02/08/11 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we got a full lineup for you today, but we're going to start right now with Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation, and they featured the best libertarian writers, Jim Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory, Lawrence Vance, Richard M.
Ebeling, and of course, Jacob himself writes on a regular basis.
You see him on Fox News, The Judge Napolitano Show, et cetera.
I urge you to look at fff.org, well, in its entirety, and especially slash blog, where you'll find Jacob's daily writings.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, man?
Hey, good.
Thank you for having me on.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And man, you're on fire over there on that blog.
You wrote so many goddamn great things on here.
I think I'll just shut up and let you school them.
Well, they give me the fodder.
I mean, it's so amazing what's going on in Egypt, because it's really giving publicity to what the realities of US foreign policy and what this government that we've been living under and born under and so forth is really all about.
And so that's what I've been writing about is, hey, while the Egyptian people are confronting their darkness, why aren't Americans confronting our darkness?
You know, the support of the dictatorship under which these people have been suffering.
Yeah.
Glenn Greenwald has a piece about the lack of irony, I guess.
You know, the cognitive dissonance on TV where obviously the people protesting are the good guys and the torture police state that they're trying to overthrow are the bad guys.
And yes, the bad guys are our best friends, but in no way are we responsible for what's happened to the good guys here.
Just all these concepts just refuse to intersect when it comes to television news, especially.
Well, right.
And it's really put the US officials in a bind because, you know, they know that they what they teach the schoolchildren of America, you know, from the first grade on up in the public schools, that your government's exceptional.
It's a democracy lover and a democracy spreader.
And then all of a sudden you have this mass publicity showing what we've been saying here at the Future of Freedom Foundation for 21 years is that this is a government that doesn't give a hoot about democracy.
It loves dictatorships.
It supports dictatorships.
Democracy is fine as long as it puts into power people they want.
And now they've got all this publicity.
And so what do they do?
They know that the that the protesters have the world's sympathy.
They've been living under this brutal tyranny where you've got torture and rape and indefinite detentions and military tribunals in a controlled economy.
And so Obama's sister says, oh, well, yeah, we identify with the protesters.
You know, well, Barrack's got to leave now.
And then all of a sudden, two days later, well, now we've got to realize we've got to go this slowly because this is their friend.
This is our ally.
This is their partner.
And then you've got the vice president of the country, which is so fascinating, who is the head of their secret police, who was the guy that was striking the torture deal with the CIA.
He's the man that the CIA would turn people over to to be tortured.
And so he's part of this little group, too.
And so, yeah, U.S. officials are they don't know which side to straddle here or they're actually trying to straddle both sides.
Well, you know, I'm watching the Al Jazeera live stream and well, it's Robert Gates now, but a minute ago it was Tahir Square there in Cairo packed with people.
I don't know if it's more than a million again, but certainly hundreds of thousands of people are out there, it looks like.
So this thing isn't going away, but it just goes to show how good our government is, if there's one thing that they really are good at, it seems like it's taking advantage of a crisis, whether it's their own fault or not.
They always seem like the Sith Lords to come out on top at the end.
And so if, you know, there's a giant uprising in Egypt, then they'll just take advantage of that.
After all, Mubarak's 82 years old, probably can't be that good of a dictator even.
And so why not go ahead and take advantage of the situation to get their torturer installed as the number one man?
Yeah, it's so abominable.
But, you know, what's important for Americans to realize is that this isn't something new.
This has been going on for 30 years.
You know, supplying the military armaments, the tear gas that was used against the demonstrators had Made in the USA on it.
They're the ones who have built up this huge military and military industrial complex that really is the balance of power of the people.
The reason everybody's having to play nice with the military is they know that that's where the real power is.
And it's the U.S. that is built up and trained that standing army.
And ironically, my blog today is about the Pinochet dictatorship, which is now back in the news because the Chilean people are confronting their dark past and saying, well, we want to investigate hundreds of human rights abuses during this dictatorship, including determining whether the guy that the democratically elected president that that Pinochet ousted, Allende, was murdered or whether it really was a suicide like they claimed.
Well, as we all know, this is another example of a U.S. supported dictatorship.
You had the torture and the rapes and the and the the extrajudicial executions.
I mean, was it really just another Mubarak regime in Chile?
And yet how many America and you had the CIA participate in the murder of an American journalist there, yet no subpoenas by the Congress, by the Justice Department.
We don't know what that was all about.
Why aren't Americans confronting this dark past of their own government?
That that's what I find so disconcerting here.
You know, it's easy to cheer for the demonstrators and stuff.
