I'm about to have a nervous breakdown, my head really hurts, if I don't find a way out of here, I'm going to go to jail because I'm crazy and I'm hurt.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, and I'm really a terrible businessman, honestly.
I've tried to run a couple of businesses and I'm no good at it.
But I'm an ideological capitalist and I understand and accept the reality of the way supply and demand works in the universe.
And so one example of that, as I told you earlier in the show, is when you guys all send me, I don't know, a hundred emails saying, when are you going to have Lou Rockwell back on the show?
Then I tell Angela, hey, get me Lou as soon as you can.
And so this is as soon as she could.
Hey Lou, welcome to the show.
Oh, great to be with you, but great to be back with you, I should say.
Yes, indeed.
Welcome back to the show, I guess is what I should have said.
So, geez, there's all kinds of things to talk about, important stuff in the news.
I guess first of all, I ought to give you a decent introduction.
Lou is the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which is located at mises.org online, where you can find, I don't know, a Library of Congress worth of writings by the best libertarian scholars on every economic subject imaginable.
Gotta make that the Library of Anti-Congress.
Yeah, exactly.
Good point.
And then of course there's lourockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market, and of course the blog, which I leave open and refresh all day long because I like it.
So now, oh yeah, and he also wrote Speaking of Liberty and The Left, The Right, and The State.
Those are two great books that I highly recommend.
So, as always, Lou, really we've got to talk about central banking and war.
War and central banking, I'm not sure which one comes first, chickens or eggs, or how exactly this works, but I'm pretty sure that these two very important subjects are related somehow.
Can you help clue me in?
Well, certainly, obviously there have been wars as long as there have been people on the earth, I'm sorry to say.
But the vast wars that we see characterized the 20th century, the world wars, the mountains of corpses, the vast genocides, and all the horrendous things that took place during the 20th century were made possible by central banking.
Because as governments have learned throughout history, there comes a point when they always describe it, the pro-state people describe this as war fatigue.
There came a point when the people said, hey, we've had it.
We don't want to pay for any more of this.
The taxes are too high, too many people killed, and so forth, and we don't want it.
So the governments would actually be forced to pull back.
What central banking enabled governments to do was to forget about war fatigue, because they never have to worry about taxing people.
They never have to worry about borrowing money.
They can just print it.
And so it's, I don't think, any coincidence that the horrendous evils of World War I, certainly one of the great disasters in the history of the human race, and it's part two, World War II, and all the horrible stuff that happened in the 20th century, that century of mass death like no other century, was made possible by the fact that every so-called civilized country had a central bank that could just print up the dough.
So we see, just to take a more recent part of it, when, for example, if Obama wants to increase the U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, he doesn't have to worry about an appropriation from Congress.
He doesn't have to worry about taxing anybody or borrowing the money.
They just print it, and that was true of Bush's wars.
So the question of the cost of wars entirely goes out the window, and this has been true ever since we've had pure fiat money, that is, money that could just, where the money supply was entirely within the control of the central bank and could just be printed up, because in the early days of the 20th century, you still had a partial gold standard.
Franklin Roosevelt and other people, other similar creeps, got rid of the partial gold standard, and then Richard Nixon and all the rest of the criminals and the governments all over the world following Nixon got rid of the very last tiny hindrance to pure money printing back in 1971, and ever since then we've had a world unprecedented in human history where every country was on a fiat money standard.
