05/07/09 – Lew Rockwell – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Next guest is Lew Rockwell, and he is the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Austrian Economics at Mises.org.
And he runs the website LewRockwell.com, which has my favorite blog in the whole world, if it can be judged by how many times I hit refresh on the thing.
And also has a great radio show of his own at LewRockwell.com slash podcast.
Welcome to the show, Lew.
Scott, great to be with you, as always.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'm sure there will be some people in the audience who heartily would disagree with this statement.
But I try not to do too much libertarian evangelism for its own sake.
I try to just focus on the crimes of the empire and, you know, why liberty would work.
Kind of, you know, try to lead by example and show libertarians are the best on these issues.
That's really what's important.
But on the personal level, my friends mostly are liberals.
And I lose so many arguments just because I might as well be arguing with a 9-11 truther or a warmonger who believes that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are in Syria.
Or someone who thinks that they need to force Jesus to come back and have Armageddon.
Or, you know, the John Hagee church riots or something.
It's almost impossible to break through the myths of people's misunderstanding about what libertarianism really is.
So I figured why not bring on Lew Rockwell to explain what libertarianism really is.
And particularly in, hopefully, the way I can set up the questions in contradiction to what people mistakenly believe that we're about.
And then whether they want to reject what we're really about or not, that's a separate question, too.
You mean you're not going to tell them we're just a bunch of greedy money grubbers?
Well, you know, that's right to the heart of it, isn't it?
I learned as a little kid libertarianism means rich white man's anarchy.
Oh, yeah, you're free to work for some rich white guy on his property, but you don't get to own any.
And that libertarians basically are the intellectual apologists for the criminal corporate state that we live in.
Well, you know, this is, of course, an issue that is so important right now because we're living in a period of vast state expansion, of a movement towards open socialism and maybe worse.
Not that Bush wasn't horrible, but Obama's building on what Bush did in terms of the police state, the warfare state, the welfare state, and the regulatory state, and he's making things worse.
So the fact that some people think that, gee, the problem really is unrestrained capitalism.
It's a serious problem, but it seems to me one only has to think about it and think about the size of the U.S. government, which is the biggest, richest, most powerful government in the history of the world by many magnitudes, full of tens of thousands of regulators, hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to business.
The idea that somehow this is a laissez-faire operation and that's the trouble and we need to put the people in Washington even more in charge of our lives seems to me just idiotic because, of course, we have a situation where we are actually being impoverished.
We're actually already, of course, because of the vast welfare state, the Social Security system, all the income taxes, and all the other things that Washington does to us, we are a far poorer people today than we would be otherwise, far poorer.
There's no telling how wealthy a society at all levels this would be if we hadn't had this continuous ripoff going on for so many decades.
But now, because they're stepping it up, they really are facing us with a terrible, terrible future.
I have not mentioned the key institution of the regime that, again, nobody wants to talk about.
Some people think it's even politically incorrect to talk about it, and that's the central bank, the Federal Reserve.
It is the Federal Reserve that, for example, just brought on this recent artificial boom and now this ultra-real bust that's affecting everybody, people losing their jobs, businesses going broke.
I hope the liberals aren't happy about that.
And all the other situations we're seeing with, again, massive inflation ahead of us because we have an institution where Mr. Bernanke and company can just create trillions of dollars in new money out of thin air just for the push of a computer button, and people think this is a good thing, it's a wonderful thing.
So far, what this has done is it's definitely jazzed up the stock market.
It's increased the stock market, only took a few trillion dollars to do that.
But the rest of the economy is still headed south.
People are losing their jobs.
People have lost their savings.
This is not because of unrestrained capitalism, but it's rather because of the great anti-capitalist institution in America, the Federal Reserve, which, again, prints all this money.
It has a bunch of very bad effects.
One of the effects is, besides increasing prices, besides, by the way, a redistribution of wealth away from the poorest and most vulnerable people in society towards the government and its contractors, military-industrial complex and all the other big banks, all the other institutions that are most closely associated with the government.
