08/20/07 – Lew Rockwell – The Scott Horton Show

Lew Rockwell from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Is it alright if I keep you just a couple more minutes here?
Sure.
I'd like to ask you about the Ron Paul revolution, sir.
You brought it up at the beginning in terms of a strain of American conservatism that perhaps might be willing to embrace peace as a doctrine once again, if they ever had.
It's obviously a tremendous thing.
I don't know if the general poll numbers are showing it, but on the world wide web there are, I don't know, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people who have committed themselves to being hardcore activists for the Ron Paul campaign for presidency.
I know you used to work for Ron Paul back in the 1970s.
I was just wondering if you could tell us your perspective on him and what this Ron Paul revolution means for the long term.
Yeah, I'd love to.
Let me say I'm not speaking for the Mises Institute or for lourockwell.com, both of which are non-profits, and Mises Institute especially is not a political organization.
It's nothing to do with politics and, for that matter, lourockwell.com is not a political operation, although we're interested in politics and observe politics.
So I'm just speaking as an individual.
But I'm thrilled.
I've known Ron Paul for, gosh, more than 35 years.
And I can tell you, I think everybody recognizes instinctively he's the real thing.
I mean, he actually is what he appears to be, a man who puts upholding the truth and the search for justice first, who got into politics, in fact, because he was concerned about the money issue.
He first encountered the Austrian School of Economics and Mises and Hayek and Rothbard and Haslett, Senholtz.
When he was in medical school, we started reading.
He's very deeply read.
I would say he is an economist, even though he doesn't have the official credentials.
He knows his economics.
And it was Richard Nixon's abolition of the final tie between the dollar and gold and imposition of price and wage controls back in 1971 that got Ron Paul interested in becoming a public figure that led to his running for Congress.
And all his time in public life, his two key issues have been, first, a peaceful foreign policy.
Secondly, the abolition of the Federal Reserve and establishment of a sound currency, also abolition of the Internal Revenue Service.
Those are his three key issues.
He's upheld them all his life.
And, you know, we're living in just a tremendously interesting time for libertarians, and I would argue for all Americans.
That's why I think this campaign is one for the political science textbooks of the future.
There's never been anything like this.
First of all, we have the work of libertarian intellectuals that's taken place for centuries, but especially since the old right that we talked about earlier, the people who formed against Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, his drive to war, hundreds and hundreds of libertarian intellectuals, great men and women over the last 75 years who spent all their lives advocating the ideals of liberty, building the intellectual foundations of liberty.
Then we have the man.
We have a man who is a real leader in all the proper senses, who has tremendous political skills.
I mean, Ron Paul is a great politician.
He's got just tremendous political skills.
That's how he's been able to be elected with increasing majorities, having libertarian ideas.
This is unique in American history.
He is unique in the history of American politics.
So he has tremendous coalition-building abilities.
He has just tremendous teaching abilities to explain the ideas of liberty to regular people and garner their support.
He has a fantastic sense of timing.
He was pretty much drafted to run this time, but I think the reason he agreed, unlike the times that people tried to draft him both in 2000 and 2004 to run for president, he didn't think those were the times.
This time he thought, well, maybe this is the time.
And, you know, again, his political skills have made that possible.
The other thing that we have going for us is George W. Bush.
George W. Bush has destroyed, in some sense, the Republican Party.
He's wrecked the party, meaning that there's an opening for some new people and some new ideas.
He's destroyed the morale of the Republican supporters by his vast spending, by his failed wars.
All the terrible things that he's done have meant that there's a real opening now.
Then we also have the Internet and the development of the World Wide Web.
This is a terrible thing to admit.
I've been involved in politics since 1960 when, as a teenager, I raised money for Richard Nixon in 1960.
As a 16-year-old, I walked around my town and raised a couple thousand dollars and, in fact, got to meet Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, and got thanked by them at a meeting in Boston.
Terrible thing.
So all the libertarianism, then, is you doing penance for that, is that it?
Well, let's say I saw the light.
Okay.
I think I've always been a natural.
My dad was a Taft Republican.
And, in fact, my first political memory is of my dad pitting a Taft for President button on my coat.
So I had some good roots, even though I went wrong in 1960, but I was active in the Goldwater campaign.
