Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Sheldon Richman.
He writes for the Future Freedom Foundation and the Foundation for Economic Education where he's the editor of their magazine, The Freeman.
His blog is freeassociation.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
Hey, thanks for having me back, Scott.
Well, it's great to talk to you again.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
I'm doing really good and for some reason, I'm not real sure.
It seems like Jacob Hornberger always runs everybody's essays a few months after the fact.
So we ran this article on antiwar.com over the weekend, America's Anti-Militarist Tradition.
And based on some of the things you say in the article, it sounds like this thing was written back last fall.
Is that right?
Well, it was originally an op-ed and then, yeah, it was expanded.
It was around the time that General Petraeus was testifying in Congress.
Right.
And now this is around the time that moveon.org put out their thing saying General Petraeus or General Boetraeus, which served as the great distraction.
But the lesson, I think, was that whoever's the top general in Iraq is descended from heaven and is beyond question and could not possibly be dishonest or even mistaken about anything.
And we're all just supposed to shut up and defer to whatever he says.
Is that about right?
Well, that's the attitude.
You saw how the Democrats were, how the Republicans reacted to the Democrats, the conservatives, the conservative talk show hosts.
To even suggest, if you're listening to Limbaugh, one of those guys, or Hannity, to even suggest that Petraeus might be something of a politician was considered almost a sin.
It was a heresy.
It was blasphemy.
Right.
It didn't seem to matter that Petraeus apparently wants to run for president.
Right.
And see, that was the thing, too.
He had even admitted that, right, to some reporters that, well, not this time around.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
In fact, well, I've even seen him mentioned as a possible vice president for a candidate for McCain.
That's not coming from him, his camp, I assume.
But the point is, why should, just because you're wearing stars on your shoulders, and a whole bunch of medals on your chest, why does that mean that we cannot skeptically look at what this person has to say, especially about an ongoing occupation that was the result of an illegal and immoral invasion?
Yeah, especially when his superior officer, Admiral Fallon, who was the head of CENTCOM at the time, had denounced him as an ass-kissing little chicken shit.
Seems like if his superior officer can demean him, I sure as hell can.
I'm a civilian.
Well, that's right.
And people don't seem to realize that.
In fact, I was watching some program last night, it was a discussion of Obama, but whoever this was, some pundit or something, said, look, well, I want to know what my commander-in-chief believes in.
And I shouted out to the TV, whoa, wait a second, even under the Constitution, he ain't our commander-in-chief, he's the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
He's got no command in that sense over you and me as civilians.
So we ought to be able to take all the critical shots at Petraeus and these military guys, especially when it comes to, they're speaking in our name, they're acting in our name, why don't we have a right to critically analyze what they're talking about?
Right.
And particularly when, you know, in this case, you don't have to be any kind of, you know, rocket surgeon to be able to tell that this whole surge thing is basically accomplishing nothing but perhaps creating a little bit of calm whereby the various factions can rearm and prepare for worse bloodshed in the future.
There's, you know, no one outside of the American Enterprise Institute who could tell you that there's any kind of actual success going on here.
Well, if you listen to people like Chris Hedges, who I know you interviewed, he makes it quite clear that we're doing the rearming.
We're arming the various groups and as well as spreading a lot of cash around to buy a little bit of peace, at least to get us to the election, I suppose.
Who knows what's going to happen after that.
Right, yeah, the former Syrian insurgency is now called the Concerned Local Citizens, although Gareth Porter corrected me and said, no, they've dropped that like the long war, and now the Concerned Local Citizens are called the Sons of Iraq.
That is, the former Ba'athists, the guys that have killed right around 4,000 American soldiers this whole time.
Right, well, yeah, that's right.
This is one big charade and, of course, McCain thinks the Iranians are supplying the Sunnis, which is a neat trick, until he got called on it.
So what makes us, why should we assume that they know what they're talking about?
Just because, again, just because you're in high office, or just because you've got those stars on your uniform, it's not a guarantee you know what you're talking about.
