Sheldon Richman, senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of The Freeman, discusses the expansion of NATO and arming of Russia’s neighbors, U.S. meddling in foreign elections, the likely U.S. invasion of Sudan, the myth of Herbert Hoover and the financial bailout crisis.
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Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our guest today is Sheldon Richman, he's a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation, the author of Tethered Citizens, Time to Repeal the Welfare State.
He's the editor of the Freeman Magazine and maintains the blog Free Association at SheldonRichman.com.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
Thanks, nice to be with you.
Well, it's great to have you back on the show here.
And now, I think the way this works is that you write an article and then six months later something, Jacob Hornberger posts it where people can read it online, is that about right?
The longer article, which is in his Freedom Daily, which is actually a print publication, is a few months later than is posted.
Right, okay.
So, this article is a little bit out of date, but not really, because this is our future, too.
It's called Just What We Need, New Reasons to Go to War, and it's about NATO expansion.
I'd like to try to ask you some things about the bailout and your views on markets and that sort of thing toward the end of the show, but I'm really glad to have your perfectly libertarian perspective on this NATO expansion.
Of course, the leadership of both parties and all presidential and vice-presidential candidates agree that basically every European country other than Russia ought to be brought into NATO at this point.
Is that about right?
That's pretty much the consensus of the establishment view, right and left, of center, if we want to use those terms.
Back in the 90s they used to talk about inviting Russia into NATO, which of course was pretty absurd, because then why have NATO?
If Russia's going to be in it, why have it?
If every country in the whole world is in NATO, why do you have NATO?
Just call it the world.
Yeah, the army of the north.
The Russians didn't regard it as a serious proposal, and I don't think any of us should have.
This has always been aimed at encircling and marginalizing Russia, getting a hold of resources that it once controlled, and basically making sure it could be no deterrent to U.S. freedom of action.
You know, I read something recently about, I'm sorry, if you don't know about it we can just drop it, but there was a foreign affairs article from 1947 or 48 by a British lord of some kind, I forget his name, and basically he was saying, okay, as we hand off our empire to you at the end of the second world war here, here's what you need to do, and a big part of it was what they called the bread basket and all this arable land in southern Russia and I guess what we now call the banana stands or whatever up there in central Asia, and that it's all about controlling these resources or limiting other people's access to them, and I think it was more about the ability to grow wheat than oil, but same difference to him.
Do you know about that?
I don't remember, I don't know the article, I don't know if I've ever seen the article, but that certainly does explain much of U.S. conduct, no matter what party's in power, there is sort of a permanent foreign policy establishment that's there regardless of who's in power, and that's going to be true of the November election as well, and that does explain their conduct.
We've been cultivating friends out of some pretty odious regimes in central Asia, you know, some of the stands, like you say, and we've been backing Saakashvili in Georgia, even though he's a rather big mouth hothead who thought he had protection from the U.S. when he went into south Ossetia and then looked around and all of a sudden saw that the U.S. wasn't standing back there ready to go to war for him, but we had built him up with weapons and money and advisors and probably lots of pep talks, and the same with Ukraine, and of course NATO has been expanded to the Baltic states and some of the former Warsaw states, and I don't know how else you could explain this, there's no other reason for the U.S. to be expanding NATO up to Russia's doorstep except to have control of those resources and make sure Russia can't be in any kind of deterrent.
Well, and you know, part of this has been about the nuclear warfare doctrine, too, where you have these Dr. Strangelove, Wolsteader types who come up with this nuclear game theory and all these weird things where it seems like there's been a decision on some level, and I really wish I knew more about this, but to basically change the doctrine from mutual assured destruction to get America ready to be first strike capable to where they think they would be able to wage a nuclear war against the Russians so overwhelmingly, so quickly and with good enough anti-missile missiles to defend from any initial retaliation or so forth, that they could go ahead and do a preemptive nuclear war against Russia without mutually assured destruction, which, you know, I don't know what kind of crazy Rand Corporation basement you've got to spend your entire lifetime in to think that these things are right, but this does seem to be what they're doing, right, with all these anti-missile missiles they're putting into Poland and also into the Czech Republic, not just the radar.
