All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks for tuning in to the show today.
And our guest is L. Neil Smith.
He's a world-renowned science fiction author and runs the Libertarian Enterprise at ncc-1776.org.
Welcome to the show, Neil.
Hi.
Good to have you here.
Well, thank you.
And I got to tell you, well, I want to ask you all about it later, but I'll tell you that I did read The Probability Broach, I guess two or three months ago, I found it online.
Ah.
Yeah, that was really cool, man.
Oh, this is the graphic version?
Yeah.
Yeah, the graphic version.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And I forget where it was.
I should try to find a link to it or something.
It was at bigheadpress.com.
Well, yeah, I thought that was great.
And then I just realized this morning I saw a reference to it on the Libertarian Enterprise.
You talked about how you did that back in 77, is that right?
That's when I started it.
It was published in December of 79.
This is the text novel.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, so you did the text novel first and then the...
Yep.
Oh, I see.
All right.
Now, okay, so wait, let's get to first things first, which is, of course, foreign policy.
And I know that ever since September 11th, you, like Harry Brown and Jacob Hornberger and Justin Armando and I guess relatively few others, really got it right from the very beginning and talked about how extremely limited the response needed to be in terms of getting the bad guys and how we needed to make sure to retain our freedoms here rather than giving them all away.
I know this has been something that you write about a lot at the Libertarian Enterprise and also saw this headline here, something about $1 oil brought to you by the Libertarians.
So I figure I'll just set you off in that direction, see if you can make some sense for us.
So this is a bumper sticker that my daughter designed for me.
It says, $1 gas vote Libertarian.
Oh, I'm not sure right now that voting Libertarian would achieve that.
But the fact of the matter is, in a free society, our technological level, energy is almost free.
And I have gone into this several times in different writings, chiefly with regard to a process called thermal depolymerization, which yields burnable gasoline at an estimated $8 a barrel.
Really?
Wait, and how do you make that stuff now?
You make it out of garbage.
Really?
The trouble is that the process has been interfered with politically.
I think it's been sabotaged mechanically.
But there's a company that had a pilot plant in New Jersey that worked just fine.
They set up an operational plant right next to the Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri.
And the first time they cranked it up, of its 20,000 wells, 5,000 of them leaked.
So they got that fixed, and then the governor of Missouri shut them down, saying that it was too smelly.
Now, mind you, they're right next to a turkey rendering plant, and they're located there because that's where their raw materials come from.
It takes long-chain molecules, breaks them down into short-chain molecules.
There's nothing miraculous about it.
And it means that we could mine our garbage dumps, our landfills, for all the fuel that we'd need.
And that's just one thing.
I mean, it's just one thing.
This war is not about oil.
It's about forcing Americans to buy their energy from established sources and keeping them away from other sources.
That's a very good point.
It's not a question of whether the oil will get to market, it's a question of who's bringing it to market and getting that cut.
Well, in that sense, it's exactly like the food situation in the world.
It seems like everybody but Bono, of you two, understands that there isn't starvation in the world because there's any scarcity of food.
There's starvation in the world because political and military leaders will not let it get to the people through the market system.
And that's why you have people in Africa who are starving to death, because the food is held up for ransom, essentially.
If they'll behave themselves politically, then they can have food.
That's what the source of starvation is in the world.
I've also likened the current situation to what they used to call hydraulic despotism, places where the most abundant liquid on earth, nevertheless, some king got a corner of it, and because of that kept it from the people unless they obeyed him.
That was true in ancient China, it was true in Egypt, it was true in other places in the world.
The water was used to keep people in line.
Now it's petroleum.
You think this is the root of America's policy in the Middle East, then?
I think America's policy in the Middle East has to do, as I said, with continuing to get oil from sources that the establishment controls, rather than from other sources.
And now when you talk about mining garbage for gasoline, that kind of thing, we hear a lot of goofy stuff about, oh, this miraculous energy source.
But this thing that you're talking about, it's not one of those goofy ones, this is actually real.
It's for real.
It was written about in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, I forget which, a couple of years ago.
And it's been written about since.
You can look it up online.
As I said, there's nothing to it.
It's a big reagent, a retort, that under pressure and temperature, in the presence of water, breaks the long-chain molecules down in practically anything.
You talk about old computer cabinets, you talk about tires, tires, there are mountains of tires in this country, literal mountains of tires, dead tires in this country.