So I know a little bit about another political campaign, senatorial and gubernatorial, and Ron Paul's congressional campaigns, and so forth, over my life.
Even extremely enthusiastic campaigns, like the Goldwater campaign, where you had a lot of young people involved, everything was the official campaign.
If you were a volunteer, you were participating out of official offices, you were doing what the official campaign told you to do, you were dealing only with the publications of the official campaign, and so forth.
The Ron Paul campaign, there's never been anything like this in American history, where the vast majority of the campaign is entirely decentralized and spontaneous.
You have thousands and thousands of people all over the country walking their neighborhoods, raising money, setting up meetings, printing yard signs, printing bumper stickers.
I just heard about some young people in Texas who print 30-foot banners every weekend and go out and put them on the overpasses on the big highways for Ron Paul.
This is people entirely self-financed, entirely volunteer.
If you were to actually combine the spending that's going on by volunteers, the thousands and tens of thousands of volunteers all over the country, I'm sure the Ron Paul campaign is financially bigger than even the Romney campaign, or the McCain campaign, or the Hillary campaign, or any of these campaigns.
It's just that most of the money is being spent voluntarily.
So you have the regular campaign, which of course is essential, but then you also have this spontaneous decentralized campaign made possible through the Internet, bringing young people in, which is itself a revolutionary factor, because it is the young who tend to drive revolutions of all sorts.
So you have teenagers, people in their 20s and 30s, who never thought of being involved in politics, attracted by the Ron Paul revolution, and writing American campaign history, bolstering the libertarian movement in a way that has never happened before.
Thousands and thousands of people getting interested in libertarian ideas.
Already, I would say, Ron Paul has won a victory.
Even if he were to decide, well, I'm going to give it up and I'm through with this, already he's brought about a vast increase in the number of people interested in libertarian ideas.
People are reading libertarian works, especially on the Internet.
They're getting interested in the history and the ideas that underlie our movement.
There's an explosion of interest going on, and this is taking place just in the last six to eight months.
What are things going to be like six months from now?
A year from now, I would say the sky is the limit.
We have no idea what could actually happen, and it's a tremendously exciting moment to be living in.
A lot of the people who worked for libertarian ideas in my own lifetime and in the generations before me continue to do it, even though they thought that there was no chance.
There was no chance to reverse the growth of the state.
We were stuck with a welfare-warfare state, and who knew that still the truth had to be upheld, even though we weren't going to win.
But I think Murray Rothbard's optimism that we could win and would win is being validated right now.
Murray always felt that he was always a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist.
He thought that because of the Industrial Revolution, because of the division of labor required by capitalism, because of the entrepreneurial and magnificent growth of the American economy and other capitalist economies, that because of the power of ideas that we do have the truth on our side, that the good guys would actually win out, that the state would not win, that the fascists and the communists and the socialists and the interventionists and the left liberals and the statist conservatives and so forth, that they would not win, that we would win.
Well, maybe that's happening right now.
Well, it is kind of interesting that, as you say, the campaign itself is an example of the spontaneous order that, if you listen to Ron Paul, this is what he says works, is free people doing their own thing, and all around him sprouts this spontaneous order bent on propelling him further.
Well, and Ron is, of course, very, very aware of this, and he's continually thrilled and buoyed by seeing how many people are involved, how many different types of people, how many different age groups, ethnic, racial diversity, income diversity, age diversity, every people from all different classes and occupations, people from all different political parties and no political parties, republicans, democrats, independents, libertarians, and people who never thought in a million years would they ever be involved in anything like this are involved, and, you know, as he says, freedom is a unifying idea, and it unifies us in the way, not in the way the state unifies us through the barrel of a gun or attempts to unify us, but unifies us through our hearts and through our minds and through our, through voluntarism.
So there's been, this libertarian movement that we've all been part of has just been increased and enhanced, and it's growing by some amazing amount every single day.
I would say it's already transformed America.
Who knows what lies ahead?
I don't know, it depends on how much all of us work and how many people are willing to put their minds and their hearts into the Ron Paul revolution, but I must say I'm extremely optimistic.