And here's the thing, too, is that there's, at least while all of us are considered to be beyond the pale for daring to question these things, and obviously there is a very strong militarist tradition in American history, there's also a very strong anti-militarist tradition in this country that you document very well in this article that is not, cannot all be traced back to, you know, Soviet sympathizers and so forth.
Well, that's exactly right, and that was really the point of the article.
I was drawing on a great book that may still be in print, I'll be sure you can find used copies of it, that is totally overlooked by a great historian by the name of Arthur E. Kirch.
He's not alive any longer, but he, and he's certainly no Soviet sympathizer, and he would be considered sort of an old right type, certainly not a neocon, but a libertarian or conservative in maybe that older sense that actually did mean very limited government, and significantly, which he documents, distrust of the military.
You know, if you're for freedom and decentralization and sort of spontaneous order that the freedom advocates understand as the basis of society, you would be naturally distrustful of the military, which represents the total opposite of all those things.
You know, Thomas Jefferson once said that a large military is completely adverse to the spirit of this country, he seemed to think.
Well, and he wasn't alone among some of those early people, maybe not all of them, there was a feeling, look, the standing army was anathema.
I mean, people didn't like the idea of a standing army.
They thought that the defense should be handled by a citizen militia, which is why there's a reference to militia in the second amendment.
So the idea of a standing army was a foreign idea.
It was identified with the British, and people did not trust it, certainly not during peacetime.
In fact, even in the article, go back to some English history, I guess before their permanent empire and standing army was established, where they actually had had a long tradition of fighting against the idea of a centralized standing military like that.
That's true.
We inherited that idea from them.
Don't forget, a lot of people who helped to settle this, the colonies were Brits themselves, and they saw them, they inherited that attitude that the idea of a standing military, they looked at a domestic standing military the way the Iraqis look at the US government, US military.
It's an occupying force.
They didn't see it as part of them or defending them.
They saw it as an occupying force, and most people don't like the idea of an occupying force in their midst.
That makes them uncomfortable, and they may even take actions to upset that army, which today we call terrorism in the old days, a little longer ago they called it guerrilla warfare.
I'm not sure what they called it way back in the time of the British Empire and the American colonies, but it was the same attitude.
These guys were not of us.
They were a foreign force.
That was the attitude toward a standing army.
It didn't matter that the people who made up the army were not literally foreigners, but they saw this force as something foreign to society.
Right.
Jefferson even once remarked, I think, that the only thing he thought more dangerous than a standing army was a central bank.
Ah, well, Jefferson was wise in many ways.
Well, so, okay, I know what the war party is going to say.
They're going to say, yeah, but that was all during the age of muskets.
Now we have Cobra attack helicopters and thermonuclear weapons.
You can't have the local militia in charge of defense in an age of high technology like this.
Well, I think it calls for, I mean, given the threat that they're describing, which is that they don't talk about terrorism being the bigger threat now, that interstate warfare may be becoming obsolete.
I think the case can be made more than ever that what we need is a decentralized market-based form of defense.
Because, look, the other side, this is brought out very nicely in a book by John Robb called The Brave New War.
Now, he doesn't measure all the conclusions that I would draw, but his point is that for a very little bit of money, these groups, al-Qaeda types, or even groups that are just claiming their offshoots of al-Qaeda, they may not be, but they claim it, can inflict a lot of damage at a very low cost.
The price of technology has come down.
You know, after all, look, the 19 hijackers used just commercial airliners on 9-11.
They didn't use any fancy high-tech stuff.
So for minimal cost, these groups, these sort of freelance groups, can do a lot of damage to states and societies.
What that tells me is that governments are not going to be very good at countering this stuff to the extent that it is a threat, because governments are lumbering, you know, like elephants.
They're not flexible, they're not entrepreneurial, and they're going to be nearly as resilient as the force they're attempting to protect us from.
So I think they're totally unqualified these days to protect us.
The case for a privatized, flexible entrepreneurial defense seems to be stronger than ever, than it's ever been.
So you're talking completely now about society without a state?
The state is an albatross.
And, you know, people like me have long argued that, and it was a hard sell, because people would say, well, how can you say that?
You know, with the Soviet Union, certainly we need to have a traditional form of national defense.