And, again, it's very open recently that people are being ripped off for the benefit of the big banks.
How come nobody thinks there's something funny about that?
How come all the liberals who think there's something funny about what they would refer to as, as you say, the criminal corporate state, think there's nothing wrong with this?
There's a vast transfer of wealth from everybody else to the big banks, and yet they accept it.
Well, I think they accept it as a necessary evil because of systemic risk.
If we let all these, you know, Chase and JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup and AIG fail, then it'll just bring everything down.
Even real, productive, good businesses will be brought down by a systemic crisis.
And I want to add right in here somewhere the concept of the government is we, and the corporations are they.
And so there's this we-the-people aspect that the government is our tool, the belief is, I think, that we can use to limit the terrible power of these companies.
And without that, they would have total reign.
The whole world would belong to Citigroup, and we'd all be total slaves.
What Batman movie was it where the bad guy had the television set streaming propaganda directly into your brain?
Batman 3.
Anyway, when I saw that movie, I thought, gee, that's just like the U.S.
So what you're telling me is that these liberals have entirely bought the government propaganda line.
They might as well just have it being beamed directly into their head from their television set.
Well, why is that wrong, though, that it says we-the-people, we get to vote, every man has one vote equal, we get to pick our representatives, they make laws which are binding, and they're supposed to enforce.
I mean, and if they fail to enforce fraud laws, doesn't that just mean that the laws should be enforced better?
Well, you know, I think this brings us to maybe the core libertarian principle, which is the government is not above the moral law.
You know, if we think of what government is at its most basic, I mean, it's a bunch of guys with guns ordering you to do stuff.
I mean, that's one basic way to look at government.
But the other way to look at government is it's the one institution in society that's above the law.
In fact, a lot of people go into the government, whether it's as policemen or soldiers or bureaucrats or CIA operatives, because they get to be above the law, because the law does not apply to them.
So you have this institution in society that's above the law that gets to determine what the law is and gets to determine how much of your income they take for their activities.
And this is supposed to be, you know, democracy.
This is the wonderful institution that's going to protect us.
We only need to look at what's happened over American history, and, of course, we can look at any other country.
But this institution of the state has fattened itself on the American people, and the people of the world has fattened itself on most people.
It's a blood-sucking organism.
I mean, it might as well be a vampire.
So at the same time, of course, it's telling us, hey, I'm a good guy.
I'm protecting you from this group whose blood I'm sucking, and I'm doing it by sucking your blood, too.
And, yes, so people do believe in this.
They are taught from their earliest days in the government schools.
And, by the way, this is why there are government schools, not to get rid of illiteracy, not to bring the benefits of education to people, but so that you will believe the propaganda, so that you'll be a good little taxpayer, that you'll be a good little soldier, that you'll do whatever the government tells you to do.
That's the purpose of the government school, so people get fooled by this.
Then you have the media, the mainstream media, which is connected to the government at the hip and is viewing government propaganda 24-7, whether it's the cable companies.
We get the Democratic version on MSNBC.
We get the Republican version on Fox.
But it's all basically the same thing.
Obey the government.
Do what the government says.
Believe the government.
Oh, by the way, turn over to them your children, your income, your future, and they'll take good care of you.
But, again, the government is not us, and you're exactly right.
This is a key problem.
People think of the government as we.
Gee, should we murder people in Afghanistan?
Should we murder people in Iran?
Should we go to the moon?
Should we send Bush to Mars?
Whatever might be the thing that's being discussed.
It's we.
We're not we.
The government is separate from us.
It's a separate entity.
It's a parasitical organism that lives off of us.
And it created the fractional reserve banks.
The Federal Reserve enabled.
There shouldn't be banks the size of Citibank or Bank of America.
At least they shouldn't exist in their current form.