Yes, and the U.S. has never foresworn the first use of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War and up to the present time.
They've never said we will not be the first to use them.
Of course, only one country in history has used them, and that is the United States and Japan twice, and Americans may not think about that or may not remember it or may not even know it, but the Russians do and the rest of the people around the world do know that.
And so the whole thing is poisoned.
American policymakers never look at their own policies from the other side as if they were aimed at them.
They say, hey, our intentions are good, so we can do anything we want because our intentions are good.
And they may think they're good, the other side isn't so convinced of that, and they may actually see the activities, the actions, the acquisition of allies all around Russia and, like you say, the placement of anti-missiles systems in the two former Warsaw Pact countries.
And then, you know, they'll say things like, but these are defensive weapons.
Well, of course, that's a canard because a weapon isn't inherently defensive or offensive.
It depends on the purposes a human being puts them to.
A missile shield, which on the face of it may look defensive, is offensive if you're planning to shield yourself while you're launching a first strike.
So this idea that these are defensive, they think the American people are morons, or maybe the Russians too, by assuring them that these are only defensive missiles, Putin knows better than that, and the Christian American people probably don't know better than that, but we should be telling them.
Well, and you know, back in the day, in the Cold War, there was at least, and I'm not saying it would have been a good enough one for me, I was just a kid at the time or whatever, but at least it was a somewhat plausible excuse, the refusal to foreswear first use of nuclear weapons, because the implication, at least, was that we might have to use nuclear weapons first to prevent the Red Army from pouring through the Folda Gap and conquering all of Western Europe, that we promised to defend Western Europe, and that Russian conventional forces were so huge that we would not be able to take them on without nukes.
That was at least some sort of plausible argument.
What's the plausible argument now?
Well, that's a fair question.
It was plausible in the sense that if you didn't look too deeply, it was plausible.
I think you could make a good case that the Russians had no intention of pouring the Red Army into Western Europe, but you're right, it doesn't even have that plausibility today.
What does the Red Army have to gain, or what does Putin have to gain by doing that?
They are Europe's biggest trading partner.
They sell energy to Europe.
It seems like they would be hurting themselves if they were to go to war against Europe.
I don't think Russia wants a war with Europe.
It really does seem like we've just replaced the Soviet Union.
We're not quite as violent as they were.
They killed millions and millions in Afghanistan.
We've only killed 1.2 million or so in Iraq, so we're not quite as bad, but basically we've taken on the Warsaw Pact and become it.
Well, yeah, that's an interesting way to put it.
I was watching Charlie Wilson's War the other night for the first time, and of course anybody who's paying attention would get to the end of that movie and say, okay, the Russians aren't bogged down in Afghanistan anymore.
The U.S. now is bogged down in Afghanistan.
And we have our own domino theory, too, where all we've got to do is change a few regimes and then the rest of them will fall, and on like that.
Right.
And the first domino theory wasn't very accurate when we said that if Vietnam fell, Asia will fall, Japan included.
Of course, that didn't happen.
And these domino theories are more propaganda than anything else.
Yeah.
Yeah, excuses.
And that's the tough thing, is sometimes I get caught on this show, too, confronting the spreading democracy around the world.
We all know that's simply a fig leaf for imperialism, but on one sense you have to confront these bogus arguments on their face, you know?
Well, and I heard Sarah Palin last night argue in her debate that we should not have been promoting democracy in Gaza among the Palestinians because, guess what, people we didn't like won.
Yeah, that's what Joe Biden said, too, yeah.
So maybe they're changing the, of course they have been changing the promotion of democracy crusade.
They stopped pushing democracy on Egypt some time ago because they didn't like, they suspected we wouldn't like the winners in that one, so they decided that the repressive Mubarak is just fine.
And you notice the way they brag that Gaddafi has given up any aspirations to have nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in Libya.