But I think even now it's becoming an easier sell, because of the new world we live in.
I mean, most people don't think we're going to go to war against another country, nation, state, ever again.
I mean, Rob argues that it seems unlikely.
Now, it's true, we may go bombing Iran if McCain gets in, or even if the Democrats get in.
But it's not going to be, I mean, the U.S. is not going to be attacked by anybody.
Our society is not going to be threatened by some invading army of another country.
So I think the old style warfare probably is obsolete.
If there's a new threat, which I think mostly can be diffused by non-interventionism, just changing our policy, getting out of the Middle East, I think would diffuse a lot of it.
But let's assume it doesn't end at all.
Maybe there's some grievances people hold, and they want to get even for past grievances.
So even if our future policy has changed, they're not letting go of the grievances.
So let's say we still need some defense against Al-Qaeda types, jihadists.
I don't think the state is going to be very good at doing that.
Just by the nature of things, it's not very good at stuff like that.
Well, you know, in the presidential debates, Ron Paul talked about, he invoked armored car security companies when talking about the September 11th attacks, and saying we don't need a Department of Homeland Security to centralize this bureaucracy.
What we need is to let the airplane companies handle their own security.
Let the free people of this land handle their own security.
September 11th probably wouldn't have even happened, he said.
Well, I think that's a good point.
I mean, look, what's lacking, and I make this argument in all kinds of things the government's involved in.
I do a lot of speaking about education, and I would make the same exact point.
When the government has a monopoly or a virtual monopoly in anything, any service, basically what it's saying is we don't need entrepreneurship in this area.
We already know everything that we need to know.
But bureaucracies are the opposite of enterprises.
They don't operate on the basis of entrepreneurship.
First of all, there's no profit.
Nobody stands to gain monetarily from coming up with a good idea.
And on the other side, of course, consumers are not free to reject the service if they think it stinks.
So you don't get the feedback and the necessary information on either side.
And therefore, the services provided by government are not very good, even when they're services that legitimately could be performed in the marketplace, they're not very good when the government does it.
So I think putting our trust in government for defense is really a silly idea, and I think it's becoming more and more obvious.
I really like the way you characterize it, too, because I think most people, hell, most libertarians even, would say, well, you know, you have to have enough government to keep another one from replacing it and to provide for criminal justice and that kind of thing.
And you're saying, ah, that's ridiculous.
Those are the last two things you need these goons for.
Well, that's right.
I mean, you know, it's most harmful in an area like defense, where, you know, you get yourself killed.
In something else, you know, maybe it doesn't matter so much.
You know, probably no one's going to get killed if it has a monopoly in the post office.
I don't want it to have a monopoly in the post office, but it's a less lethal kind of thing to be involved in than defense.
So I think we should be focusing on defense and not just argue about whether the post office should be privatized.
I mean, I like a point that Jeffrey Rogers Hummel makes.
He's a professor and historian and defense theorist.
He's written some very important things about national defense, and one thing he points out is we don't give enough attention to the role of ideology in defense.
And in other words, ideas rule the world, not force, the way he likes to put it.
Force doesn't rule the world because it's ideas that determine what direction people point their guns.
So it's all the ideas ultimately rule things, not brute force.
So what keeps governments from violating our rights, I mean, look at the U.S. government, for example.
What keeps it from violating our rights even more than it already does, and believe me, it could do worse.
I don't mean to say anything nice about them by putting it this way, but let's face it, they could do more things to us.
What keeps them from doing more things to us?
Well, basically the ideology, the tacit ideas that people hold that make them believe the government is legitimate also to some extent limits the government in what it can do.
So it's ultimately ideas that keep the state from being even more violative of our rights, and of course part of the mission of people who want complete freedom is to change people's minds so that the state no longer will be able to violate our rights to any extent.
So ideas ultimately are what will protect us because people won't put up with, given a certain set of ideas, people won't put up with government that goes beyond the limits that they believe exist.
Now, that's not just true of the U.S. government, that would be true of any foreign government as well.
What Hummel likes to point out is that the defense against foreign governments is just a subset of the larger problem of defense against any government.