We have nothing we can do with right now.
Some of them are on fire.
They're burning sort of the way a cigar burns, very slowly.
Like in Springfield on the Simpsons, the tire fire.
Yeah, exactly.
And they're just making fun of the fact that there are dozens of these things.
Well, those tires could be mined and they would produce petroleum and carbon black, which we could use to use our slurry bombers that put out forest fires.
We spread carbon black all over the Arctic to raise the temperature of Earth and prevent global cooling.
Is that the priority now?
I think it must be.
That's funny.
All right, so, you know, it's funny, I was just having a conversation with my neighbor about that movie Tucker and the aviator, trying to explain some economics there in terms of how rich people buy a congressman for a small investment and then they get this tremendous payback.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true in the case of Tucker.
You know, he just didn't grease the right palm.
Something terrible happens to anyone who tries to start a car company in this country.
Tucker got it.
What the heck is his name?
The guy that built the stainless steel car.
DeLorean.
John DeLorean.
John DeLorean.
I actually have sat in DeLorean.
I had my picture taken with it and it was kind of nice, but something terrible happens to somebody who tries to go into full production of automobiles and took the Japanese and the Germans to crack Detroit's monopoly.
But this, you know, this congressman deal, you know why we're not flying around in flying wings right now?
You know, the Northrop flying wing was originally a military aircraft, but they had civilian hopes for it as well, but once again, they failed to grease the right center and so the military adopted the B-47 and the B-52 and like that, more conventional designs.
Right, I remember that.
I've seen footage on the Discovery Channel or what have you about the flying wing invented way back in the day.
Well, my dad was an aviator and that situation in particular made him very, very angry.
Hey, in that movie, The Aviator, about Howard Hughes with, oh, what's his name?
Do you know that story?
Do you know if it's accurate that basically TWA, I guess, or whichever the competition passed a law or had a law passed that made it a crime for this guy to give people a ride to Europe that mandated a monopoly on air travel?
Well, that's the way it works today.
I mean, they all work it out among themselves.
I don't know about that specific incident and to tell the truth, when I watched that movie, I was more concerned with watching Kate Beckinsale playing Ava Gardner.
I'm not sure which actress was which, but there were some hot ones in that movie.
Oh, yeah.
Well, Kate Beckinsale's the one who was also in Underworld, played a vampire.
But anyway, that's neither here nor there.
I know that Howard Hughes ran into obstacles all the time that even his money couldn't get past, you know, because other millionaires had had a lock on things.
Look up Henry J. Kaiser with regard to Alcoa Aluminum sometime.
Alcoa was prosecuted by the government for being too competitive, for delivering aluminum at too low a price.
Yeah, prosecuted for being too competitive.
I like that.
Exactly.
I mean, that's exactly what the indictment said.
So we definitely have the kind of mercantilism in this country that Adam Smith complained about.
I mean, today on LewRockwell.com, somebody's saying that Alexander Hamilton was an outright mercantilist who denounced Adam Smith and who wanted government privilege to decide who made it in the market and who didn't.
Right.
And see, this is really the problem with being a libertarian, is that you end up wanting to repeal all of American history all the way back to the founding generation at some point, don't you?
I would be satisfied, like Vince Brunowitz, who I'm sure is a mutual friend of ours.
If we just outlawed everything that passed in 1913 and later, though, we could go back to being a fairly free country at that point.
That would be a good start.
I mean, I'm about to write a book on libertarian ideas and principles and so forth, and I want to talk about getting rid of both sovereign immunity and limited liability.
Limited liability is the corporation's sovereign immunity, sovereign immunity is the government's limited liability, if you see what I mean.
They're both lies, they're both coercion to give them a special place in society that they not only don't deserve, but that does enormous damage to our civilization.
Yeah, well, especially with all the warfare going on, it seems like, well, I don't know if you saw that Seymour Hersh article where they had a quote of Gates in there, where he said, if America bombs Iran, we're going to be dealing with this for generations and our kids will be fighting them, our grandkids will be fighting them in the streets here and that kind of thing, and I guess the implication there is that it's not really yet a clash of civilizations, but if we go ahead and bomb Iran, we're basically going to turn this into a full-scale war of the West versus the Muslim world.
Well, I mean, that's been going on for a thousand years, hasn't it?
Well, sort of.
Not sort of.
