Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
Introducing our next guest, it's Lou Rockwell, he's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Austrian Economics and proprietor of the number one most read and visited and talked about libertarian website in the entire world, lourockwell.com.
Welcome back to the show Lou.
Scott, great to be with you as always.
Well it's great to have you here and I'm very curious, this is such a momentous period in American history, Lou Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who are you voting for tomorrow?
Well you know it's a very tough choice between Nero and Caligula, and I don't have to really think about it, but needless to say, I'm not voting.
I think I'd have to side with Nero in that one.
I mean a vote, first of all it's a pain in the neck, I mean you have to go down to the government office, the government school or some other kind of horrible run down place and wait in a long line, fill out forms, be interrogated by bureaucrats, and then it makes no difference.
I mean unless the election in your congressional district or your state is decided by one vote, your vote doesn't count.
And as Gordon Tellock, economist from Arizona State, showed, you are far more likely to be killed on the way to the polls than you are to make a difference in the election.
Well now, isn't that the number one argument for tackling here when it comes to this voting thing?
Everyone, right, I think, if you really break it down, ask them to really break it down, would accept what you just said as a fact, that unless it's really within one vote decided that their vote wasn't the one that made the difference, and yet the opposite of that is yeah, but if nobody voted, then where would we be?
We'd have a military dictator or something, right?
Don't we have a military dictator?
I'm not saying we don't.
Voting has given us the biggest, richest, most powerful government in the history of the world, beyond many magnitudes, and as Hans Hoppe has demonstrated, as the franchise increases and more and more people vote, bigger the government gets.
So it's not a coincidence that in a mass democracy, we have this huge government.
So it's not that the government or the bad guys would be somehow strengthened if we didn't vote.
In fact, the bad guys would be dramatically weakened because their power comes from the democratic myth.
I mean, the idea that we are the government, and Hoppe points out, in other kinds of governments, everybody realizes that the governing class is a separate, sometimes they're smart enough to realize a separate parasitical entity, but certainly they don't think of themselves as the government, whether it's a king, whether it's a communist dictatorship, whatever particular form of regime it is, nobody thinks, when they talk about the government, they don't say we.
However, in America, with democracy, you know, we say we, should we invade Iraq, should we have socialized medicine, should we vote, and by we, of course, they mean the government, but we're not the government.
The government in this country, just as much as Louis XIV, is a separate parasitical entity, living off society, hurting, damaging society.
But the way they stay in power in this country, and the reason they have far more power than any dictatorship ever, is because of this democratic myth.
So it's a very, very important thing to the regime that we participate, it's what is almost a religious aura.
I mean, why you're almost a heretic and a traitor, probably should burn to the stake if you don't want to vote.
And yes, we're one of those little horrible stickers on your coat about, I voted.
I was joking with somebody last night, maybe we need to print up some that say, either I didn't vote, or I won't vote, or I never vote, something that would give the, can be, if I were inclined to put a little paper tag on my coat, that's what I'd want mine to say.
I didn't vote is for sale right now at libertystickers.com, along with voting is for suckers, and friends don't let friends vote, and a few more along that line in the anarchism section there.
Scott, I should have known that you would be way ahead of the curve on this.
Yeah, well, I think in bumper sticker slogans, Lou, I plead guilty here.
So what you're telling me is that if they just went ahead and they dealt honestly with us, and they called Bush, Prince Bush the Lesser, and he had just simply obviously inherited this power from the skull and bones, bloodline, or whatever it is, then he never would have had that mandate.
He never would have had that 90% approval rating.
We always would have treated him like the dog that he is, really pretending to be our master.
Well, the late, wonderful, pre-market conservative, Eric Von Canoladine, from whom Hans Hoppe and I and many others learned so much, I mean, he would point out that if, say, Louis XIV, I mentioned Louis XIV before, had decided that he was going to ban wine drinking in France, he would have been out the door, and he'd been lucky to keep his head on his shoulders.
If he'd ordered all the people to tell him every April 15th every dime they had earned, every dime they had, and he decided how much he was going to take, he would have been out the door, too.
It's only democracies that can get away with these unbelievable, unbelievable tyrannies that actually tyrants are not able to get away with.
And it's why in the 20th century, which is the century of democracy, Hitler was elected.