Well tell me this, I think probably many would say, I mean, if you're really saying, hey, if you want security, buy your own and leave me out of it, they're going to say, hey listen, there's going to be giant portions of the population who aren't able to afford any security at all, and then what are they supposed to do?
Well, I don't know why that prediction would be made.
Well just because there's a lot of poor people around, I don't know.
Yeah, but well, in a rich society, first of all, there would be a lot of coverage that wasn't directly paid for by people, it would just be sort of general.
I mean, this is another point that Hummel makes, that the free rider problem, which is usually regarded as insurmountable and therefore we need government and taxation, the free rider problem, as he puts it, is overcome every day.
In fact, the government itself would suffer from the free rider problem if it could not be overcome.
An example is, if I want to work for a tax cut and I get a few friends together to kick in money for a campaign to gain a tax cut, well, everybody's going to benefit by the tax cut, whether they've kicked into the effort or not.
And yet, so that's a free rider problem, and yet, you know, there have been times in the past when citizens have been able to get together and put enough pressure to get a tax cut or some other kind of legal change, even though free riders have enjoyed the benefit without participating.
So if it's true in that context, it would be true in another context.
So it's not like a poor person would have to kick in, you know, thousands of dollars.
It would be, you know, something community-based or larger than community when we think of that word.
We tend to think of maybe smaller communities, but I don't believe there's going to be a problem.
Besides, the need for defense also will shrink because we won't be led into, you know, tickets by our so-called government that's supposedly protecting us.
In other words, the government makes enemies.
The government doesn't protect us.
The government does the opposite of protecting us by engaging in interventionism, which creates enemies that then want to strike out against the United States and the American people.
That's the opposite of defense.
And I don't mean it's offense.
It is that, too.
But it's the opposite of defense in the sense that it's endangering us.
That's what the government does.
Well, that would all end.
And it's the same thing in the domestic sense, too, like, you know, the war on drugs.
I mean, these are my last two excuses for having a state, right?
National defense and criminal justice.
And I always thought, well, you can't put the profit motive in criminal justice.
You have to have, you know, unbiased and confrontational court system and this and that.
And I thought, well, wait a minute.
What am I talking about?
The prison industry in this country is already run for profit.
It just has state power to back it up now.
And then also, I read a bit of the national defense myth edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and the various authors in there, perhaps even including yourself, I forget now, make the case that, listen, national defense is make-believe.
This national government has been at war since 1791.
And how many of these fights were actually started by the foreigners?
One or maybe two of them?
Well, good point.
And while I'm not in that volume, Jeffrey Hummel has a chapter in that volume, which is well worth reading, about pointing out some of the things that I've probably briefly described here.
And there's a lot of other good material in that book.
And you also find some good material in a book edited by Edward Stringham called Anarchy and the Law, which is a collection of classic papers on how various aspects of a stateless society would work.
And Jeffrey Hummel and the late Don LaVoy have a paper that was published some years ago and reprinted in this volume on conceptual issues regarding national defense and the free rider problem that I discussed and things of that nature.
So you can find this stuff in print.
If people are willing to or interested in pursuing this, there is some very good scholarship being done on this.
This is not just some college student sitting around a dorm room saying, hey, I bet we could do without the army and just sort of spinning things off the top of their heads.
This is research stuff that's based in history and good theory.
It's solid, solid stuff.
And it's a serious literature that's been growing now for, I don't know, 30 years, let's say.
All right.
Now I want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about the recent controversy about presidential candidate Barack Obama and his membership at this church in Chicago led by this preacher, Jeremiah Wright.
And it's funny, your blog's called Free Association.
I guess we can talk a bit about guilt by association here.
But I want to go ahead and play this clip.
It's about three minutes long.
This is the clip that has gotten Barack Obama in so much trouble.
And then we'll come back and get your comment on it.
We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocence.
We want revenge.
We want paybacks.
And we don't care who gets hurt in the process.
I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday.
Did anybody else see him or hear him?
He was on Fox News.
This is a white man.
And he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end.