They can print up whatever they want to do, whatever criminal acts they want to commit, wars, stimulus packages, and everything in between, and they've just been able to do it by their own discretion, and they've set up not only all the deaths and the horrendous property destruction and mutilated bodies and destroyed lives and orphans and widows and so forth, crippled people that have come out from these wars, but they've also set up probably the worst economic disaster in the history of the world, something that we're now living through, we've only, I'm afraid to say, seen the beginnings of, and we can trace it right back to, well, first of all, the state itself, which is always the source of evil on earth, but central banking really took the state and made it, took it to a whole new level of disaster, and this 21st century, we've got more and more wars, and although, thank goodness, no more world wars yet, although they'd like to stir that up in the Middle East, we have this worldwide depression that I'm afraid is going to get worse and worse, you know, we can talk about plummeting housing prices, and despite all the vast subsidies to try to raise housing prices and so forth, everything they've done had the exact opposite effect of what they claimed it was going to, made economic conditions far worse, we're all getting poorer, students getting out of college have got no jobs, a lot of working people have no jobs, and so they're, of course, increasing taxes, they're going to take even more money out of working people in order for all the civil servants to get big pensions and so forth, there's a real social unrest coming, there may even be food shortages in many, many countries of the world, so we, all the terrible things that are now happening, and are going to be happening in economics and in mass wars, we can trace right back to that institution that Ben Bernanke is head of on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., the Federal Reserve.
All right, now, I'm glad that you did bring up housing and the domestic economic crisis here, I mean, you know me, Lou, as an economist, I'm a great anti-war guy, and as a wise man once said about somebody else, I think, and so, it's just my ideological bent, but here's my perception, it seems to me that really the main reason, other than just, you know, ignorance and greed and the kind of things that rule Republicans' minds anyway, but the real main reason that we had this giant housing bubble through the Bush administration was it was all about the war, it was all about the fact that it was time for, what do they call it, a correction, right?
We needed a real recession to get prices back to, or somewhere approximating reality right around when Bush first came into office, and then when September 11th happened, it's right in downtown Manhattan where all these financial firms are and everything else, and so, you know, they'd already started this for Y2K and whatever, but especially after September 11th, they really cranked the interest rates all the way down and tried to force as much money into circulation as they could because the politicians needed to launch these wars, and they couldn't launch them.
I mean, they were talking about 60 countries have Al-Qaeda and on our hit list forever and all these things.
They couldn't do that in the middle of a recession.
They had to avoid the double dip by creating this giant bubble that the most important reason for it was so that they could wage their wars, and that's how the market got so distorted throughout the entire 20 aughts there.
Well, it's true, and you're right that right after 9-11, that's when they really turned the monetary spigots on, and I don't want to be technical, but here's what the Federal Reserve does when they turn on the monetary spigots.
Of course, they don't actually print up most of the money.
It's done electronically, but when they increase the money supply, Ben Bernanke recently doubled the money supply, but it was vastly increased under Alan Greenspan, and what happens is it lowers the interest rate below the market level, and of course we see it now down near zero, so that has many bad effects like it discourages savings and investment.
It punishes the retired people who have saved all their lives and then want to live off their savings.
Many, many bad things are wrong with it, but the key thing that's wrong with it is it leads business people to make investments that at those interest rates seem like a great deal.
So this, whether it's in terms of building new subdivisions or commercial property in the downtowns of America, many, many other different examples of this sort of thing, but they turn out to have been fooled, and these turn out to be money sinks, not money production, not economic production, but economic disaster.
All right, now hold it right there, Lou.
We're going to come back after this break and talk a little bit more about Austrian business cycle theory and war.
Lou Rockwell, right after this, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Lou Rockwell.
He's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and runs lourockwell.com.
That's L-E-W-rockwell.com, and we're, I'm sure Murray Rothbard must have written about this a hundred times or something, but I'm calling it the Scott Horton colliery to the Ludwig von Mises Austrian theory of the business cycle, which is that the whole thing begins when they want to mass murder a bunch of people.
Then the inflation kicks in.
It becomes a giant bubble of malinvestment and misappropriated funds, as Lou was explaining before the break, things that seem like a good deal to an entrepreneur turn out not to be because those interest rate signals are false.
And then what happens, Lou?
Well, then it turns out that when the interest rates eventually have to go back up, then there's not enough savings in the economy to actually finish all these projects, and things have to go bankrupt.
So that's what we're...