But I never heard them say, and he's decided, he's agreed to democratize his country.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, the dictator Gaddafi, as long as he's with the program on weapons of mass destruction.
So it was clear that they were broadcasting even a couple of years ago that democracy is not really what it's about unless they can, they know for sure up front and for certain that our guys, our chalabi's or whoever are going to be the ones who get in.
Right.
Well, and of course in the case of Iraq, they basically spread so much propaganda about democracy that when they tried to set up the caucus system where they would handpick people from all across the country and what have you, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called them on it and went out and said, hey, we want one man, one vote.
And not just for the parliament, but for even the writing of, for the, to pick the group of people who are even going to write the constitution in the first place.
And then the, all the elections for prime minister and everything else after that.
And he came out and he basically told George Bush, if you don't give this to me, you're going to have to start this war all over again.
We're going to have one man, one vote.
And then they ran, I think mostly just because of the security situation, nobody could put their name on the ballot without getting assassinated.
So they ran as religious slates and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq won.
And they've been our allies there this whole time.
And I think that the Washington Post headline really got that one right.
It said winners of Iraq election opposite of U.S. vision.
These guys are so cynical because even when there's an election going on somewhere, one of these places, and this has been even true in Russia, the U.S. pours money in, they funnel it through things like the National Endowment for Democracy or one of those shell organizations.
And you know, it may, it may hide it from the American people that we're tampering with other people's elections, but the people there always know it.
The Russians know it or whatever the country may be.
People know that it's U.S. money.
There must be something very obvious when you're in that country and in that culture, you know, when outside money's coming in and it has U.S. fingerprints all over it.
And all that would do is paint the whole system because people know that George Bush or whatever president it is, is meddling, which you would think even they would find that counterproductive because anything they touch is going to turn rotten in the eyes of the people of those countries.
I just remember the scandal in 96 when John Wong and James Riotti and Charlie Tree and all these guys were bringing sacks of gold coins with dollar signs on the front of them to Bill Clinton to help pay for his re-election.
You know, he could have been removed from office just for that, and yet that's what we do to the rest of the world all day long.
Right.
The right wing, you know, went bananas when that happened here.
Rush Limbaugh and those guys were complaining about the Chai comms and Clinton's connection to them.
And yet they fully support our doing it because, you know, when we do it, of course, it's well-intended and it's for freedom and God and capitalism and all the rest of it.
Well, you know, you brought up Sarah Palin there.
And she got roundly criticized for her interview with Charlie Gibson where he said, listen, you want to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, huh?
She says, oh, yeah, of course.
And he said, so does this mean that we might have to have a war with Russia?
And she says, yes, it does mean that we might have to have a war with Russia.
And everybody said, oh, my God, she's insane or something like that.
And really, it seemed to me the only thing that happened there was she was too dumb to know that what you're supposed to do is not answer the question.
You're supposed to say, well, it's a peace guarantee.
And the more security, the more members we have, the less likely a war is or something like that.
Instead, she went straight for the truth, which is NATO membership is a war guarantee.
It means that young men from Texas and Alabama and Pennsylvania and Nevada will die in order to protect the territorial integrity of the state of Georgia.
That is exactly what it means.
Right.
Right.
It will go to war to decide who is going to rule South Ossetia.
This sounds like a bad joke.
This sounds like a bad movie, you know, starring Randy Quaid or something.
I can't.
You have to laugh at this stuff.
You're right.
But, you know, perhaps.
And then she followed up by saying, that's what it means to be in an alliance, Charlie.
And of course, I was very disappointed that Gibson did not follow up on this.
This would have been the place to really put the screws to her.
I guess he was worried about looking like he was bullying, you know, the little woman.
But he should have said, well, wait a second, you are saying Ukraine and Georgia should be in NATO.
And you're also saying that we probably would have to go, that we would be obligated to go to war if Russia does something to them.
Do you really want to look at the American people and say, I would send our, you know, people to fight in Russia over South Ossetia or Abkhazia?