Certainly the communists always had elections and it was all part of their propaganda.
And we think, of course, in our country that's different from the communists, that in a communist country, well, you just maybe have one guy voting, or maybe you have two exactly similar party members running in a phony vote.
But, of course, that's what we've got here, too.
I mean, you've got big government candidate A versus big government candidate B, or you've got Goldman Sachs candidate A versus Goldman Sachs candidate B, or warmonger candidate A, warmonger candidate B. It's not, we don't actually, first of all, the president, although we all get caught up in an election season and the sort of personalization of the state, and the idea that somehow it's going to make a huge difference to our lives, whether it's Obama or McCain, and it can make a difference on the margin, because of the different interest groups and different people coming into power.
But you know what, no matter which one of these guys is elected, the government still wins.
The government is going to get bigger and more powerful, and at our expense, that's, it's not actually a choice.
We actually have no control through electoral politics over what's going to happen to us.
So this is the myth, it's a religious war, it's like the sacrament of the state.
You're supposed to partake, and you're supposed to be a good little citizen, and go along, I guess, in the same sense, maybe you're supposed to agree that Louis XIV had the divine right to rule you, but we think the U.S. government has got the democratic right, even more powerful than the divine right, to rule us, and in fact, of course, in the view of too many Americans, the right to rule the world, too.
That really is the most important aspect here, isn't it?
The benefit of the doubt, the presumed legitimacy that comes with there having been an election between now and the time when this guy did all the evil things he wanted to do.
Well, I mean, does anybody really think that, you know, it made a huge difference that it was Bush's versus Gore, or Bush's versus Kerry?
I'll agree that Bush is stupider, probably, than Gore or Kerry, but the government would have grown massively under them, too.
People say it doesn't matter if you don't vote, nobody pays attention, but you know what?
You were not participating.
You were saying no to the regime.
You were refusing to be part of the gang and be part of the crime.
You're refusing to join the criminal gang, so there's something to be said for that, but they're very, very concerned about turnout.
That's why they're all popping champagne corks, because I think voter turnout is going to be so high this year, and this is the source of the legitimacy.
So if we could ever get more and more people not to vote, it would actually be very, very weakening to the regime and to its sense of legitimacy, and it'd be a great thing.
So I think it's important not to vote, both from your own personal integrity standpoint, but also in the sense of public service.
Very important public service.
Don't vote.
Well, you know, when Bush, I guess it's even debatable whether he actually got elected in 2004, they say, you know, the theft of Ohio and New Mexico and things like that, but regardless, he did get the popular vote, and he had 56 million, I don't know how many it turned out for Kerry, but he had 56 million votes, which was a record number of votes for, I think, anybody in any election ever, anywhere on earth.
He then literally, Lew, went up on a balcony and gave a great speech that started with, we've had our accountability moment, now watch me soar.
Well, I mean, it's true that, you know, that this is what gave him the legitimacy, that he had all these people vote for him, but again, you know, I think it's all a trick.
Elections are crooked.
I don't want to bother anybody's civics class version of how the American government actually operates, but not only Mayor Daley in the old days in Chicago, who was having the dead vote and making up, you know, stuffing ballot boxes, throwing other ballot boxes, burying them in the river or burying them.
This is the norm.
Now they do it electronically.
When Ron Paul was first elected in a special election, he was defeated in the next election, this is in 1976, by exactly this sort of thing.
I mean, you had phony voters with addresses at public libraries and gulf gas stations and even the Astrodome in Houston.
I remember all, of course, this stuff very well.
So there's, the elections are not somehow pure while the rest of the government is crooked.
The elections are crooked.
I assume that they really were 56 million people who voted.
You know, actually, who the heck knows?
I mean, this was not just one party that's a bunch of thieves.
Both parties are a bunch of thieves.
So I guess in general, 56 million people voted, and I guess in general, Bush got more votes than Kerr, or maybe he didn't.
I mean, you can't actually know.
These are the same crooks who will take your money to allegedly help the poor, and they're giving it to wealthy connected businessmen.
These are the same people who will go bananas over alleged WMD in Iraq, and then murder a million people in Iraq, and they lie to us about everything.