I'm not smart enough to know exactly how banks would operate an entirely free market with no fraud involved, without fractional reserves, without the Federal Reserve to back them up no matter what they do, no matter what crazy thing they do.
If they do a bunch of crazy things as they did during the boom, they get to keep the profit.
If they do crazy things that lead to them not doing so well, we get to pay the price.
So, yeah, liberals think this is a wonderful thing.
Let's keep backing these people because, oh, no, there's a boogeyman that's going to get us if we don't give them all our money.
Well, this is just a lie.
I mean, it's no different from the WMDs in Iraq.
In fact, it's my rule of thumb in life.
Believe the opposite of everything the government tells you.
Now, you won't be right 100% of the time, but you will be almost always right.
When Obama tells you something, believe the opposite.
When Bush tells you something, believe the opposite.
And you'll begin to see through the fog that's created by government.
Again, read some economics.
They don't want you to know real economics because if you know some real economics, then you can see that the government is pretty much a trick operation.
And I want to mention what I think is the best book to start.
If you want to learn about economics, if you want to learn what the government has done to us in this horrific crisis that we're in, how it came about, how we can prevent such a thing from happening again, read Tom Woods' book Meltdown.
This is a great introduction to real economics.
There's all kinds of other things to read in the future after you read this book.
Read that book, understand why central banking is a moral and economic evil, why it's connected to world wars and all the other atrocities of government in the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century that could not have taken place, at least in the scope that they did, without the central banking and especially without the Federal Reserve.
So you have to begin to open your own eyes.
You have to educate yourself.
You have to think, gee, maybe these people who are ripping me off don't have my best interest at heart.
I know that's a shocking notion, but that's the beginning of wisdom.
Well, you know, first of all, I have to second your endorsement there of Tom Woods' book Meltdown.
It is just absolutely great.
Every single thing I would have been able to possibly think of to try to raise as an objection, he brings it up himself and not as a straw man either, and he counters it well, and it's just excellent, Thomas Woods' Meltdown.
But now here's the thing, and I'm sure that you would argue that the worst lawlessness of private corporations is due to their political influence.
The state, of course, as you say, above the law, gets to decide which private entities are above the law, like the telecoms who cooperate with them on spying on us or something like that.
But I'm sure you would also agree that there are some pretty amoral businessmen out there or immoral businessmen who just as soon violate people.
And, you know, I got a tweet earlier, and I went and read this pretty substantive article I'd recommend at BuzzFlash.
And, of course, they're pretty far leftist, but it's about the Bayer Company and how they have a factory, some kind of chemical storage facility of some description, actually a pretty shoddy description, in West Virginia.
And they're storing this chemical, which is famous for blowing up in India and killing thousands of people.
It's extremely volatile, and they're keeping massive storage bins full of this.
And it's extremely toxic, even if it doesn't explode.
If it leaks out, it's, you know, this terrible chemical that basically they've done a balance sheet equation.
The lives of the people of this county in West Virginia versus, you know, whatever money they'd lose by phasing out this chemical and doing something different.
And, of course, they're aided and abetted by the state, which continues to ignore what they're doing.
But these men basically don't care.
If they poison the people of West Virginia to death, Luke, who's to stop them from doing stuff like that if not the government?
Scott, this plant isn't uphill from Washington, D.C., is it?
Oh, yeah, well, I mean, that would be a silver.
Oh, is it uphill from Washington, D.C.?
No, no, that would be terrible.
Yeah, I'm sure it is.
Yeah, it's a downwind from that.
I just wonder.
I must say I don't know anything about this plant.
But, you know, men are not angels.
Women are not angels either.
So, yeah, I mean, of course you have to worry about crooks.
There are crooks.
Not all crooks are in the government.
The vast majority of crooks are in the government.
But there are private crooks, private criminals of all sorts.
So then, you know, you have to have private law enforcement.
I think you have to have institutions.
You have to have courts and police and so forth.
Yes, of course.
Whether they ought to be part of a government machine, I think that's another question.