It's not so easy to say, wait a minute, I want an investigation into what my government's been doing to support this darkness.
Well, we all need to be able to get Al Jazeera on a local cable hookup because that's the answer to your question.
Why aren't the American people picking topics like the coup in Chile and put people in prison for it?
And the reason why is because TV is telling them that the agenda this week is something else.
And so it's always it's always easy to point one finger at somebody else and forget the three pointed back.
But this is what we need in this country, Scott.
We need a we need an awakening and a revival where Americans are over here saying, now, wait a minute, we want to confront what our government's role in all this has been.
And instead of just cheering for the demonstrators, let's confront our government's role in all this darkness under which people around the world have been suffering, including the foreign aid, the military aid, the support of the dictatorships, the interference in the internal affairs of other countries, the empire, the bases.
This is what Americans this is our opportunity to lead the world in terms of, hey, we're confronting our government over here, too, while you guys are trying to do your best to achieve a democratic and free society over there.
Well, you know, it reminds me of well, it's kind of this thing I've been on the past few days, really, is how easy to imagine, you know, if, say, for example, after the Cold War, we had just decided, you know, the people then had decided to live up to their principles instead of embracing world empire.
And if the last 20 years had gone by, this 20 years that you've been trying to say this 20, the last 20 years that are two thirds of Hosni Mubarak's reign and and the history of the Future Freedom Foundation trying to oppose these things.
What if we'd had a Hornburgary in foreign policy these last 20 years?
And what might the Egyptians think of America at this point?
And wouldn't it be credible if the American president at this point said our heart is with the uprising against whatever tyranny is there?
That's not our responsibility because we didn't pay them to torture anybody.
Well, that's the thing is that, you know, this is why Americans need to be starting to think about libertarianism all across the board, a libertarian economic policy which produces wealth and prosperity and capital and harmonizes people's interests as compared to this socialistic welfare state and interventionism, the drug war and stuff.
But they need to also not start thinking about libertarian foreign policy, which means that there would be no foreign aid to any regime.
Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Argentina, just no foreign aid at all.
That's just international welfare.
That's what leads to the charges of the corruption, the money getting into the pockets of the privileged and so forth.
No military aid to any regime.
So, OK, does that mean that bad things are no longer going to happen around the world?
No, of course not.
You could still have a dictatorship in Egypt.
But then it's their responsibility, their problem.
And then so if things go wrong and there's a dictatorship that oppresses people, the anger and the hatred is not directed toward the United States because our government has had no role in this.
So what we say is it's not the role of the government to take the side of the protesters, to get involved over there.
It's not the role of the government to support the dictatorship, just butt out and liberate the private sector, the American people, to travel and trade around the people with the people of the world.
Sounds good to me.
If America didn't police the world or even just, you know, euphemisms aside, maintain our world empire, how much worse off would we be when the price of oil be much higher and we wouldn't get all that cheap labor?
And so our prices of everything would be higher.
And we'd have, you know, China and Russia and Europe working against us to invade us and overthrow us.
And and we have to do this, right?
Well, terrorists and all that.
Well, that's the rationale of the empire, the huge military, the Cold War military, the military industrial complex that I mean, that's their implication that without the big standing military force and the whole military industrial complex and all the overseas bases and the interventions and assassinations and coups and so supportive dictatorships, that the world would be this chaotic thing and America would fall to the communists and the terrorists and the drug dealers and so forth.
Well, it's absolute nonsense.
They use that rationale to scare people into justifying their existence.
Actually, the world would be very, very naturally running in harmonious if the libertarian paradigm were adopted.
And keep in mind that the libertarian paradigm is nothing more than what the American paradigm was when America got founded.
These were our founding principles.
You know, John Quincy Adams tells Congress, America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
What he's saying is the U.S. government doesn't go abroad to search out, you know, dictators that are oppressing their people and and ousting through regime change operations, assassinations and so forth.
Like they've tried with Cuba for some 50, 60 years that instead were the well-wisher of people everywhere.
But then they also had the idea of open borders that said, look, if people are suffering tyranny or oppression or starvation, famine, our government's not going to come and save you.
We're not going to get our government involved.
But if you want to get out, you're able to get out and escape this.
There will always be a country that you can go to that will not forcibly repatriate you to the country that you fled from.
And that was the ideal.
That was the dream.
Well, to me, that is the ideal.
And so you have a world in which the other may be tyranny.
There may be dictatorships, but it's a world where the American private sector is not isolated anymore.
There's no more walls.
There's no more, you know, embargoes, sanctions like against Cuba and Iran, where Americans can travel and trade and have cultural exchanges.