In fact, it's my rule of thumb that you should never, ever believe anything the government says.
Now, that won't make you 100 percent right, but it will make you almost 100 percent right.
Once in a while, they seem to tell the truth, maybe by mistake.
So when they tell us, and sing these peons of praise to democracy and elections and voting and all the greatness of quote-unquote public service, i.e. being a professional criminal living off people without their consent, when they tell us all about these things, you know darn well it's all a lie.
It's a trick.
It's crooked.
So I'm sure there are crooked de-bull machines that tend to think both the left and the right are both right, but when they accuse the other side about crooked, you know, and voter suppression, all these kinds of things, and then people voting three times, and it's all true.
Both sides are right about the other side being crooked.
Really, do you want to, you know, it seems to me you have to ask yourself, do I really want to be part of this?
I mean, it's a criminal regime.
It's oppressing us.
It's oppressing people all over the world.
It's responsible for the murder of millions.
It's responsible for the theft of trillions.
It's engaged in its central bank with having brought on probably a worldwide depression.
So this is just, you know, a few of the achievements of this government, and we're supposed to think that by going and getting a little stupid booth in a government school after waiting in a long line and voting for the chicken hawk versus the war criminal, that somehow it's going to make a difference.
What makes the difference is if we refuse to participate.
It makes a difference for us individually, and maybe it'll make a difference societally if there are enough of us who just won't vote.
Just say no to voting.
Well, and of course, they would try to spin it as apathy or, oh, well, the American people must think everything's just fine then if they don't even bother turning out to vote.
But I guess if we could really, you know, have one big year where people just refuse to participate and explain their reasons why so loudly that they couldn't spin it another way, that really could be, I guess that really is the only thing that could really shake the foundations of this state is for the people to openly, loudly, in majorities, withdraw their consent.
I'm in favor of apathy.
I like apathy.
Now, apathy is not as good as what you just described.
That is active refusal of consent, active dissent from the regime and its lies and its killing and its thievery.
However, if you're apathetic, if one just doesn't care about the government, that is a huge improvement over being involved in the government.
So better apathy than involvement in the gang.
But of course, best of all, as you just said, active refusal to be part of the regime, actively saying no to this, as Murray Rothbard said, this gang of thieves writ large ensconced in Washington, D.C.
Just say no to the thieves.
Well, you know, one thing I think this is something I read Jim Bovard talking about on his blog was that he thinks that a lot of the belief that's been placed in Obama is really a reflection of just how disgusted people have become with what the Republicans have done.
Starting wars, open programs of torture, openly warring against the Fourth Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.
People really want something done.
That's probably a lot of the reason that so many newcomers latched on to the Ron Paul movement as well.
That feeling of hope that we are on such the wrong track here, that somebody's got to do something.
We don't want it to get worse before it gets better.
Well, you're right.
Jim is right.
The Republicans.
I hate to admit this.
I was once a Republican in ancient days.
And I hate the Republicans even more than I hate the Democrats, maybe because just because in my in my teenage years, I was a Republican.
So it's you know, they are horrible.
It's absolutely right.
People want to reject this and be rid of Bush and everything about him.
And this is why, of course, they have the two party system.
This is why they have elections.
So that rather than threatening the regime, rather than threatening the parasites, all the people who live off of us without our consent, and rip us off, and live much better than the average American, of course, never forget, the average government employee has a much higher income than the average taxpayer.
So that these people, the way they prevent themselves from being overthrown, when people get as angry as they rightly are against the Bush regime, is you have the phony baloney second choice, well, I'll get rid of the Republicans, we'll bring in the Democrats to fix them up.
But Barack Obama, and I you know, I have to admit, I actually thought he might be less pro war one point than McCain, how stupid I was.
I mean, obviously, Obama is every bit as much of a warmonger.
He just is a more palatable warmonger than McCain, who's just obviously some kind of a crazy general out of an insane asylum.
Whereas Barack Obama seems like a reasonable guy.
He seems like a gentleman, soft spoken, and he seems like a nice guy.
On the other hand, as Justin Raimondo points out in his column today on any war.com, if you look at his foreign policy advisor, if you look at the people who are going to be running the killing machine in the Barack Obama administration, the idea that these people are, you know, less pro war than the than the McKinney acts, just just just a fantasy.
