianism.
And the statists, yes, they have control.
I mean, they have a lust for power.
They have a lust for money.
But I think that comes in all classes.
I think people strive to reach government power for the prestige and the adulation, and for the money that's dropping in their pockets from the lobbyists and so forth.
And I think what we libertarians need to do is just keep speaking the truth about what these statists are doing to our country.
I mean they're taking us down the wrong road.
We've been saying that for 21 years.
But we have no control over whether people accept our ideas.
The only thing we have control over is to continue speaking the truth and never join the ranks of the statists.
So I don't really guess I know how it was 20 years ago, but it seems like 10 years ago there were a few people kind of understood about inflation and war and central banking and how that works.
And then it seems like the Bush years radicalized a lot of people.
And then, of course, the Ron Paul campaign for president a couple of years back really did a lot to disseminate libertarian understandings of economics.
And the tie between central banking and, you know, that is inflation and war.
And I guess I just wonder, you know, I was a lot younger, but you're a little bit older than me and have, I guess, a longer time span you can look back on, and the evolution of those ideas making progress and being picked up in society.
Do you think that there will be a tie?
Or I guess I'd like to know how much progress you think we're making there.
I mean, do you think there will be a time when basically kind of everybody sort of understands that, yeah, the government prints the money so they can fight the wars, and that's why our prices are higher?
Yeah, it's a fascinating question because we're definitely living in darker times as far as the free society is concerned.
I mean, 9-11 was the watershed where the floodgates were opened up for all the government programs, the assault on civil liberties, the military commissions, the secret prison camps, the torture.
I mean, it was like what that guy said, that, you know, you can't let a good emergency go to waste.
And the Feds really capitalized on 9-11, and just like Roosevelt capitalized on the Great Depression.
I mean, that's what emergency do.
They give rise to government power and loss of liberty.
But on the other hand, what's exciting I've seen in the last 20 years is this movement is so alive and so dynamic.
I mean, Ron Paul, I mean, the catalyst that he served as of galvanizing people and getting people to think about liberty and the Fed and the foreign policy is just incredible.
And so these are exciting times for libertarians.
Right on.
Well, I'm very happy to hear that.
I'm very happy to have a chance to end an interview on a positive note for a change.
Thanks, Jacob.
That's Jacob Hornberger from the Future Freedom Foundation.
Everybody, we'll be right back after this.