However, the government, in true Keynesian fashion, and of course our government is entirely in the thrall of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the terrible ideas of John Maynard Keynes.
They think that all they have to do is just spend more, go into debt more, and they can somehow overcome economic law, but it's not actually possible.
And it's a great thing that a lot of individual Americans are, for example, paying no attention to the official advice to spend, spend, spend, borrow every dime, spend every dime.
I mean, we actually know in our own private lives this is not the path to prosperity, to borrow every dime you can and just go out and blow it on whatever appeals to you at the moment.
This is not the way you improve your own economic well-being, and it certainly is not the way society improves it either.
But the government and the Federal Reserve are able to make society as a whole poorer by making all kinds of terrible, crazy things happen, like the business cycle, which is not a normal part of capitalism, but is generated by the central bank and operating through the commercial banks, because we live in probably, is there such a word as bankocracy?
Anyway, certainly the banks are the most important institution in society as far as the governance through the state and all the things the Fed is doing, all the things that, whether it's Bush or Obama, TARP bailouts and stimulus plans and all this, are all hooked in to try to keep the banks living it up as they do indeed live it up.
But the banks are all inherently bankrupt because of fractional reserves.
Many different things are wrong with banks, and I guess we're coming to the end of this whole system that started full-blown back when Richard Nixon so-called closed the gold window and ended any connection between the dollar and gold and just let the Fed print whatever it wanted.
It took some time before they really got going, but ever since, as you mentioned, ever since 9-11-01, the printing presses have been running so that the steam is coming off of them.
And they're going to bring down the whole Western world now.
That doesn't mean anything permanent, as long as we've got human brains and human hands, and as long as people can save and invest and work hard, we can come back from this.
But the government wants to fasten Keynesianism around our necks, and there are also too many people in the government, and certainly in the media, in the academic world, who see war as an economic benefit.
I mean, you still hear various boobs saying that World War II brought us out of the Great Depression, as if property destruction and mass death was an economic benefit.
Of course, it's an economic benefit to the so-called merchants of death.
I mean, the military-industrial complex, they're doing fine, but the society as a whole, it's very, very damaging.
I always remember what Lou Lerman, who at one time was a libertarian and ran for governor of New York, once said, if we actually believe that war is a good thing for the economy, but we want to be humanitarian, we don't want to kill anybody, he said what we ought to do, for example, is have Japan and the U.S. build the two most modern fleets we could even think of, equipped with every kind of modern radar, every kind of modern weapon, all the most advanced stuff, build these huge fleets, meet out in the middle of the Pacific, take all the sailors off, and sink the ships.
So, you know, you only have to think for a second, this is not the path to economic prosperity, this is destruction, it's destructivism.
Well, and you can see, too, that with the whole public choice theory type thing, like Robert Higgs was pointing out on the show last week, that as the society is more and more impoverished by the wars, then businessmen have fewer and fewer opportunities to make their money, so they turn more and more to the state and to corrupt crony capitalism and to Pentagon contracts, and so if you're into mining or whatever, well, geez, maybe the best opportunity I have in this society now is to go ahead and steal minerals from Afghanistan, so maybe I need the Marines to help me secure my resources over there.
And we just get poorer and poorer as the economics of the situation are all, it's like an equation for self-destruction, basically, for bankruptcy.
Well, it's true, and we're seeing, as Professor Higgs has pointed out, we're seeing right now the same sort of regime uncertainty that took place in the 30s when businessmen didn't want to invest.
They didn't trust what the government in Washington would do.
They didn't trust that the government wouldn't just seize all their property.
Right, but they can trust the generals if they can make friends with a general and get a good contract.
Now, there's a relationship worth having.
Well, it's like Boeing and Martin Marietta and Lockheed and all these various companies that, yeah, they all do very well off murdering people.
They're a great bunch.
So if I understand this business cycle thing right then, so they want to launch a war.