But, you know, of course that's right.
There are bad people.
On the other hand, let's take this company.
Let's assume that the buzz flash story is entirely true.
And then let's look at what the federal government does every year.
They killed a million people in Iraq.
They killed a million people in Iraq.
So, yeah, so buzz flashing is concentrating on this company.
The other thing to think about, if indeed this story is true, private property rights have been distorted by the government.
In the 19th century, when you started to have massive industrial pollution and people wanted to do something about it, the government through the courts said, no, you can't do anything about it.
There was a famous case where a train was going by and the sparks came out of the locomotive, as they did in those days, and burned down a farmer's fields in his home.
So he tried to sue.
He wasn't able to sue because the government said, gosh, it's far more important that we have industrialization and that your property rights be protected.
And the same is true with pollution, air pollution, water pollution, and that sort of thing.
It's all been nationalized by the government.
And I know, again, this is a shocking statement, but you know the average guy has zippo influence with the government.
On the other hand, big corporations have a lot of influence with the government.
They're paying off people, among other questions.
So we're never going to have utopia.
We're never going to have a society of angels.
But if we want to have more justice, if we want to have more prosperity, if we want fewer rip-offs and we want criminals allowed to run free, fewer and murder people, whether they're in government uniforms, in the standing army, or whether they're in the CIA and they're wearing civilian clothes, we want less of that.
We have to think about pruning the government.
We think about not allowing the government to just do whatever it wants, whether it's allowing a company to pollute in West Virginia or whether it's dropping bombs on people in Pakistan or in Afghanistan.
Oh, gosh, we're so sorry.
We killed 100 people the other day.
But what do they matter?
They're just gooks.
And, you know, we're all gooks to the government.
We're just cash cows.
They don't actually care about us.
I want to mention, Scott, a terrible fact about myself that I think you know.
I don't know if everybody knows this.
I used to work for the government, and I know that's a terrible thing to admit.
I worked for Ron Paul, so I would say that's the best part of the government.
But if you work in the government, you realize that everybody in the government has total contempt for the American people.
I don't care whether they're Democrats or Republicans.
They have total contempt.
We're just tools to be used for them to their ends.
And the idea that this bunch of criminals, this bunch in government, can be put in charge.
You know what?
Because of the government, if indeed this plant is polluting in West Virginia, that, too, allows the plant to pollute.
The government allows it.
If the government didn't allow it, it couldn't happen because private people would take action against it.
So because the government, for example, has nationalized all the water, all the running water, all the underground water, so they can allow a company to pollute.
So, again, look at antecedents.
Look at how this situation developed.
There could be any perfection, and certainly not any perfection from the government.
We just have to look at Washington, D.C., which is what they run.
They own and run Washington, D.C.
That's what they have at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
They're single-payer medical care in the Army and so forth.
So I think just have a clear eye.
Try to look at things from a rational standpoint.
Don't buy the propaganda.
They wouldn't buy the propaganda from a company.
They ought not to buy the propaganda that comes from Janet Napolitano or Barack Obama or Rahm Emanuel or Joe Biden or Harry Reid or who are the Republican midgets up there.
Don't believe any of these people.
Well, I'm so glad that you keep bringing up war.
And, you know, obviously Murray Rothbard put war and peace at the center of his concept of libertarianism and at the forefront of order of importance of issues to be dealt with.
And I'm so glad, too, that you bring up the racism because I think that's so important.
And I'm not sure how it works if people just think it's just, you know, distance plus salt water between you and someone else kind of deprives them of their humanity, if it's just a different language or what.
But I think you're so right that, for example, people in Somalia, they are just gooks, which means they're not human beings.
We don't have to respect their inalienable natural rights that we all claim for ourselves.
And it's perfectly okay to bomb them.
And if we accidentally kill a bunch of women and children, well, that's just life.
And it seems like in America, and, you know, I'm a comfortable white kid from a middle-class family, so I guess I can say so and not really know what I'm talking about.