You know, put her, get her to, you know, confront this.
I don't know what she would have done.
Maybe she would have broken down.
Maybe she would have been speechless, but it would have been pretty enlightening.
I don't think these people should be allowed to get away with this.
Right.
And, you know, sending people off to fight in Russia is completely besides the point.
The question is, are you willing to give up Houston, Texas, continued existence?
Are you willing to give up the continued life living going on there and say, oh, I don't know, New York City?
Or would you have them all die by hydrogen bombs falling on their head over South Ossetia?
Because that's what Russia is quite able to do to us.
And we all know it.
They have been since the 50s.
Good point.
I mean, I was neglecting the nuclear weapons aspect to it.
But even if it turned out to just be a conventional war, think of the horror of that.
Europe, obviously, has no stomach for a conventional war, and it would be total, you know, just devastating.
And a lot of people would die, and these people, you ought to be forced to, you know, look in the camera and say, yeah, I would send your sons or I would send you off to fight because we have to stand by the Georgians in their desire to rule the Ossetians in South Ossetia.
I mean, you can't even say it with a straight face.
Make them force themselves to say it with a straight face.
That's what the media ought to be doing.
These reporters, whether they have any value at all, it's get these people to look in the camera or say, point blank, yes, this is what it all means.
And you know, too often they don't do it.
It didn't happen last night.
There were opportunities in the debate last night.
But Gwen Ifill, I don't know if it was because of the ground rules, but, you know, she wasn't following up and making either one of them really confront the implications of what they're saying.
Yeah, well, and they didn't address NATO or Russia at all in the debate last night.
Right, they didn't.
Georgia didn't come up, I thought.
I thought it would.
It would have been, I think, a very good time to get basic principles stated.
It would have been excellent, of course, if the two of them agree.
That would have been one interesting side of that is that they both, I'm sure, want and because I'm sure that Obama has already endorsed the majority of membership in NATO for Georgia and Ukraine.
I don't think he's going to depart from that.
That's a basic principle now of the rule of the permanent ruling foreign policy apparatus.
And he's not going to depart from that.
Well, and, you know, I think Pat Buchanan is right when he says, listen, if you have to try to figure out, you know, the quality and assign some kind of rating to what are the most important things in the world.
The single most important thing in the world is the relationship between America and Russia and making sure that it stays at least nominally friendly, period.
There's nothing more important than that.
We got thousands and thousands of hydrogen bombs, end of argument.
That's it.
The most important issue on earth, our relationship with that country.
I can't argue with that.
That is very important.
The Russians are really not in a position to, you know, challenge any, the safety of the American people.
I mean, they're not going to be invading the United States or anything.
They're not even going to invade Alaska for all that.
Palin may be worried about that.
He's not going to rear his head in Alaska, as she says.
I don't know why we have to be worried about the Russians.
It's clearly a case that if we appear to respect them, they're not going to be much bothering us.
But there's a long history of Russia wanting influence in its own region, predates the Communists.
It has nothing to do with the Soviet Union.
It goes way back.
And for us to tell Russia how to manage its environs is going to get the same reception as if Russia started telling us how to manage our environs, you know, here, our relationship with Mexico and Canada and, you know, other countries in the area.
We would not, we wouldn't like it.
The right wing would be not going nuts about it, but they're all for, are doing it, not just the right wing, because the so-called establishment left is also on board with all this.
It's just, I don't, I shouldn't say I don't understand it.
I do understand it.
There's interests involved.
There's an economic interest.
The whole war economy, defense economy is based on it, primarily a defense economy, but the imperialist economy is based on it.
And a lot of people would lose if we suddenly changed the policy to go on non-intervention and live and let live.
Well, and, you know, in your article, you also take on the idea, and really this is, of course, something I never, well, I don't do nearly often enough, but this really is the right way to wage these arguments, is assume good motives on the part of the people that you're arguing with and then just explain how their ideas are crazy.
Like for example, the, I think, number one common basis of all foreign policy goofballs in the entire country, from the CFR to the AEI, and that is collective security.