They're in the middle of the recession from the last time they did this thing, so they inflate all the currency, and that creates bubbles of basically price inflation in certain markets, like we saw in fuel, in food costs, in housing, et cetera, during the Bush years.
Then comes the big crash.
Then instead of them letting there be the correction, then they stimulate more and they inflate more in order to keep the whole thing going again.
And I guess if I understand most of you Austrian theory guys right, the game is up basically.
We're at the point where it's not going to work anymore, I think as Ron Paul said on the show the other day, because the dollar is going to lose its standing as the reserve currency of the world.
And so what that will mean is we'll have massive price inflation across the board in everything, and our economy will be destroyed, and we'll have to basically start all over again.
Well, Robert Higgs has written about this as well, but it took 17 years to get out of the Great Depression of Hoover and Roosevelt, and it wasn't until after World War II.
And part of the reason that it took so long, in fact the entire reason it took so long, was because the government was doing everything wrong, whether it's running horrible wars or having all kinds of welfare programs, crushing entrepreneurs and all the various things they did.
It just took a very long time to get out of this.
Today we have a government that makes Franklin Roosevelt look like, I don't know, Thomas Jefferson.
I mean we've never had a government anything like the size of the U.S. government or its power in the history of the world.
It's by far the biggest government ever to exist, and therefore it's able to do far more damage.
It has far more resources at its disposal.
It can do more damage to us.
It can do more damage to the world.
And they're in the process of making this second Great Depression last a very, very long time.
A key thing to keep in mind when thinking about this sort of thing is that the damage is done during the boom.
That's sort of counterintuitive, because we think of during the boom, hey, we're all having a great time, it's a party, and wonderful, live it up, and so forth.
But that's when the malinvestments are made.
That's when the investments that should be going into things that are going to produce more prosperity for everyone, the businessmen who are doing it especially, but everybody in society too, when those things are not happening, but money and resources are being put into things that are actually economic disasters.
And it's only in the recession or the depression where the good things happen.
That is, these bad investments are liquidated.
However, the government does everything possible under Keynesian doctrine to prevent the liquidation from taking place, and therefore they keep the depression going.
So, again, we're in a brand-new situation because of the size of the government, the size of the empire.
But my guess is, yes, it's all coming to an end, because they're not going to be able to continue to fund the empire.
They're not going to be able to, because the dollar is going to be in big trouble internationally, exactly as Ron Paul says.
And we're in new waters, I'm sorry to say, and not very happy waters.
All right, well, now, I'm going to ask your forgiveness first, and then I'm going to talk like a commie for a minute here.
There's something, actually, that sort of crystallized in my mind a little bit, reading a Gary North article on lewrockwell.com the other day, where he was saying it's just the iron law of oligarchy or the iron law of something or other, where 20% always control 80% of the property and the wealth, and then you have the one-half of the 1% who control most of that, and et cetera like that.
And I was thinking that it's all their fault.
I mean, here's a country of 300 million people, most of whom work for a living and make far less than $100,000 a year, and you have these few people who control billions, who, of course, in the words of Dick Durbin, own the U.S. Senate as their own private property, which, of course, has the power to tax all of us and bail them out endlessly.
And it seems to me that every single billionaire in this society is a communist, is a giant welfare cheating scam artist, and has the ability at least to attempt to try to stop the empire and are failing to do that if they're not the ones promoting and pushing the empire to the nth degree, like even the Walton family.
We all pay for their security on the high seas as they import all their goods from China.
They don't have to pay for their own security.
They're all welfare cheats.
So why shouldn't 80% of us rise up, find these billionaires, and lynch them?
I mean, they're destroying our society, Lou.
Well, I don't think that sort of violence is a good thing.
That's the state's tool, violence, killing, as Misa said, beating, hanging, killing.
That's what the state does.
We should be better than that.
But I would also argue that the rich in a free society, and even in our partially free society today, most of rich people are very much a benefit to society because they make the investments and do the savings, create the jobs, start the businesses that benefit all of us.