I mean, the people of the world love Americans.
They absolutely love Americans.
The American private sector is the greatest diplomat our country could ever have.
They just hate the U.S. government for its duplicity, its hypocrisy, its double dealing, its support of oppressive dictatorships.
And so we've got it backwards, Scott, with this paradigm that we're operating under.
They're isolating the private sector and they're expanding the reach of the military and the government.
We need to do the opposite.
We need to rein in the government, dismantle the empire, liberate the American people.
All right now, so let's put aside like the bogus threats of the Japanese are going to invade us and take us over and all the ridiculous scaremongering.
But what about specifically the belief that, hey, come on, your way of life depends on this, that basically when it comes down to it, your prices would be much higher if our government wasn't securing the oil, you know, making sure to prop up countries that are going to have favorable trade deals with us and these kinds of things, that ultimately we'd all be much worse off without it, that that part really is true, they say.
Well, I mean, that's the reason I really because I've heard that from so many just regular people.
You know what I mean?
That's their argument to me.
And so that's the point I think really needs challenging the most.
Well, one thing is the moral argument that even if that were true, is there a moral justification for the government to be invading and occupying countries, killing them so that Americans have the benefit of cheap oil?
And I would argue absolutely not.
But I'd also argue that God has created a consistent universe, that it's these interventions that actually increase the price of oil or other commodities and so forth.
They disrupt supplies, they disrupt the natural sequence of things.
You know, when people have oil, they they generally don't like sitting on it.
They like to make money.
And the only way they can make money is by selling it.
And so in the absence of all this intervention in an empire, you have a naturally flowing system where you have people in countries that may be ruled by dictatorships where the government owns the natural resources that are selling in order to magnify their situation.
Well, it's no different.
It's the natural laws of supply and demand that would be harmonizing people's interests.
It's when the interventions occur that those are when the supplies are interrupted.
Then all of a sudden people get angry and they're not going to furnish oil or whatever and the price skyrockets.
It's the interventionism itself that causes the price to artificially soar.
An increase when we saw we see that with like when the government imposes price controls, you know, we've got to protect people from these high prices of oil and so forth.
What do you end up?
We end up with these long lines and shortages and so forth.
So it's the same argument domestically applies internationally.
Leave the government out of the marketplace.
Laissez faire, laissez pas faire, let it be.
Let it function naturally.
Then that's when you see prices naturally flowing the way they would in accordance with laws of supply and demand.
If the price goes up, that simply means demand going up or supplies going down.
Everybody can handle that.
It's when the intervention gets into place that artificially causes the price to go up.
That's the problem here.
Well, and you bomb Iraq, intervene in Iraq and empower your enemies, the Iranians intervene in Lebanon because face it, Israel and America are the same thing.
You get Hezbollah intervening Gaza, you get more Hamas intervene, propping up dictators in Iran and in Egypt.
Eventually you get a revolution.
Jason Ditz was on the show yesterday talking about how we're building up as poorly as it's going.
We're trying to build up an Afghan army that the government of Afghanistan could never support in a million years, created this giant artificial bubble of Northern Alliance power in Afghanistan, basically.
Right.
And when they start oppressing their people with this giant military, which they do, you know, the torture centers and so just like they're doing in Iraq.
I mean, the Iraqi regime has the same torture centers, the same type of torture centers that Saddam Hussein had.
Well, then where is the anger and hatred directed when the victims of this torture decide to retaliate?
Well, part of it's directed toward their own dictatorial regime, but inevitably it's directed toward the U.S. government that is responsible for bringing this powerful military into existence in Afghanistan, supporting the dictatorial regime there or in Iraq, having brought it into existence with its invasion.
You know, inevitably there's that blowback because somebody is going to be at the receiving end of these oppressive regimes, and that includes both Iraq and Afghanistan.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, because, well, we're all out of time.
I can't really ask it.
But and maybe you already have written about this on your blog, I'll have to see.
But I wonder whether you think this is really the beginning of the end of the fall of the empire.
Well, I hope so.
But, you know, really, it takes an awakening of the American people.
And that's what we're trying to do here at FFF and have for a long time is prick the conscience of the American people.
It's up to us to confront our government just as the Egyptian people are confronting their government.
If we do that, then this may be the beginning of a great awakening and a positive development for liberty in the world.
All right, everybody, that is Jacob Hornberger, FFF dot org, the Future of Freedom Foundation.
He's the founder of the president there at slash blog to the end of the address and read his daily writings.
Thanks, Bumper.
Appreciate it.
Hey, thank you, Scott.
Bye bye.