By the way, just for my own trivia purposes, that election that they stole from Ron, was that the primary against Phil Graham for Senate?
No, that was another.
That was another criminal election.
So this was this was the general election.
He was the Republican candidate, the Democrats stole it.
And again, Republicans steal elections, too.
But it was a classic, classic sort of old style Chicago machine kind of theft.
I mean, there were all kinds of of phony votes, thousands and thousands of phony votes.
That was the margin, you know, typical in the in the old days.
I don't know how they do it today with voting with electronic voting machines.
In the old days, they sort of figure out how many votes they needed to steal and then they steal them.
They would create that number of votes.
And it was a wonderful, you know, typical Democratic election.
So in 84, this was 76 and 84.
He ran against Phil Graham for US Senate, ran a wonderful campaign, talked about the warmongering of the Reagan administration, why Graham was a warmonger, Ron Paul very much ahead of his time.
It was interesting that Ronald Reagan, who would always blabber on about the 11th Commandment, how much never speak ill of a fellow Republican.
And it was always important, obviously an idiotic, an idiotic principle.
But this was his stated principle.
He claimed all his life, no divisiveness.
We love all Republicans never intervene in a primary, never criticize a fellow Republican.
Well, some of that went out the window when Ron Paul was running against Phil Graham and Reagan entered into the race, denounced Ron, I'm sorry to say the evil Phil Graham, who went on to fame and ill fortune, our ill fortune, I should add, as senator.
And now, of course, he's the chief economic advisor to McCain, also a guy who was heavily involved in Enron and many other scams, Phil Graham.
He became the senator and went onwards and upwards in the service of the state and the power elite.
All right, well, let me try.
And I admit, I ran out of excuses.
Well, I realized that this was an argument I needed to have.
And so I interviewed Hans Hoppe, and I didn't really stand a chance.
And I guess I haven't had an excuse for having a state since then.
That was what, four or five years ago now.
But let me let me try my best, Lou, to make the minarchist case for you that I used to would have made back before I became an anarchist.
And that is that, well, you know, if we got rid of the regulatory state and if we got rid of the welfare state, if we got rid of the everything state, and we really only had two major functions, national defense, you know, keeping another government from coming and replacing ours and being worse, and criminal justice, the prisons, the court systems, fair trials for people that maybe, possibly, we could actually use the power of the vote and use democracy in order to, you know, control our government in order to provide for a reasonable national defense, not an empire of aggression.
And for, you know, what we like to think of as a pretty fair system of justice in this country in terms of rights of the accused and, and rights of plaintiffs and defendants at civil court and that sort of thing.
Well, if you're asking me, would such a system be fantastically better than the present system?
Sure, it would.
I mean, did they do any extent that we could cut back on the federal government?
It's a blessing to all mankind, let alone if we could say, go back to the original constitution, that would, that would be wonderful.
On the other hand, as Hans would point out, first of all, let's say you're just going to have nationalists forget the so-called criminal justice system for a moment.
Let's just say we're going to have national defense.
Well, given that the government is an entity that has a monopoly of violence and can tell you how much of your income it's going to take for what it wants to do, just the fact that it's in charge of quote-unquote national defense gives it the power to take everything.
I mean, maybe there should be a tank in everybody's garage just in case the riskies, you know, come over the pole.
So, I mean, they can spend an infinite amount, they can spend an almost infinite amount of money on national defense, but it's absolutely true.
If you have a system like the original American system, if you have a restricted franchise, which would actually be the most important thing, the fewer the people voting, the better.
Maybe you would just have a system where only property holders could vote because, of course, voting is in effect seeking to grab somebody else's property from them through the government for yourself.
For most people, it's a fundamentally immoral act.
I don't think if you're a libertarian voting for what they see as, you know, the lesser of two evils or voting for a third-party candidate, that's not an immoral act.
But if somebody's voting to get a war or more welfare or whatever, that's an act of theft, so the vote becomes evil.
But if you only have, say, property holders, as was the case in the original American view or law for a very long time in the Swiss Republic, you know that's better.
But it's a fundamentally unstable system, as Hans points out, again, because just given the nature of monopoly, if you've got a government that's a monopoly and can decide on how much it does and how much to charge for it, they will inevitably charge more and more and do less and less in terms of what they're promising to do for in terms of protecting you.