But that's just a property rights question.
If you have earned your money through serving the consumers, and I would say take something like Walmart.
Yes, they're in a statist society, so they're driving their trucks over government roads and all these other things.
But still, Walmart has been a huge benefit to society, and the Walton family deserves the billions that they've earned from it.
So I think that's a very different situation.
But don't the Waltons owe you and me the future where they spend their billions that they use on political influence, which they do, to demand an end to the empire when it's destroying our society for all the rest of us, when we all know that the Waltons have the billions, therefore the power, and we don't.
And they're basically, at the very least, they're silent as this all continues on.
And it's got to be hurting them, too.
They're brand USA.
Well, you know, here's something to consider.
If you're in business, there is a certain amount of political spending you may want to do just as self-protection, not trying to take advantage of your competitors, not trying to tax the people, not trying to get illegitimate privileges and so forth.
I don't recommend this, by the way, but I can sort of understand how some business people who maybe don't have your ideological sophistication think that that's the way to proceed.
But you're right.
Most of the political spending, of course, is predatory, just like the entire political system is predatory.
The entire government is predatory.
And so to the extent that private people participate in that, they shouldn't.
On the other hand, it's a little bit.
Can we use the post office?
I'm certainly not for anybody sending their child to a public school.
I think it's a terrible thing to do to a child.
But can you actually say that somebody is acting immorally in an economic sense by sending their child to a public school because it's, quote-unquote, free?
I mean, I think not.
I mean, I always like Walter Bloch's distinction that if you're involved in promoting these kinds of things, if you are, in any sense, helping bring them about, strengthening them, defending them, even with letters to the editor, let alone anything more than that, then you absolutely should be not getting one dime.
But if you're just a regular guy and you're sort of stuck in the system, it seems to me it's tough to blame them, and I think it's much better to appeal to their better natures.
And it is actually possible to overcome people's economic, narrow, immediate economic self-interest in these terms by appealing to their sense of justice.
And that's a great weapon that libertarians have against the system.
We can appeal to people's sense of right and wrong and teach them about right and wrong.
And, you know, we are building for the distant future, not because we think that we're going to make everything just fine when the Republicans get in in November, you know, that kind of stuff, but because we're building for the future, we care about future generations, we want a better society, a more decent society, a non-killer society, a non-theft society.
So we have the right ideas, we have the persuasive ideas, we have the right economics, we have the right sense of history, we have the right power elite analysis, what you were talking about, about understanding who's doing what to whom through the government.
So we have the tools.
I hate to use that word since that now means, you know, bombs, bombs and torture and so forth.
But we have the tools, and, you know, I think we have to keep our eye on the future.
It's not easy, because we're going to be facing some very tough times.
And that's why, by the way, the first and most important thing to do is take care of yourself and your family.
You know, don't spend unnecessarily.
Don't borrow.
Have a little bit of gold.
Maybe have some food and storage.
I mean, just really prepare for the worst.
We can all hope and certainly pray that the worst doesn't come, and maybe the worst won't come, and maybe there's no chance the worst will come.
But if you're prudent, if you care about, you know, yourself and your family in terms of protecting yourself, then you'll have the energy and the economic wherewithal and the mental ability and so forth to try to help others and to promote these kinds of ideas and to hope for a better future.
Well, you know, I think a lot of what you said there is a real reason why people are so attracted to the message of LewRockwell.com.
And I think that's frankly because most people are under the understanding that libertarianism just kind of means the rich white man's anarchy and, you know, where corporate America can just do whatever they want.
And that, you know, even an ideologue like me or you, that really we're just the cover for evil corporatism and whatever.
And I think it's so important that people hear the way you put, you know, the way you said, for example, you know, an average guy trying to make it in the world.
Of course, he needs government help to go to college.
They're the ones who raise the prices already.
That's the system he lives in.
He's got to work with that.
He's got to drive on a government road and use the post office and whatever.