He pointed out, you see him, a white man, he pointed out, an ambassador.
That what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true.
America's chickens are coming home to roost.
We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo.
Terrorism.
We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear.
Terrorism.
We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.
We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hardworking fathers.
We bombed Gaddafi's home and killed his child.
Blessed are they who bash your children's head against a rock.
We bombed Iraq.
We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living.
We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy.
Killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they'd never get back home.
We bombed Hiroshima.
We bombed Nagasaki.
And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.
Kids playing in the playground.
Mothers picking up children after school.
Civilians, not soldiers.
People just trying to make it day by day.
We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.
America's chickens are coming home to roost.
Violence begets violence.
Hatred begets hatred.
And terrorism begets terrorism.
A white ambassador said that, y'all, not a black militant.
Not a reverend who preaches about racism and an ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who's trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised.
The ambassador said the people that we are wounded don't have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and to take thousands with them and we need to come to grips with that.
All right.
So there you go, Sheldon Richmond.
That was Jeremiah Wright.
And judging from what I've heard on the radio and seen on TV lately, the only conclusion that I can come to is that this man is self-evidently evil.
Everything that he just said is self-evidently wrong and Barack Obama must be a terrible person for being associated with him.
Is that the same conclusion you come to there?
I think that was great stuff.
I'm not endorsing every bit of the speech, but the segment you played is perfectly sound.
David Henderson has a column about that speech on anti-war.com and he gave and he checked out the various charges and I believe he ends up giving the Reverend Jeremiah Wright an A- for his accuracy, historical accuracy.
Yeah, there were a couple of points about the military-invented AIDS and the...
Yeah, the AIDS thing is a means of genocide.
As I described in my own blog post about this, it was over the top.
And in some of the things, I mean, I did have a general sense of collectivist racism there.
And he used the word we too much for my taste.
I think there's a...
Well, how do you mean?
What do you mean by that?
Well, he says we killed innocent people.
We did this.
We did that.
And that's much too broad, because he's being a nationalist and a collectivist, just like the other side is.
And here's what I particularly criticize him for.
When he said, you didn't play the part, but when he goes on and on about goddamn America, which got so many people upset.
Right.
I think that was from a different sermon, actually.
Okay.
Well, I criticize that too, for the same reason, though, that I criticize people who say, God bless America, or he's a great American, or I love America, or I'm proud of America.
I don't know what that means when people say that.
That too much is implied by that word, or some people will imply sort of whatever they want in it.
It typically means the government and government policy, along with a lot of other stuff.
In other words, it's too diverse a bag of things, good and bad, for me to make a statement about what...
You know, someone said, do you love America?
I would not answer that.
I love my home.
I was born in the United States.
I like my home, my family.
I admire a lot of stuff about American history, certainly the philosophy in the Declaration of Independence.
I can pick out things I love, but there are a lot of things that are associated with America, mainly government policy, that I don't love, that I hate.
So I don't talk in those terms, and so I criticize Wright for taking the flip side of that and damning, quote, America.
You know, what does he mean?
He needed to be more specific.
These were particular policymakers who did these horrible things.
They were speaking in our name, and that, of course, was one of the offensive things about it, that they spoke in our name and they took our money to do it without our consent.
But when it comes down to the particulars, he's absolutely right when he goes through the treatment of the Indians and slavery and the atomic bombings and the...
He didn't even have to go to atomic bombings, just the conventional bombing during World War II in Vietnam, you know, wreaked great havoc.
It took many, many innocent lives.
And so, in general, his catalog there is right on the mark.
In fact, I wish that Obama agreed with him more.
I think this is a point that Henderson also made.
Obama, unfortunately, doesn't agree with that stuff or won't say that, because you can't say that and get elected.
That's not considered...
Well, we could see how the reaction has been already.
You don't say those things in polite company.
And so it's a shame.
You cannot...
If you condemn government policy, people do think that means you're condemning everything about the United States, the American people, its history, everything.
And it's crazy.
We've got to disaggregate this stuff.
That's why I said he uses the word we much too promiscuously.
Yeah.