And, of course, they'll do all the stuff that brings them more power and more glory and more money and nothing that might, you know, actually help you speaking within the paradigm of a government.
But on the other hand, people who believe in returning to the original Constitution are certainly allies, and the fact that we would disagree with them on, you know, the last part of it doesn't mean you can't cooperate in a whole bunch of ways.
But I think it's very, very important, more fundamentally, to let the scales fall from your eyes.
Take off the blinders, see government for what it is, because, I mean, take the red pill.
Once you actually understand things from a libertarian standpoint and you realize, again, as Rothbard said, the government is a gang of thieves writ large, that it's entirely a ripoff operation.
That's all it is.
It's a group of criminals living off the rest of us, while, of course, propagandizing us that they're protecting us, they're educating us, they're saving us from poverty, they're protecting our health, you know, whatever the claims are.
It's just a ripoff operation.
So once you see that, then you're prepared to try to do something about it.
And can you cooperate with people who believe in a minimal government?
Of course.
I mean, they're great, great people.
Although, I must say, from a standpoint of really making progress, I would like, again, Rothbard's point, and this essay is on LewRockwell.com, as are many, many other Murray Rothbard essays.
But the key question is, do you hate the state?
I mean, if you were actually bothered by the U.S. government, if you think it's just, even if you think that it ought to exist in some form, but if you agree today that virtually everything they're doing is evil and you're upset at them, you think it's a criminal enterprise, gone beyond its, say, what you think of as its legitimate constitutional bounds, you know, you're a great guy.
If you actually love the government, like a lot of the self-proclaimed libertarians in D.C., and they're actually very happy with the government, then these people are not only not allies, they're enemies.
Is this the essay where he talks about how he would prefer, or how he does prefer, a radical minarchist to a conservative anarchist?
Yeah, damn right.
Yeah, this is the one, this, that essay actually always reminds me of Jacob Hornberger, who of course is absolutely on fire from the moment he gets out of bed every morning defending liberty and justice from the depredations of the state, and yet absolutely a constitutional kind of guy.
Not an anarchist like us, but boy, he does not pull his punches at all.
Well, no, and I share your admiration for Bumper Hornberger.
He's just magnificent.
So is obviously Ron Paul, many other great people like this.
These are our allies, these are our friends, and they feel the same way about us.
However, people who are offended by anarchism, as there are, you know, beltway libertarian types who actually find it offensive to be an anarchist, you know they're bad people.
Well, and in fact, that essay is, he talks about someone I'm not that familiar with, but it's Milton Friedman's son, David Friedman, who actually was an anarchist.
Didn't he write a book saying the machinery of freedom, something like that, about how here's how an anarcho-capitalist society could work, and yet somehow that wasn't up to Rothbard's standards.
What was going on there?
Well, part of it's economics.
You know, David is a champion of his dad's economics, and that means that he, at least, and I want to mention that I've not read David Friedman in recent years, so I hope I'm not mischaracterizing his current positions, but certainly in the past, even though he proclaimed himself as an anarchist, he liked the Federal Reserve, and he thought that really the Fed was a great operation, and really an example of if you have to have a government, that's, you know, that's the sort of thing to have.
Well, needless to say, Rothbard had a different view about the Federal Reserve, but David Friedman is a brilliant guy, and Machinery of Freedom is a very, very interesting book.
I think it's, you know, I don't agree with much of it, but it's absolutely worth reading.
I think he's a, you know, he's a brilliant and interesting libertarian, so I think he's, I think I would definitely say he's a good guy, David Friedman.
Just, he just needs a little bit of hate.
Well, but, you know, I actually, it's terrible that I'm actually not familiar with his current writings, or, so I could, again, I could be entirely mischaracterizing him.
Well, so it's possible that he wakes up in the morning hating the state like Bumper Hornberger these days.
Yeah, well, he could learn a lot from Bumper Hornberger.
All right, now, one thing that's bothered me, well, always, but especially now, is I really think that there's a demand among the American people for this supply, Lou, and the supply is what the politicians describe as service.