But for someone with real means to collect government welfare and to thrive off of government contracts and government inflation, et cetera, et cetera, that that is what must be stopped first.
I think that obviously, one, you're right.
And then two, because you're so right about that, that that is the best libertarian message for people to hear, that there's no greater enemy of the parasitical rich than the libertarians.
We're not against wealth legitimately earned at all.
That's our whole philosophy is everybody has the right to keep what they earn.
But it's not OK for someone to spend a couple of million dollars buying a few congressmen and then stealing billions from the rest of us and, you know, sucking us dry.
And, you know, there's another point.
Just as if we have a Jeffersonian understanding of so-called states' rights of competitive sovereignties, we understand that we can restrict the federal government, not because we think there's anything good happening in Sacramento or Montgomery or Boston or the other state capitals, but that Jefferson was right that you can restrict the central government, which is the real enemy, not only of us internally but of the people of the world, by having this divided sovereignty.
So it is a very good thing just to have more and more powerful rich people.
It's why the state, for example, one of the reasons they wanted to enact the income tax and the inheritance tax, because when you have very, very wealthy, powerful private families, they represent competition with the state and they represent separate power centers in society.
So the state wants only a power center for itself and everybody else, as Robert Nesbitt, the great libertarian sociologist said, wants everybody naked before the state.
So they want to get rid of all what he called intermediating institutions, all businesses, charities, towns, states, churches, families.
So it's just the naked individual faced with the state.
So to the extent, and this is certainly shown throughout history, if you can have very powerful private families, and I'm not talking, we hope they might be libertarians, but it sort of doesn't matter.
It's a good thing to have competition to the central government.
It's a good thing to have these very powerful families, and the government knows it doesn't want that competition.
Again, that's very, very important reasons why they enacted the income tax and the inheritance tax.
Not so much for the money, although of course they want every dime they can get, but they want to make it hard for families to establish independent power from the state.
So we want more rich people, we want more well-to-do people, we want fewer poor people, and if we want those kinds of goals, we want more capitalism, we want less government.
I mean, those are the two rules.
We want less government interference in the economy, less of an empire, less of a, you know, but of course, as it is now, I always think that the NUDO scanners at the airport are a perfect symbol for what the government today is.
It's actually able to take naked pictures of your children, and, you know, the thugs from the TSA can be yucking it up at lunch hour, back there in the room looking at pretty women naked and so forth, and nobody seems to care.
How come nobody cares about this?
Well, I think it's up to us as libertarians to alert people to what's going on.
It's too easy to ignore what's happening.
We're living in a very historic, evil historic period of vast state growth, and it's our calling and our job as libertarians to ring the alarm bell.
Yeah, so that was what I wanted to get to, and you brought it up anyway, which is the nobody caring, I guess, is not the whole point, but part of it is what's happened to our culture, and I guess, Sonny, I sound like an old man or something, just because I grew up in the 1980s when the culture was completely different, where it seems to me, and maybe I'm just making this up, and I'm idealizing my childhood or something, Lou, but it seems like in 1982 they had said, we're putting cameras up everywhere, we're taking naked pictures of your daughters at the airport, we're making you line up and look at your socks because we made you take off your shoes and shut up, and don't you crack a joke or we'll ruin your life, and look, we could go on and on, the NSA reading all our emails and tracking all our Google terms, and the torture and everything else.
I want your wisdom about how far low our culture has been brought by this decade of war already, how different, I know I don't mean to sound too much like a commie, but how different as a people we are after all this time already.
Like you just said, we'll sit there and tolerate this at the airport, virtually no one even cares.
Well, you know, I think in one sense that's correct, and certainly I can tell you it would have been even tougher to get away with it in the 60s than it was in the 80s.
So yes, we're seeing again tremendous state growth, we live in a soft fascist state, it's getting harder, however, and so there's just terrible, terrible things going on, most people are ignoring it, but you know what, most people ignore everything anyway all the time.