I mean, look at the way the British and the French, but mostly the British, decided they were going to make the Holy Land holy again or something like that, and in one version or another that's been going on ever since.
I just see the current conflict as kind of a variation on that.
I mean, I'm sure they had their motives in the Middle Ages for doing it that had nothing to do with the state of purpose, and now we've got things like protecting an oil pipeline through northern Afghanistan, sitting on top of the second largest pool of oil in Iraq, and that sort of thing.
It's all very short-sighted.
None of it takes any account of new discoveries, like the fact that old oil fields are filling up again from the bottom with oil that's of a different geological age than the oil that was originally pumped out of it, and the fact that oil does not come from biological sources.
The oil shale out west here was not abandoned because it couldn't be done, it was abandoned because it couldn't compete with 1960s oil prices, but it sure could now.
Energy is virtually free.
Well, but the thing is about the clash of civilizations thing is that America used to not be a part of that, and now we are.
I see some people here and there on Rockwell saying that we have been a part of that since the Jefferson administration, but I haven't studied enough to know whether or not the story that's told about the Barbary pirates is true enough that they were interfering with commerce.
Well, and even, you know, the Battle of Tripoli and all that, having a ceasefire between the Jefferson administration and when Wilson helped the British take all of the former Ottoman Empire and that kind of thing, even then, you know, really America hasn't been directly involved in being an imperialist over there until, or weren't until the end of the Second World War.
Well, we certainly are now, aren't we?
Yeah, afraid so.
But I still believe that the whole thing could be called off, that the clash of civilizations is a bunch of hooey that's being pushed down our throats, but that really people are people and we can all just trade and be friends and it doesn't matter if they believe in Islam or what.
Well, I'm a little hard to fool in that area because I had, my first friends when I came to college here at Colorado State University, the first people who welcomed me in were Arabs of various kinds.
I knew both Christians and Muslims, mostly from Lebanon, which was a beautiful place in those days.
They were kind and generous and decent to me.
They threw swell parties.
So there's that.
And then, because of that, I've read the Koran in two different translations, so I know what's there.
And I don't find anything there that is more outrageous or more violent or more intolerant than what you find in the Old Testament.
So I know it's going to anger an awful lot of people.
I get mail on a regular basis from a guy who, you know, say, you think that Islam is a peaceful religion.
Well, no, I don't think any religion is peaceful.
But there isn't anything special about Islam.
It's no more or less crazy than any other religion.
That's not the problem.
The problem is that certain people in this country need somebody to pick on so they have a justification for Pentagon budget, defense budget, and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
I actually just read something the other day where somebody was quoting the Koran as saying something violent, and then somebody else went and did a little bit of Googling, and it came from the Old Testament.
Muhammad was just quoting his old Bible at the time, and he said it.
I thought that was kind of funny.
In point of fact, I agree with you, and I'll tell you something else.
If we stopped interfering, I think that things would simmer down in just a very few years.
If we brought our people home, left them alone, except to trade with them when they were inclined to trade with us, and left them alone, I don't think there's anything wrong with, on a non-coercive basis, giving moral support to a secular element to Muslim society.
I know that there is a secular element there, and it needs to be founded in courage.
But that would be a private thing, a personal thing.
Right.
Which makes all the difference, because we see what happens when the CIA goes and supports moderate so-called forces here and there and the other place.
They just marginalize them worse.
They're exactly like the FBI.
They have no basis for existing under the Constitution.
That means they're outlaw organizations, and everybody who works for them is a criminal.
Good call.
Well, so how strictly do you enforce this Constitution?
Because of course, if you want to just repeal all the laws back to 1913, you'll have another hundred years' worth of repealing still to do before you get back to the Constitution.
Well, you know, I come from a school.
One of my early mentors was Robert Lefebvre, but I don't know if you know anything about him or not.
No, I'm afraid not.
He was an early teacher in the movement, and a great, great man.
If you want to know what Bob was like, watch the first part of The Wizard of Oz, when Frank Morgan is playing the snake oil salesman.
That's how Bob was.
He had that grand carriage to him, and dramatic gestures, and dramatic way of speaking, and a gentleman of the old school, very polite to ladies, and that sort of thing.
The great misfortune is that he didn't write nearly as much as he taught people face to face.
I wish I could take one of his seminars with experience, but I wish that there was more left.