This is the kind of thing where, I don't know if they spike these questions in the audience or what, but you hear it at some of these town hall meetings, what people don't like about Bush is that he didn't ask them to sacrifice enough, and people, I think, really have an innate, almost religious need to serve something larger than themselves, and to many Americans, I guess this sort of goes back to what you're talking about with politics as the civic religion, D.C. has replaced Jesus, basically.
This is the thing that we can all be a part of together, and, in fact, I saw Obama give a speech that, minus this one part, it really sounded great about how it doesn't matter if you're black or white or gay or straight or you live on the East Coast or the West Coast, big city, small town, we're all Americans and all that, only it wasn't a pitch for individualism, it was a pitch for, we all have, this is what he said, we all have work to do, we all have responsibilities, we all have to live up to, we must sacrifice for the good of the whole together.
Well, I mean, I would say, you creepy son of a gun, I mean, what are you doing even talking about these matters?
They're none of your business as a politician, certainly none of your business as the president, you're not the minister-in-chief, you're not a religious figure, shut up!
I mean, how about talking about, you know, if you're running for president, you're making all these promises about the economy or whatever, you have absolutely no business trying to erect yourself as a religious figure and imply that somehow working for the U.S. government is service of others, whereas, of course, it's actually attacking others.
So, of course, there's a wonderful, perhaps implanted in the human heart, also taught by religion, a wonderful feeling that we ought to help others and that we should love our neighbor as ourselves and that we should do what we can to help people in need, but you can only do that either as an individual or through a church or other private group, it can never be through the government, the government only hurts people.
Even its welfare operations are a tax on the people getting the welfare, let alone, of course, on the poor people having to pay the welfare of the taxpayers.
I just find that stuff sickening and rotten and, on the other hand, the point you were making about that there is a demand for what we have to offer, you only have to look at what the Republicans say when they've got their backs against the wall and they're worried about appealing to the American people, they sound like us.
I mean, who would have ever thought that John McCain would be denouncing redistribution, income redistribution?
I mean, now, of course, he's lying, since the government can be seen as nothing but a redistribution operation, that's all it is, taking money from some, keeping, of course, a huge amount for itself, and then paying off whomever among the interest groups getting the money, that's all the government does, is redistribute.
Redistribute from you and me to Lockheed Martin and so forth.
But that McCain would actually use radical libertarian rhetoric and think that it's appealing to people, and you know darn well their own polling shows them that it's appealing to at least the Republican base.
Very encouraging.
And even just to have these things mentioned, I saw Craig Crawford, who's a liberal guy on television, political commentator, was criticizing McCain, and he said, you know, he's calling into, he's calling into question the graduated income tax.
Why?
The graduated income tax, he's implying it's socialistic.
Graduated income tax, he said, is as American as apple pie.
Well, it may be as American as apple pie, but of course it was one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto, and it's indeed an evil thing.
Now, of course, McCain believes in the income tax and the graduate income tax, but it should harden us.
These guys have to use rhetoric of peace, the rhetoric of property, in order to try to fool the American people to continue having power over us.
It should actually give us hope.
And not Obama-style hope, real hope.
It's a real cause for frustration to me, too.
John Cusack made that great movie War, Inc.
My favorite line, War is the improvement of investment climates by other means.
That's Clausewitz for dummies.
And he's got this great bent along the lines of Naomi Klein and the shock doctrine about, well, frankly what, you know, you and I are perfectly happy and willing to call fascism in this country, where the national government uses, in fact, unlimited amounts of violent force in order to enrich the privately connected special interests and that kind of thing.
And yet what ends up happening is, because these fascists adopt our language, so many people, particularly those who already sort of lean left anyway, really believe that the fundamental problem, especially now with the financial crisis, the fundamental problem with the Bush administration was their belief in the dogma of free market capitalism, and their belief in private property rights, and all these libertarian themes that they invoke as they wage their wars of aggression, Lou.
So we really have an uphill battle in trying to get liberals to, you know, to understand, you know, we're the best on the anti-war issue, we're the best on the corporate welfare issue.
Well, I agree, and of course the Obama campaign has pretty much wrecked the left-wing anti-war movement, because they're all, in effect, going to work for Obama, as if he's actually the peace candidate.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that had, you know, an Obama bumper sticker and a peace sign on it.