They're, you know, and you can sort of understand it, I mean they've got enough to do to raise their families, earn a living, mow the lawn, go to church, you know, and deal with their mother-in-law, whatever, they've got many other things on their plates.
Things, significant social change always comes about, either for the good or for the ill, by minorities.
So it only takes a minority, so first of all it should not discourage us that we're a minority, because we're never going to get the quote-unquote people to go along with us.
On the other hand, it is possible to sway the people by means of an activist, well-educated minority, and again that's, I just want to end on sort of an Albert Jay knock note, he was once asked about, you know, sort of how you can save the world, and he said, well, you know, you can't save the world, he said, you know, there's only one person that you actually have control over, and that's yourself.
So you can make yourself a better person, and, you know, from our libertarian standpoint, we do control ourselves.
We can become beacons of liberty if we learn economics, we learn real history, we learn about libertarian political philosophy, all the various things, and there are many other things worth knowing, of course, literature and art, but as libertarians, those key issues of, you know, where the state collides against society, we can know about it, we can be able to explain it to people, then people will come to you for advice, and they'll come to you because they know you know.
So the most important thing is to educate yourself, but even though the state is, you know, growing out of unbelievable, certainly nothing like this ever in American history, not in the New Deal, you probably have to go to the depths of World War I or World War II to see the kind of state growth that we're seeing right now.
But I think there are more and more people who are waking up.
Also, the state is a very stupid institution, and as it becomes bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more bureaucratic.
It can't do anything.
You know, they can't plug the BPOL well, they can't prevent Hurricane Katrina, all the other stuff they, you know, allegedly talk about doing, they can't prevent the Depression from taking place.
They're being shown up as more and more incompetent, more and more rip-off artists, you know, to the extent, for example, that we alert Americans that the average American makes half what the average government employee makes.
Everybody is propagandized, so they go, oh, the poor teachers, the poor postmen, or whatever, you know, oh, they're not earning very much.
Of course, they're all ripping us off, and they are part of the ruling class, albeit at the lower end of the ruling class.
So this sort of libertarian class analysis that I just hinted at, as Mises, Hume, LaBoetie, Rothbard, all the great guys talked about, there are two classes in society.
Not the crazy Marxist class analysis, which was a distortion and a theft of the earlier libertarian class analysis, but there are two classes in society, those who live off the state and those who pay for the state.
Now, democracy sort of smudges that and makes it less clear, but still, there are some people in this society who are vastly state-negative and others who are state-positive, and people who live off the state, other people who pay for the state.
So to the extent we can raise people's consciousnesses about the fact that they're being ripped off, that it's not only all the killing, it's not only the depression and so forth, but the people in the California state government who earn these unbelievable pensions for vast amounts of money for the rest of their lives and can retire at the age of 55 after a non-work life of 20 or 30 years, to the extent we can raise people's anger, just anger, and we can actually have a chance of changing things, I think that, as is always the case in human society, there's a race between power and market.
There's a race between the state and society, and I don't believe they have the future on their side.
I think we have the future on our side, but gosh, only if we really roll up our sleeves and work every bit as hard as we can.
Well, you know, it seems like the biggest part of that class war, because, I mean, it's true that, first of all, there is a difference between people who are struggling to make it in the world and people who have everything at their fingertips and only their biggest problem is which yacht to pick out, even though they may be collecting tax dollars.
Senator John Kerry, for example.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyone in the Senate, for example, I think.
But, you know, the thing is, well, lots of different things.
I guess one thing to say here is, well, it goes back to the idea of the rich white man's anarchy, and at least my belief, Lou, that libertarianism is not.
It's the little guy's anarchy.
It's the right of every single person, even the grandson, the great-grandson of a slave, to own property, to be an entrepreneur, to improve his station in life, to live his life confident that his children are going to live better than him.
That's the anarchy that we seek, right?
And so, you know, it seems like, well, and then I'll say one more thing here.
I had a great segue to tie all those things together, but that part fell apart.