But it seems like a great progress has been made on racial issues in American history that has some pretty horrible history behind it, obviously.
And yet somehow foreigners still can be a haji or a gook or a slope or a Jap or even a Hun.
If they're a German, they're wild Huns from the East.
And we can deny them their humanity and kill as many of them as we want.
And so how is it that, you know, you're always right on that question?
I mean, is it that's what libertarianism is about?
It's basically that fundamental premise of the individual, no matter who you are or where you are.
Well, you know, if I can give another definition of libertarianism, it's that you're never allowed to aggress against the innocent.
And, of course, when I say that, people listening to us, liberals or conservatives or whatever, if there are such, are going to say, well, that's right.
Of course we don't want to aggress against the innocent.
But then, of course, they start to explain, well, that means you can't tax people.
You can't just grab their income because you want it.
That's theft, whether it's a guy in a tax office in Washington, D.C., or whether it's a mugger on the street.
It's morally exactly the same thing.
You certainly can't aggress against people in foreign countries either.
You may not aggress against the innocent.
This is, again, another way to look at what libertarianism is.
And I must say it's disheartening how easily the American people, and maybe this is all people, but I'm most familiar, of course, with our own country, how easily people fall for this propaganda.
So if the government is demonizing Muslims or if they're demonizing the Japanese or whatever, then people think, yeah, it's okay to just kill them en masse, and they deserve to be killed and they can be killed just because they're that particular ethnic group or that particular religion.
Sure, that's, you know, I mean, how many Americans even today, except all the war crimes committed by the U.S. in World War II or the war crimes committed in the Vietnam War, the war in Vietnam is what it actually was, or the war crimes committed against the Cambodians leading directly to Pol Pot, who was, by the way, a U.S. ally within the region of Southeast Asia and protected by the U.S. within the U.N. right up until the Reagan administration.
So nobody cares.
Somebody killed a few million people.
He's serving U.S. foreign policy goals of an empire to rule the world, to benefit the U.S. government and, of course, the interest groups, the corporate interest groups and others that are affiliated with it.
It really is a rotten and an evil system, and people ought to be prepared to take a radical look at it and hear about their fellow human beings, as they oftentimes claim to.
Take a look at what the U.S. government has done to the human race.
Take a look about whether the U.S. government is actually, rather than the protector of the human race, as if to hold itself out to be in the manner of the Roman emperors, whether it's actually, like the Roman emperors, an enemy of the human race, and whether we need to think about different structures.
It's not immediately obvious to any of us what those structures might be, but don't we need to take a radical approach, be ready to jettison what's evil and think about what's good?
And, again, I think it is not right to aggress against the innocent.
You may not like your next-door neighbor.
Maybe they really bother you.
That does not mean you have the right to go hit them on the head.
It does not mean you have the right to go hit people on the head in another country.
But, of course, that's what the government is.
It's the entity that claims the right to hit anybody on the head, kill them, put them in a mass grave, do anything to them.
If the U.S. government or any other government thinks this is what's appropriate for itself, that it's all right to kill, the government claims the right to kill you if you sufficiently resist paying your parking ticket.
So this entity that is steeped in blood, whose whole ethos is around, look at anything you have to sign from the government.
By the way, if you are lying to us in this, we can put you in jail.
This entity of jails and concentration camps and mass murder and bombing and shooting, this entity, that's what's at the heart of the state.
Really, we want that bunch having more control over society, over human life.
I must say I find it difficult to understand how people can want that, but you're exactly right.
People we think of as left liberals, as well as the whole left, and indeed the whole right, believe that this is justified.
It's a shameful thing they believe that, and they ought to be willing to reassess their own beliefs, and maybe they will.
Everybody, that's Lou Rockwell.
The websites are lourockwell.com, that's L-E-W, rockwell.com, and mises.org, M-I-S-E-S.org, for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, of which he is the president.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today, Lou.
Scott, thank you.