Well, if I can echo a bit of what you said about Dr. Paul's character at the beginning there, I'd be lying if I said I was surprised, because I've been following Dr. Paul since 97 or so and reading his speeches and so forth, keeping up all this time, if I was anybody else I would have been surprised and amazed, I think, to hear my interview with Dr. Paul from last Friday, where because Antiwar.com itself is also a non-profit, we couldn't talk about the campaign and talk about aren't Giuliani and Romney jerks and that kind of thing.
We couldn't talk about that, so instead I treated him like Mr. Professor and I asked him about what's going on in the world, and the guy is a true heavyweight.
He understands foreign policy in regards to pretty much every nation on earth that America is dealing with.
We talked just about everything but Korea, I think, and he's on top of his game all the way around, and it wasn't in terms of what would you do if you were president kind of questions.
It was, listen, let's talk about what's going on in Israel and Palestine and what might be the solution and so forth, and he's got a million things to say about every one of those issues.
Well, he's very, very deeply read.
If you could see his own home library, everything read and marked up, and he's constantly reading.
He's read all the important books, both in terms of the classics and in terms of current affairs.
There was that funny episode when George Bush was first running for president where a reporter in Boston asked him some foreign policy questions, which I remember was denounced at the time as an ambush, because, of course, it was predicated on thinking he might know something, which, of course, he didn't know anything.
And you need more than knowledge.
You need the correct moral compass, and Ron Paul has got both of them.
And when I worked for him, as you mentioned, in the late 70s, also the early 1980s, it was an astounding and a thrilling experience because there were times, I can remember once, when Ronald Reagan called him at the office to try to pressure him to vote for a bill.
By the way, the only time Ronald Reagan ever tried to pressure him was to vote for more spending, despite the propaganda about the Reagan administration.
And, you know, it's not easy to have the president of the United States call you, the head of your own party, and put the arm on you.
But as Ronald Reagan discovered and as Newt Gingrich discovered and as George W. Bush has discovered and Cheney and all these guys, Ron Paul's arm cannot be twisted.
He can't actually make him do the wrong thing.
He wouldn't do it.
He wouldn't give in to Reagan.
This was in the vote for the B-1 bomber, I guess it was at that point.
But they all eventually, I remember when Gingrich was speaker, there was an episode when they brought all the Republicans together and they were ordering them all that they had to vote for this particular budget, which involved some spending and some extra spending and deficits, of course, and he said that there were going to be consequences for anybody who didn't vote the way the party was ordering them to vote and they were going to be in very deep trouble.
And these are all real threats, I mean, in politics.
And then he said, of course, except for Ron Paul, because as Gingrich had learned and they all learned, they can't actually pressure him.
He has his own moral compass.
It's been in existence his whole life, and I think he's always been a very good man.
When recently he was in Pittsburgh, some of his high school classmates talked about the kind of boy he was in high school, that he was the kind of boy other boys look up to, that you could always trust him, that he always kept his word, and that he was also, by the way, a great athlete, which of course gives you credence.
He won statewide track records in the 220 and some of the other track events in Pennsylvania, so there you have to be pretty good.
In fact, there were those who thought in the early days that he might actually be able to get a professional baseball contract, he was that good a baseball player, get some knee injuries so that ruled that out, but he was always a top student, always an A student, that was all through high school, through college, through medical school, and also reading libertarian works as well as being a top medical student.
So he's always been the kind of man that he is today, and this is something else that they can't deal with in normal politics.
You know, we all assume, every American assumes that every politician is a liar and a bum.
Even the guys in your own party, you don't fundamentally trust them.
But people look into Ron Paul's face, you know, who is it who said that every man has the face he deserves after 58?
Oscar Wilde, I think.
When you look at Ron Paul's face, you know you can trust him, and when you listen to him, his words actually touch people's hearts in a way that I've never seen to be the case in American politics.
And I think it's because, you know, his character is transparent.
You can actually see the decency and the honesty there.
So even people who may not be libertarians, who may not agree with us in everything, might end up supporting him.
I heard a man who was describing himself as a lifelong liberal, actually a blogger on the Huffington Post, and he said, we were starting to consider Ron Paul, he was a liberal Democrat all his life, said he looked at his website, and actually was looking at the lurockwell.com website, where we'll have all Ron Paul's speeches and testimony and so forth.
And he said, what's up about the Federal Reserve and money is very interesting.
I'm finding it very interesting, but he said, if Ron Paul were ever the president, I would feel like I wasn't going to be lied to.