Well, I'd like to think that that would be, you know, and I'm happy to be proven wrong if he wins, but I don't expect it.
So yeah, it's true, I mean, it's also frustrating they lie, but still it's interesting to see the particular lies they tell.
We know that they tell lies about bad guys under the bed, and bad guys going to bomb us, and bad guys going to make our women more burkas, and all those sorts of lies, but it's always interesting to analyze the propaganda of the state and its friends to understand, you know, how they're able to keep power, maybe what we can do about it.
Yeah, and I'm sorry, because I'm sort of a non-sequitur.
I brought up CUSAC, because I just read a blog entry that he wrote at Huffington Post, where he's really calling the Republicans out, and yet it's kind of muddled and confused, and it's capitalism's fault at the end, and that kind of thing, and what do you think is the best strategy for us?
You know, when I interviewed Sheldon Richman not too long ago, he said he thinks we're almost back to square one now, with this financial crisis, where it's basically might as well be 29, with everybody blaming the excesses of capitalism.
This all just proves the need for an even more massive regulatory state to smooth out the booms and busts.
How do we confront that, Lew?
Well, you know, I have to disagree.
I think we're in a far better position than our forebears were in 1929.
There were relatively few people, there were people, talking about what had happened in 29, why there was a boom and a bust, and what not to do, and why what Hoover and Roosevelt was doing was wrong, but there were relatively few.
There are far more people who understand what's going on today.
There are far more people, despite the lies of the media, who understand this is hardly, the U.S. system is hardly an example of laissez-faire capitalism, that we live in a very regulated fascist economy, and that it's had certain effects.
There are far more people who are suspicious of the Federal Reserve, thanks to Ron Paul and all the work of the great men of the past, Mises and Rothbard and Hazlitt and the rest of them.
We have, in fact, we're in a far, far better position than libertarians were in the 1930s.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of people understand this now, so does that mean that, you know, we can't, we can stop them from doing what they want to do?
You know, that's another question, but we are not back to square one.
We're about square thousand and one.
We're doing far better.
Far more people understand real economics.
Far more people understand libertarianism, and it's a reason, I think, to have hope, not to just think that the whole world is over, the sky is coming down.
We can use a crisis situation, the economic crisis, all the horrible things that the government has been doing to us and the Fed have been doing to us, and what these results, use it to educate people, to anger people, to make sure they're angry at the right institutions, to try to get a real movement for change, and it's an opening.
Any crisis is an opening, because the climate of opinion weakens, the government propaganda weakens.
It's why the government doesn't actually like stuff like this, even though they're very happy to take advantage of it and to expand their power, as Bob Higgs always points out, in a crisis.
Still, they don't like these kinds of crises, because there can be problems for the state.
So I think people are now, their ears open to hearing about a gold standard, to hearing about what's wrong with the central bank.
We saw this in the Ron Paul movement, so I think we're just much, much better off than the poor old right libertarians of so many years ago.
Yeah, well, and really the Ron Paul revolution is a great part of that, isn't it?
Too bad the stock market crash wasn't a year ago.
Well, you know, and also, yeah, everything might have been very different.
I was just thinking back the other day, Ron was just here at the Mises Institute to speak at our Supporters Summit over the weekend, and I was reminiscing with him about the Dearborn Michigan debate, which I think was either March or April 2007, and he was talking the truth that he always does about the Fed, about what was coming ahead, why we were headed into economic troubles, and all the rest of them, McCain, Romney, all the rest of the crew, were of course all saying, look, the economy's great, Bush is great, we're just flowers on petals in our paths strewn ahead, and, you know, anybody who's horrible to say there might be anything wrong, there's clearly nothing wrong, and Chris Ron, as is always the case, has proven right.
They were all proven to be creeps and liars, and you're right, had the economic crisis hit a year earlier, we might be living in a very different country today.
Yep, well, still, I appreciate what you say about where we are far advanced from where we could be, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and of course your personal website, lourockwell.com, been leading the way, and I'm sure will continue to.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Lou.
Scott, thank you.
All right, folks, that's Lou Rockwell, he's the author of Speaking of Liberty, he's the founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the website is lourockwell.com, that's l-e-w-rockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.