Bob's view was that the country went wrong in 1794, and of course, that's the premise for The Probability Broach.
Right, the Whiskey Rebellion.
That's right.
I had to tell you.
I thought that was great fun.
There's a part.
Well, anyway, here.
Let's go ahead and talk all about that.
In The Probability Broach, you've got a cop from where?
Colorado, right?
Yeah, in Denver.
Oh, yeah, in Denver.
He goes through to the other dimension.
He's explaining the history of our America to the people there.
He talks about how Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion.
The lady gasps, what?
They lost the Whiskey Rebellion?
Oh, no!
That's why our history has been completely ruined ever since.
They also want to know where the license plate is.
So explain that, though, the Whiskey Rebellion and its centrality to that story.
That's the first time the federal government tried to collect an excise tax on a domestic product.
They decided that the farmers in western Pennsylvania who grew corn and then were accustomed to converting it into whiskey because it would keep better and you could trade it down the river much easier and stuff like that.
It was more valuable than just corn.
They decided that those people should pay a tax and the tax would be used to support the government.
They sent tax collectors, and for a while, the whiskey farmers and their supporters would meet up with the tax collectors or tar and feather them and run out of town.
They burned the head tax collector's house down, and anybody who paid the tax, they would shoot his still full of holes and stuff like that.
It developed into something resembling a full-fledged rebellion, but it never involved more than about 400 people.
George Washington and Alexander Hamilton's part in this must be emphasized because this whole thing was his idea.
They sent 15,000 federal troops to western Pennsylvania to put down a rebellion of 400 farmers.
The only reason there wasn't a civil war right then is because a new immigrant, a landed gentry type by the name of Albert Gallatin, who had immigrated here from Switzerland, talked his friends and neighbors into not fighting because he was afraid they would get killed.
He ended up being Thomas Jefferson's treasurer, and in the probability row, he ends up being president after the rebellion turns around and marches on Philadelphia, which was the capital.
They put George Washington against a wall and shoot him, and return the article to the Confederation.
Alexander Hamilton flees to Europe, where he's killed in 1804 in a duel, just like he was here.
I'm using real historical characters and trying to respect their original inclinations.
In a very real sense, the Constitution was kind of a military coup against the Revolution.
You're just describing a successful counter-coup in favor of the Revolution.
That's exactly right, and Bob Lefebvre is the one who taught me about that.
I was 21 or so when I encountered him, and he pointed out that the Constitutional Convention had no right to unplug the Articles of Confederation and plug in some other documents.
Their mandate was to revise the Articles of Confederation and make them work better, and it is a myth that they were not working.
They were working well, but people wanted them to work a little better.
I don't know what we'd really be like if that had happened, but I guess in the probability broach, the government would shrink year after year after year.
We'd achieve some progress in human civilization so that we wouldn't need government.
The last time in the probability broach, in 1987, which is their year 211 after the Declaration of Independence, Congress hasn't met since the 1950s.
There just hasn't been any reason to do it.
We see the process, and we see people who have no respect for government, and they feel they're doing something that they're going to have to wash their hands afterward, and that sort of thing.
I really like it because it takes some time to explore what it would really be like to live in anarcho-capitalist America.
Well, that was my idea.
That was the whole idea.
I saw that nobody was writing positive utopias.
My models were Ayn Rand to a decree.
She has a sort of a positive utopia at the end of Atlas Shrugged, but we don't see nearly enough of it.
The person I didn't want to be like was Edward Bellamy, who wrote a socialist utopia called Looking Backward.
Looking Backward.
Thank you.
It was his cousin, I think, who came up with the Pledge of Allegiance.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's right.
They were cousins.
Both of them dedicated socialists.
One of them, and I can't remember which one it is, was a minister who got kicked out of two churches because he preached socialism instead of religion.
That sort of thing.
So when people pledge allegiance, the flag thing gets very patriotic and all that.
What they're doing, in fact, is they are celebrating a socialist, collectivist oath to worship the country and its flag, and you were supposed to salute the flag as you did that by raising your right arm up at a 45 degree angle with the palm flat.
In other words, that's where the Nazi salute came from.
Right.
But the whole pledge wasn't even written particularly for America.
It was just, I pledge allegiance to my flag, and it was meant to be for everybody around the world.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, that's how not to do it.
Yeah.