You know, one thing I picked up on, too, was when he first mentioned Malcolm X when he was silenced by Elijah Muhammad for saying that America's chickens are coming home to roost in response to the assassination of John Kennedy, the crowd kind of went wild there, a black audience in Chicago.
They seem to understand the principle of blowback, that when you deny people their humanity and treat them like dogs for decade after decade, that tends to build up resentment.
Not that black Americans are ready to hijack planes and crash them, but they certainly seem to not be fooled by this they hate us for our freedom thing there.
They picked right up on this is a consequence of something that our government or we or somebody has done to them.
Yeah, I see that.
And that's much more perceptive than many, many other people.
I mean, look at the reaction Ron Paul got when he suggested that during debates.
Now, I know it's a lot of it was political posturing, but I bet a lot of people watching those debates liked what Giuliani and McCain had to say in response.
Sure, and that was years later, too.
People don't like the idea of thinking that, quote, their country, because most people don't analyze that phrase, their country did bad things.
And so there's a knee-jerk reaction.
No, that can't be true.
That can't be true.
And, of course, to distort the words of the blowback, the person who's describing blowback, because you remember the one debate where Ron Paul was immediately, there was an immediate comeback by Wendell Goler, I think, of Fox.
Are you saying we invited this?
Well, he didn't say we invited it.
Invite means when you invite something, you welcome it, right?
You want it.
I invite someone to my home.
He never used the word invite, and what he said didn't even imply invite.
But he did say it was a reaction to long years of American policy.
That's different from inviting.
Sure.
I don't think the American government, and other people who differ with me on this, I don't believe the American government, the people the American government wanted the World Trade Center brought down.
I don't believe, you know, I don't, I'm not willing to believe that yet.
I have to see a lot more evidence of it.
But that doesn't change the fact that their policies sowed the seeds of a violent reaction, and violent resistance, and a twisted sense of retaliation.
Well, and you know, the thing is, even the term invite, depending on the context, doesn't necessarily imply deliberately inviting.
In fact, I wrote an article with David Bato for LewRockwell.com about how Ron Paul is right about foreign policy, and I went back and researching and I found a speech he gave in 1997, where he was citing the Saudi government, saying that if we do this most recent Bill Clinton bombing campaign, that we are radicalizing the people of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Saudi Arabia is warning us, and we need to reassess this policy, because right now we are inviting the next attack upon the United States of America.
And of course he meant it in the, you know, unintentionally inviting, but there he was, you know, what, eight years before getting it right.
No, that's good.
I mean, he's a man of good sense, and he understands this stuff.
Look, after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Herbert Hoover said, well, if you poke the rattlesnake long enough, he will bite you.
I take your point.
In one sense, you certainly are not inviting it to bite you, but in another sense, you are.
It doesn't mean you want to be bitten, but you're doing the thing where the consequence is easily foreseeable.
Right.
Although in the case of Pearl Harbor, we know they knew what they were doing in poking that snake with the stick.
Well, we do.
What's not quite yet nailed down, and maybe never will be, is that they knew, you know, where exactly and when.
I mean, there's a lot of, there is circumstantial evidence about that, and that's of course another subject, but certainly their intention was to get some reaction out of the Japanese.
And I just said we, didn't I, as though I was part of the New Deal cabinet.
It's very easy to fall into that, but that is one of the most dangerous words in political analysis, we, and the related words, they, us, them, because it papers over too many distinctions that have to be made.
I mean, there's a difference between us and the state, and this is important when we're talking about whether the state can defend us, because, you know, their interests are not entirely the same as ours, and so therefore, you know, that needs to be, that's the perspective in which we need to judge this idea of national defense.
Sorry, we're kind of screwed by just the idea of popular sovereignty in the first place, aren't we?
I mean, you grab your neighbor, your average neighbor at random and ask them, and he'll tell you, we are the government, which means basically that whatever they're doing is what the majority at least allowed them to do, if not told them to do, and therefore it's all right.
Most people do think that way.