Well, I think this is something that communicates itself to people.
Again, I don't know exactly where this is headed, but it's already, I would say, surprised Dr. Paul, to the extent and the enthusiasm of his broader campaign, the real campaign and the virtual campaign.
It's growing every day.
And it's funny, you know, you're right, he refuses to take any credit for it.
He says, well, it's just the message, you know, people want to be free, and so they like it when I talk about liberty.
Of course, it matters very much who it is that's saying it, particularly when you're a libertarian who, you know, in the case of Dr. Paul, will come right out and say, you know, we need to get on a track to getting rid of Medicare and so forth.
It's clear, instantly, on watching Dr. Paul speak, that he's no greedy capitalist who just says, you know, I got mine and screw everybody else.
You can tell by one look at him that he's a bleeding heart.
That's why he wants to get rid of welfare, because welfare is bad for poor people.
But he is certainly, you know, he's a baby doctor.
He's a bleeding heart.
You can tell just by looking right at him that all of his positions come from the point of view, like you said earlier, of justice and compassion.
That's where his starting point is, you know, what's the right thing.
Well, there was an article in a local Texas newspaper recently talking about, which people, of course, talk about how he's able to get elected, and there was a Democratic official who was interviewed.
He said, I don't support Ron Paul, and he has all these views about social welfare programs, I'm paraphrasing, that you would think would get him defeated.
And he said, in fact, should get him defeated, because he's wrong to be against all these things.
But the problem we have with him is, he said, if somebody needs, one of his constituents needs a wheelchair, and he has a program for it, Ron Paul is the kind of guy who will go out and get the money to buy him the wheelchair.
And indeed that, privately, of course.
So indeed that is the kind of man Ron Paul is, a very charitable man personally, and this is something he wouldn't want me to talk about, so I'm not going to give any details.
But I'll tell you, he's very charitable personally, and he does have a compassionate heart.
So unlike the politicians who talk about, just like the conservatives think that, somebody recently said that the chicken hawks are the guys who ascribe to themselves military virtues because they're pro-war.
Well, you know, the left sometimes ascribes to themselves charitable virtues because they're for the welfare state, although typically, of course, they're not actually doing anything personally for anybody in need.
Well, Ron Paul is the kind of man who does things personally for people in need.
Even though he's against these programs that was libertarians we know, not only is that not a contradiction, in fact, those two things go together, because in a free market, you do have, when people are not being taxed at the kazoo, they are, they end, you know, people are charitable, and they do take care of those who are in need, just as I think we, he believes, and I believe we have a moral responsibility for religious and other reasons to do.
But that doing it through the state is, of course, not charitable, but at the opposite of charity, it's the state of that cold, cruel monster, as Nietzsche said, and all the welfare programs are actually cold and cruel.
They're not compassionate, they're not warm, they're not, they don't actually help people, they destroy people's lives.
And so, but Ron Paul takes the correct positions from an ideological standpoint, from an economic and a political standpoint, but personally, he's the kind of warm person we'd love to have as a doctor or as a neighbor, as a community leader.
So I think that, again, communicates itself to people.
You can actually see his character, see the kind of man he is when you talk to him or when you hear him on television.
It's why he stands out from the other, so no matter what the official polls say, and I think there are technical reasons, even if we don't think there's any cheating going on, there are technical reasons why the official polls are not yet showing the kind of support he has, but he has far vaster support than the official poll show.
And, you know, it's a revolution, and as the wonderful sign says, again, spontaneously produced, that emphasizes the word love within the word revolution, well, that's what Ron Paul is about.
Yeah, it really makes me wonder, too, whether, and I know this is, well, I guess I don't know, but I assume that this is just kind of fantasy world stuff, but so Giuliani and Romney have a lot of Lockheed money, but nobody loves them.
Seems like, you know, if we have the slightest bit left of our forms of our constitutional government here, if the people who support Ron Paul love him that much, shouldn't it be within the realm of possibility that he could get the nomination to be the Republican candidate next year, Lew?
Well, you know, just to back up just a second, at the Alabama straw poll, where, of course Ron won overwhelmingly over the weekend with 81% of the vote, the Romney forces had two paid staffers there, and I'm sure these guys are not exactly getting the minimum wage, very well dressed and looking the part of an important paid campaign guy, Romney got 14 votes.