Well, another thing I was reading, a study you're writing about, the comic book history of the United States, that is to say, most people have not learned the truth about the history of their country since about 1865, and the reason for that is because if people understood the real history of their country, things would be very different.
I've often said that if people understood how consistently they're lied to by the media, there would be a TV station standing above its own ashes in this whole country.
Yeah, and you know, history is just the lie they got away with that day written down for later.
Well, you know, Henry Ford couldn't be wrong about everything.
He said history is the bunk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and we could see that, too.
I mean, I saw even before the 1990s were over in my college history textbook, the Branch Davidians were a Charles Manson-like cult of suicidal people who set themselves all on fire to the horror of the innocent FBI agents outside.
Well, you know, what's really interesting about that is that they believe their own propaganda for a certain point.
I happen to know, happened to know an ATF agent because his daughter skated with mine, they're both ice skaters, and he was fairly new.
He'd been in Operation Desert Storm and then came back and worked as a paramedic for a while and then he joined the ATF because he couldn't find a better job.
And they lied to him.
He believed the drivel that the ATF fed him about what happened there in Texas.
I was going to write a book with Michael McNulty.
Do you know who he is?
Yeah, he's the guy that made Waco, The Rules of Engagement, Waco New Revelation, and The FLIR Project.
Well, yes, exactly.
And Michael lives in Fort Collins, or at least he did, and he wanted to write a book with me.
It was going to be called Waco, Children's Voices, and it was going to be the story of that siege from the kids' viewpoint.
And the thing that got to me worst of all, seeing all the miles and miles of footage about that incident, was a little girl talking to the FBI agent on the phone saying, you're not going to kill us, are you?
And the FBI agent said, of course I'm not, and of course they did.
But in any case, we got interrupted by 9-11, where Michael's agent said, well, no publisher is going to want a book that's negative about the FBI.
And so that killed the project, which I guess is just as well, because to tell the truth, going through all that stuff, was really, really depressing, I mean, life-endingly depressing.
Yeah, the Waco story is a hell of a thing.
I guess my problem was, I lost an argument one time, not because I was wrong, but just because I didn't know enough.
So then I had to read all these books to make sure that I would never lose an argument about Waco anymore.
And yeah, it really cut my sense of humor down a couple of notches permanently, I think.
Yeah, well, Waco was a huge warning, and I think it was largely successful in the sense that it changed the opinion of a lot of people about the government.
And what the conservatives need to recognize is that the Iraq war, the Iraq occupation is simply the Waco massacre basically happening every day, or at least on a weekly basis, on a good week.
Or, you can think of it as practice for here.
Well, yeah, there's that too.
All these soldiers are going to come back and be our cops.
Yeah, yeah, I would like to see.
I don't ever propose laws unless they are for government, if you see what I mean.
Yeah, sure.
Restricting what they can do.
Yeah.
And I would like to see a law that prevents the hiring of former GIs who've been in combat as police officers for some period, some cooling off period, maybe five years or something like that.
I know that's rough on people returning home when they need jobs, but on the other hand, this is a volunteer war, and I don't feel as bad about it as I would toward conscripted people.
Yeah, and we don't want to be treated the way our government treats the people of Iraq.
I for one, and I know you, don't want our government treating the people of Iraq that way either.
Yes.
But that's sort of even beside the point.
We ought to even be able to get the warmongers to agree with us that we don't want to be shot on the side of the road because that's basically the way it goes.
And you know, this has already happened too, right, where people get shot for the cell phone in their hand or something like that, where under old police rules of engagement, the shot would not have been fired yet, but these guys are coming back overly militarized and trigger-happy.
Well, there's a whole lot of elements.
I was a reserve police officer myself in the 70s, and I did that specifically so that I would have some basis on which to talk about police work.
At the time, the three greatest theorists in the movement who talked about police were Robert Lefebvre, who was a real estate broker, Professor Murray Rothbard, who was an economics professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic at the time, and John Hospers, who was the head of the philosophy department at USC.
None of them had any inkling about what the cops were like, so I joined the police specifically to find out.
And I found out a whole bunch of things that have informed my writing ever since then.
I think, for example, and this outrages them, but this is a former cop saying this, they should be forbidden the use of Kevlar.
Their psychology changed when they started wearing bulletproof vests, and it did not change for the better.
I also think that they should go back to six-shot revolvers and four-shot shotguns and rely on armed civilians for any more firepower than that.