I mean, I used to think, I mean, I thought right along that our heritage here, the revolutionary heritage is both a curse and a gift, because it's a curse in the sense that we now, most people believe we are self-governing in a very simplistic sense, that so the policy we're getting are the policies we really want, and of course that's ridiculous.
First of all, foreign policy, it's the most ridiculous of all, because it's the most, it's the area of foreign policy that's most kept out of the view of the people.
We don't know what's going on, because they can always claim, well, we can't have our, you know, material has to be classified, this is sensitive.
They could never get away with that in foreign policy.
If someone demanded, you know, someone criticized Social Security, but because on the grounds that it's insolvent, you know, Bush could never get away with saying, well, you don't have all the information we have, but we can't release it because it's classified and sensitive.
Right.
He'd be left, you know, he'd be left out of court.
Couldn't get away with that.
But in foreign affairs, of course, it's done all the time.
And therefore, they can keep things from us that we won't learn for 20 years or more, or some heroic, you know, Daniel Ellsberg leaks something like that.
But otherwise, we won't know for a very long time, long after the damage is done, and then they're already up to something else.
Yeah, again, it's funny how, well, with all these arguments, whether it's foreign policy or anything else, libertarianism always has the answer.
You know, even when you talk about, you know, the we and the they and the being able to discriminate between this group of people and, you know, that group of people and the military and the state and the people and whatever, this comes from being able to start at the individual rather than starting with this kind of holistic idea of everything between Maine and Southern California, that we start from the bottom up.
And so all these distinctions are quite apparent to us, whereas they seem to maybe escape some of our neighbors.
But again, that's true.
And that's why we have a tough road.
I mean, we can't we can't boil it down to soundbites, even if we get invited on these TV shows.
We're at some disadvantage really because, you know, a quick 10 second answer to something is not going to be enough.
And we're asking people to think and rethink things that maybe they've never heard before.
I think a lot of people have the sense that, you know, something can't be true if they never heard it before.
Right.
If they're 50, 40 years old or 50 years old, they figure, look, I've been around long enough to hear everything that's true.
So if you're if you're telling me this, if you're telling me that we overthrew the Democratic government in Iran in 1953, heck, I never heard that.
And then that that's because a lot of the problems we're having with Iran.
And since I never heard that before, you must be making that up or that can't really be true.
I get that kind of reaction from people.
So we have a hard sell and we have to be patient and keep at it and be as clear as we can be and be as careful in our research as we can be.
Well, now, this is something that I'm sure you have to put up with at the Foundation for Economic Education is the idea that somehow the libertarians, when it comes to business and capitalism, we're like Dick Cheney, only even worse because, you know, at least he's for some kind of welfare program, safety net type thing, and that we're just, you know, the apologists for we're the intellectual bodyguard for the corporatist elite who are looting this country and the world blind.
So I wondered if maybe I could get your analysis of some of what's been going on between the Federal Reserve and some favored Wall Street banks and so forth, and perhaps at the same time dispel that myth.
Well, this is an important time for us.
It does give us an opportunity to dispel the myth.
We I mean, I almost fell into the we there, and that's a little, even though I'm not talking about the government, we've got to be careful with the word we.
But libertarians have been, I think, a little sloppy on this, and the person who has been very good at reminding us is a guy by the name of Kevin Carson.
I don't know if you know him, but he is what he calls himself a free market anti-capitalist.
In his view, capitalism, and a lot of people's views, and historically capitalism has been a system not of free markets, but of interventional behalf of capital or behalf of capitalists.
And in fact, wouldn't it, didn't Karl Marx coin the phrase to mean that the combination between the rich people in the state?
I think he did coin the phrase.
Mises, of course, embraces it.
And which is not unusual, right?
Because very often the term of insult is then embraced by the group being insulted, like the Austrian economist, the term Austrian economist.
Economics was an insult by the German historical school.
Anything Austrian was a put-down.
They'd say, oh, that's just Austrian economics.
Well, of course, the Austrians then eventually proudly embraced the term.
But what has been so good about what Carson has done on this issue is he's coined a term called vulgar libertarianism, which I think is very valuable.
For him, vulgar libertarianism is forgetting that we don't live in a free market, and defending corporations and their conduct as if we were in a free market.