Ron had no paid people there, these were all volunteers, and of course he won, and it's because people do love him.
People will do extraordinary things, dedicate their lives to Ron and the kinds of ideas he espouses because they believe in the ideas and because they also think this is the moment because of the man they've got.
Now, when I say anything is possible, I think anything is possible.
We're going to have the entire official media, of course the state itself, the whole establishment against him, and as he does better and better, they're going to focus more and more hate on him, smears and so forth.
But here's one possibility, an actual brokered convention, that is, we haven't seen this since the 1920s, a convention where the nomination was actually decided at the convention, it's possible that no one will get a majority, this is one possibility, no one will get a majority of delegates before the convention assembles.
So in that kind of an atmosphere, anything is possible.
There are those who want Dr. Paul to run as an independent, maybe with other parties' nominations, if he's denied the nomination.
We live in a revolutionary moment, I must say when this first happened, when he first decided to run, I thought, this is going to do a lot of good for libertarian ideas, because Ron Paul has always been a teacher, he has the teaching gene, he loves to teach.
When I worked for him in Congress, there's a group called the Meetup Foundation, excuse me, I beg your pardon, that's Meetup as our guy, the Close-Up Foundation, that brings high school kids to Washington.
And so they always try to get, when there are people from a congressman's district, they want him to talk to the kids, and of course all congressmen are glad to talk to the kids from their congressional district.
But Ron Paul was one of the very few who would be glad to talk to any group of kids, wherever they came from in the country, talk to them about libertarian ideas, because he loves to teach, and he's an extraordinary teacher.
So I knew that, just as he has taught libertarian ideas as a congressman in the 14th Congressional District of Texas, and through speeches and otherwise through special orders and C-SPAN and so forth through the Congress, I thought a presidential campaign would teach these ideas.
But I must say, I didn't think that the chance of getting the nomination was more than infinitesimal.
I no longer think that, I think that there is a chance now.
Exactly how things are going to eventuate, I don't know, but I don't think that it's impossible that he's going to be the next president.
But again, I think that there's been a victory already.
There will be more and more of a victory as this goes on and on.
I don't know, is it possible for him to actually win primaries?
Yes, it's possible.
But is it possible that nobody will win a majority and there will be a brokered convention?
Yes.
Is it possible that an independent candidate could actually win a plurality of votes?
That's possible too.
But one thing that we know for sure is that the libertarian movement, the movement for freedom that Ron Paul is building, is a revolutionary movement.
It's going to change this country.
I would argue it's already changed this country.
Whether, you know, he'll be in the White House this next time or not, I certainly am going to do everything possible I can to help bring that about.
And it is a possibility and it depends on what all of us do, what all of us are willing to contribute in every sense in terms of our time and of our resources and in what we're willing to do in terms of talking to people and persuading people, being an example to people.
And so the sky is the limit.
Are you going to be at the barbecue next weekend?
I am going to be at his birthday barbecue.
I've always been at that barbecue.
Gosh, I've been at it since, I guess, 1978.
So that's a lot.
Pretty consistent record to show up.
And I think there are going to be thousands of people at it.
I hear there are groups coming from New Hampshire and from Iowa and from Minnesota, from California, from Virginia, I mean from their people coming from all over the country as well as from his own congressional district.
So I think we're going to have a very good time.
Well, I had the pleasure of meeting you at the Ron Paul Barbecue a couple of years back.
No, I remember you helped me.
You helped me give my talk, as a matter of fact.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, hopefully we'll be able to meet and talk a little bit next weekend there as well.
Scott, I look forward to seeing you and people should go on the, and again I'm speaking only to an individual here, people should go on the Ron Paul website.
Can I say this?
Yeah, yeah, go right ahead.
Go to the 2008.com website and look under events and click on the Ron Paul Barbecue in Texas City coming up this Sunday and everybody is welcome.
It's going to be a great time and hope to see a lot of Scott Horton listeners there.
All right, everybody.
Lew Ellen Rockwell, he is the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He's the author of Speaking of Liberty.
He runs LewRockwell.com, L-E-W Rockwell.com, which is the best libertarian and most trafficked libertarian website on all of the internets.
And I thank you very much for your time today, Lew.
Scott, thank you.