And you know, that's how it was in history, right?
You know, if the sheriff is in over his head, all of a sudden, men with rifles start showing up to help out.
That's what happened when the sniper got on top of the tower here in Austin.
Exactly.
Exactly right.
And I actually am questioning now the very existence of municipal police forces, which are a very recent development, a very recent invention, I think would be much better to rely on the sheriff's department to keep peace in a county.
Because for one thing, sheriff's deputies are directly accountable that way.
They work for the sheriff who is elected.
We don't like it.
We diselect it.
With the municipal cops, they work for the police department, which sort of works for the city manager, which sort of works for the city council, and you know, there's many more layers of bureaucracy and less accountability.
So I'm going to be writing a book, as I said, about what libertarians believe.
And this is going to be a big part of it.
I'm going to have a big section on the police.
Well, and you know, something that's happened really in the last 20 years, I guess, is the rise of the SWAT team to the point where I guess basically all 18,000 sheriff's departments in America now have M-16s and all the, you know, not just Kevlar vests, but full on body armor and helmets and machine guns and armored troop carriers.
Yeah, absolutely.
The personnel carriers, you know, you can watch on A&E.
I love this on the Arts and Entertainment Channel, which used to all be ballet and crap when I was a little kid.
Now it's, you know, Kansas City SWAT or Dallas SWAT, not just cops, but just SWAT.
And the one I can't ever get out of my mind, I think about this all the time, is it was a raid on a house in Dallas where rather than, you know, walking up and knocking on the door, they drove up, they attached their armored personnel carrier to the burglar bars on the front windows on the front of the house, and then they backed up as fast as they could and basically tore the entire front of this guy's house out.
And for what?
At the end, a nickel bag of pot is what they got.
And they completely destroyed this guy's house.
The mindset is not, no one in the editing booth is saying, whoa, we can't run this.
They go, yeah, this is great.
Put it on there.
And everybody loves it, I guess, except me.
Well, remember the purpose of the mass media.
The purpose of the mass media is to disseminate government lies and threats to the popular.
That's what they're for.
You know, and everything else is just, is just window dressing.
So they show that so that you'll be properly afraid of the cops.
You know, if I were in charge of that unit, I would have fired every single individual who had anything to do with that.
But that's just me.
Yeah, apparently that is just you.
You know, when they created the SWAT, it was, hey, listen, in L.A. they need this because in L.A. they got serious crime like the rest of you people don't understand.
And sometimes you'll have, you know, really violent bank robbers with a bunch of people, you know, held hostage in a vault.
And what are you going to do?
You need special weapons assault teams or actually, I guess they changed the acronym to and tactics because they didn't want assault right in there.
But anyway.
OK, fine.
What a what a bunch of Austinites care if the LAPD wants to create, you know, this small paramilitary force for bank robbery hostage situations.
And yet now we all have them.
They're everywhere.
Yeah.
They serve every war.
And it seems like it's bad for the whole country.
They need to be broken up.
And no more.
No more SWAT.
As I said, they should be limited to traditional law enforcement tools.
The gun is as much a badge of office as anything.
And if it gets into a real survival situation, then they should duck and call for help.
This is one of the complaints in the Declaration of Independence, right, that the king has quartered soldiers among us and protected them from their crimes with bogus trials.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
You know, my wife's insight long, long time ago was that here's the standing army that the founding fathers didn't want.
I don't know.
I don't know how many policemen there are in this country, but they talked pretty glibly about adding another hundred thousand back during the Clinton administration.
So there must be quite a few.
And, you know, in my hometown, which is a very low crime place, in fact, it was just voted the most pleasant town in America to live in for about the third year.
But you see some bicyclist, not even a motorcycle, some bicyclist pulled over to the side for some offense and three police cars there.
Yeah.
You know, you know, these guys have too much time on their hands.
They have too many resources.
And, you know, when I was a reservist, it was pretty boring duty, actually.
I mean, occasionally we get exciting things, but we had one quarter of the town that when people were trying to patrol that, they moaned and groaned because absolutely nothing ever happened there.
And I remember one night sitting on a hill with my partner watching Straw Dog at the drive in because they're trying to figure out what was going on because we couldn't hear it because the radio was completely dead every half hour.
They do a check on us to see that we were still alive.
And aside from that, the same guy had to, or no, it was a buddy of his, one night he was stationed in that area and they couldn't get him on the radio.