So very often you'll hear libertarians say, if a corporation is criticized for something, oil company or pharmaceutical company, oh, well, they couldn't do that if it wasn't serving consumers, because the market wouldn't permit it.
It would end in the marketplace.
Forgetting that yesterday they were talking about all violations of the marketplace to go on.
In other words, vulgar libertarianism is the inability to remember sort of from moment to moment whether we're in favor of free markets or we're in favor of what we have now.
And you do see this line blurred very often on the free market blogs.
I wrote an article a few weeks ago on the fee website called Where Free Market Economists Go Wrong, and I was trying to bring this out.
So we need now I think on this, the bailout regarding Bear Stearns and what's going on now, I mean, the free market people so far have been very good.
I mean, no, I haven't heard anyone defend the Fed helping J.P. Morgan, whatever it is, Chase, get its hands on the stock and the building that's owned by Bear Stearns.
So I think this is so obviously an intervention on behalf of special interests that you're not going to find too many free market people going for this.
But we need to be careful, because The Wall Street Journal, of course, well, I take that back for a second.
The Wall Street Journal was ambivalent about the Bear Stearns and the Fed intervention and offering a $30 billion loan line of credit to Chase.
Well, even the neocons were skeptical.
Yeah, it was a little too blatant, I think.
But that doesn't mean they're going to be against more subtle ways of getting people over some of the difficult times.
But this is clearly a case where capital, which has inroads to the state, good connections, will get certain considerations.
After all, now, the Fed has opened its discount window to investment banks, not only open to commercial banks, which of course was objectionable from our point of view, but now investment banks are going to be included.
And that has now led to the inevitable call for new regulations on the investment banks.
And this has a certain surface logic to it.
And Schumer and, what's his name, Barney Frank are arguing this.
They say, look, if you're going to open the discount window to investment banks, well, then they should have to abide by the same kind of rules that commercial banks have to abide by.
And they abide by those, because that was the quid pro quo for access to the discount window from the Fed.
So unless you challenge the whole business of the Fed making loans, I don't see how you get out of endorsing new regulations.
Yeah, you know, we really have to be way out front on this.
It's something that, I don't know if it's really possible for this to be fixed in the mind of the average American.
But I know that, well, I always fight with Greg Palast, who's a friend of mine.
But whenever I interview him, he always refers to fascism as free market economics.
Yeah, the U.S. government came in, pointed their guns at people's heads, and said, turn over all of your publicly held resources to our corrupt crony capitalist buddies.
And that's their free market dream.
And I always have to fight with him and say, hey, look, call fascism fascism and acknowledge the fact that laissez-faire is the opposite of that.
And this is something that I've seen also in Naomi Wolf's book, The Shock Doctrine, where she's describing page after page after page of government intervention on behalf of billionaires and calling that laissez-faire free market capitalism.
How the hell are we ever going to win an argument when the terms of the debate are so far from reality?
That is the problem.
She, I haven't read that book, but another thing she, and from people who have read the book, I get the sense that there are times where she does have a glimmer of this point.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
She realizes it's not the free market, and yet she'll lapse back into that rhetoric as a way of scoring points on libertarians and other free markets.
Well, I need to hurry up and get that book read and then have her on the show and fight with her about it, I guess.
Well, that might be worthwhile, and she might learn something from it, so I would encourage you to do that.
You know, the flip side of vulgar libertarianism in Carson's lexicon is what he calls vulgar liberalism.
And that's the view of people who say, what we have is the free market, and therefore we don't want any part of the free market.
Right.
The libertarian side of that is, in a sense, saying, what we have is the free market, and therefore don't criticize those corporations, because they couldn't be doing what they were doing if it wasn't serving consumers.
It's like Bovard says, it's like watching drunks in a bar, they swing and they miss.
All right, we've got to go.
That's it for the show today, Antiwar Radio.
Thanks very much, everybody.
It's Sheldon Richman.
He is from the Future Freedom Foundation and the Foundation for Economic Education, editor of the Freeman, and his own blog is freeassociation.blogspot.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, Sheldon.