So I want to ask you this, which is that are the Marxists right, though, about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, that imperialism is really the last stage of capitalism, that as long as we have a monopoly state and not the Walter Blockian anarcho-capitalism that we all wish we live in, but as long as there's a state, the richest people are going to buy it up and they're going to have an empire, pretty much, right?
I mean, aren't the commies right about that?
And is the only solution then to have no state at all?
Otherwise, it'll turn into an empire at its first opportunity?
Well, it's really true that the only solution is to have no state at all, because the state, you know, there's a wonderful essay on lourockwell.com by Stephan Kinsella where he asks, what is anarchy?
And he says it's simply, you know, the view that you think it is never morally permissible to use violence or the threat of violence against the innocent.
That's all it means.
So do we want a society in which the least possible violence or threat of violence is used against the innocent, whether by the small amount of private crime or the vast amount of public crime?
Yeah, of course that's what we want.
And it's in everyone's benefit.
It doesn't mean that we're going to have, you know, equality.
It doesn't mean that equality is actually a goal.
Some people are smarter than others.
Some people work harder than others.
But the fact that every person should be able to achieve to their maximum desire and ability, you know, that's a free society.
And we've had various times in American history more like that than we have today, at least for certain segments of the population.
And we want it, of course, for everybody.
So that is the essence of libertarianism.
But there's no question that the state has always had, I wouldn't say it's the last, you know, it's not the, I think Lenin was wrong, it's not the last stage of capitalism because they were pre-capitalistic empires.
Now they couldn't be anything like the size of this current empire and the economic power of it.
But ancient Egypt had an empire.
Babylon had an empire.
Syria had an empire.
Athens had an empire.
You're getting into more market production when you're talking about Athens.
And there was even market production, of course, in Sumerian, Etherian, Babylonian.
But these weren't capitalist systems in the sense that we would describe them today.
So I think just as the state wants to control every aspect of our lives here at home, and that's actually always their first incentive, they always are concerned about controlling and ripping off and preventing from revolting the cash cows in their own little dotted line on the map they call the border.
But yes, they want to get other people too, and it's a great way to get the fool people into supporting the government.
Oh, all those bad guys across the river, they're going to get us if we don't go get them first.
And Mr. Smith here is going to provide us the arrows and the bows for a very cheap price for the government.
So I mean that goes right back to the earliest days.
So yes, empire is simply another aspect of the state.
The state wants to erect an empire against us here.
It always wants to erect an empire to the extent it can get away with it over other people's too.
That's just the state.
So as libertarians, we know the state is an evil institution.
It's totally destructive.
It involves theft on a vast scale through redistribution and taxes and all the killing and very nasty apparatus, the state.
So we have to be dedicated to delegitimizing it, to criticizing it, to doing everything possible to oppose it, and various people can make various choices about how they're going to do that.
But it seems to me the one choice you should not make is not to be an activist against the state.
Indeed.
Well, an obvious place where people can go if they really want to get educated about these things is Mises.org.
I mean, there's no better place to start.
And of course, LewRockwell.com, you'll find the links all over the place.
From there, it's the best-read libertarian website in the world and for very good reason.
So, yeah, I'll just conclude with thanking you for all your work, Lew, and your time on the show today.
Really do appreciate it.
God's great to be with you.
Especially staying with me over time here.
Oh, sure, and let me mention just one thing for the future.
I'm chairman rather than president now.
Oh, you know, I never get that right.
Doug French is president.
Chairman.
I like chairman better.
It sounds private, not public.
Well, that's a point.
But I think actually the government chose it, stole it from the private sector.
President was originally a private title.
Yeah, they always do that, don't they?
They do that with socialism and with liberalism and with everything else, too.
All right, well, that's the way it is.
They're a bunch of thieves.
We're thieves.
Intellectual property theft.
Oh, no, that's a different show.
Okay, thanks, Lew.
Thank you, Scott.