And so somebody drove up to see what he was doing.
He was standing there with the hood of his car open, putting his fingers on the contacts of his battery to wake himself up.
That's one way to do it, I guess.
You know, all you guys had to do, though, really was just start kicking in doors at random.
You'd have found something somewhere.
Well, the trouble is in this town.
Somebody would put a hole in you, you could see it, you could throw a dog through it.
And that's why this is a low crime town.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, when you talked about the solution to this is besides scaling down their weapons and their armor and kind of equalizing the situation between them and us a little bit more, you also talked about getting rid of the sovereign immunity.
And I guess what you mean by that is so that when a cop commits a crime, he can be prosecuted and or sued as an individual, not just, oh, you sue the city now and he's protected.
Yeah.
I'm all of that.
I want to see I want to see individuals held responsible for what they do.
But I also want to see whole units held responsible for what they do, too.
You can't right now.
You can't really sue the police department.
I mean, there are people standing in line and they go through this deal where you have to get permission to sue the state and all of that stuff.
And I want an end to that medieval idea that we should have gotten rid of when we got rid of kinks.
That's all there is to it.
And but thanks to people like Alexander Hamilton wanted everybody to address George Washington as your majesty.
And that should tell you right there what he had in mind.
Yeah.
Hey, doesn't the right to petition in the First Amendment, doesn't that mean the right to sue them to petition for redress of grievances?
I would think so.
I would think so.
The guys who wrote the Constitution were not necessarily good guys, but they were being constrained by a number of things.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights largely, and he did it to.
What he imagined would be the specifications of Thomas Jefferson to they're trying to get Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry and people like that sign off on the Constitution.
And they knew that they would never do that and that there was something like the Bill of Rights.
And they made, you know, I think at least James Madison did, you know, a good faith attempt.
Although one thing is conspicuously missing from the Bill of Rights is any kind of penalty clause.
And that's one of the things that I think we need to address ourselves to right away.
And it'll be one of the things I discuss in my book.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess ultimately the theory goes that it all comes down to the House of Representatives and their power of impeachment.
And we're supposed to be in control of them.
Yeah.
Right.
So that at the end of the day, that's where the accountability comes from.
Yeah.
Well, it doesn't work.
It hasn't worked.
It doesn't work now.
And it is time to provide new guards for our future security, as Thomas Jefferson said.
Yeah, I like it.
All right.
Everybody, that's Elniel Smith.
He's a science fiction author.
And actually, I have a whole list of stuff that you wrote here in front of me.
If I only click the right thing.
The Crystal Empire, Henry Martland, Martin, Martin, I was just spelled all weird.
Henry Martin Palace, Bretta Martin, Star Wars, the Lando Calrissian adventures.
Hey, all right.
And most recently, the mitzvah with Aaron Zellman.
Oh, I think that I saw that on online and that's that's a long time ago.
The most recent thing is Roswell, Texas, that big head press.
Oh, Roswell, Texas.
And you should go and see that if you want to see a good, fun story, beautifully drawn by Scott Beezer, beautifully colored by Jen Zack, beautifully lettered by by Zeke Beezer and beautifully written by me and Rex May, then you should you should go to the big head press and see Roswell, Texas.
And that's where The Probability Broker is as well, plus my latest graphic, which is called Time Paper.
Meanwhile, I'm writing books without pictures for big people, too.
Cool.
All right, everybody.
That's L. Neil Smith, Libertarian Enterprises, N.C.
C.dash 1776 dot org.
Right.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thank you, sir.
Back to that fucking cop show, because I'll tell you the threat to freedom, not the freedom, I'll tell you the threat to the status quo is in this country is us.
That's why they show you shows like fucking cops.
So, you know, that state power will win and we'll bust your house down and we'll fucking bust you any time we want.
That's the message.
Why don't they have a show called Storm Trooper?
Or better yet, how about IRS?
Every week, the IRS has a special celebrity guest.
This week, it's Red Fox on IRS bust.
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, ding, ding.
Who that.
Who that?
At my door.
What do you all want?
The rings on your fucking finger.
Dun, dun, dun.
See you next week when we go down to Texas and meet Willie Nelson on IRS.
That is the message they want to leave you with, to keep you afraid and keep you fucking impotent.
Keep these lying scumbags doing their fucking dirty work.