That the more of us promise to jump in on a fight, the less likely it is there will be a fight.
That's been the doctrine since World War II.
Yeah, they use the schoolyard analogy very often, and you get a bully in the schoolyard, and so all the other non-bullies are justified in getting together and deterring the bully.
But those analogies are very bad.
You can't go from individuals to states, because it's a whole different ballgame.
States control populations through taxation and conscription and other ways, and so when they act, they're not just like an individual taking some action against a possible threat.
It's, when a state acts, it creates its own threat, it creates its own damage of innocent people.
And you just can't use those analogies.
And I hear even libertarians use analogies like that.
They all break down.
Well, and you know, it's funny, because I often do use those analogies in the sense of America being the toughest kid on the block, at least for now, and so then when you were a kid in the neighborhood, the toughest kid on the block, was he the biggest bully on the block, or did he protect the kids from the bully on the block?
And what kind of reputation do we want to have?
And in fact, you know, like you look at Israel, I think of Israel as moving into a new neighborhood and then thoroughly beating up everybody on the block and saying, all right, good, that ought to guarantee my security from now on, when in fact, all they've done is make sure that at least one day, things are going to work out quite the opposite.
Right, and then you left one element out of that.
Too sloppy, you think?
Not only did they beat up everyone on the block, they then claimed they were the victims of everyone on the block.
Yeah.
Well, so is that too sloppy, do you think, Sheldon?
Outgunned and outmanned by everybody.
Do you think that's too sloppy of me, though, to use those kind of neighborhood analogies like that?
Well, I think you've got to be very careful, because the other side will just pick up on that.
And, you know, you heard it before the U.S. went into Iraq, that, you know, this was just a mean guy in the neighborhood who was building some big gun pointed at your house.
I heard Walter Williams make that argument.
Of course, we had to preempt them.
You know, if your next-door neighbor was building some big gun, huge, you know, cannon pointed at your house, you don't have to wait for him to pull the trigger.
This was very common, so I think it's risky, because Suda Shinoy once closed a lecture she gave at the Mises Institute by saying, you know, a war is two states exploiting their own populations for mutual self-interest.
And you can't forget that in any war between two countries, there's actually four parties, roughly.
There's the two states, and then there's the two populations which are victimized by their own state, and then, you know, each state may also want to go on to victimize the other state.
But we know as a starting point, you have two states victimizing their own population.
And the war may be a convenient way to step up that exploitation.
If you are familiar with Robert Higgs' materials, which, of course, you are, governments use war, the threat of war, foreign crises, to beef up their power, which means further exploitation of their own population.
All right, now, I've got this incredible fear, and the debate last night gave me every reason to continue this paranoia that the American government, whether under McCain or under Obama, will, within the next year or two, deploy ground troops to Sudan and spread, they won't call it that, but it soon will be the war on terrorism throughout northern Africa.
I mean, we already have this proxy war in Somalia, but, you know, the whole Islamic extremist angle there is, you know, pretty shallow, pretty hollow.
But you put American ground forces in Sudan, and you're going to see a battle between nomads and farmers and, you know, 16 different factions or something, I think, fighting there now into a holy jihad against the American crusader occupiers.
Osama bin Laden called it in the summer of 2006, he said, look out for the Americans, they're coming to Sudan.
Be prepared to wage holy war against them there.
And here we are just following that script.
I fear, you may be right, I know, of course, Biden went on sometime last night about how we have to do something there.
And so I assume that means Obama's on board with that.
I don't think Biden would be contradicting him.
I don't know what McCain has said about the Darfur, but, you know, he's got this self-righteous streak in him where he may think this is a good thing for the U.S. to do.
We have to, we must dedicate ourselves to, you know, a cause larger than our selfish interests, as he keeps telling us.
And I don't look forward to that.
That would be very bad and, you know, there's a horrible thing going on over there.
But the idea that the U.S. can make it better, I have no confidence in.
Yeah.
And, you know, that whole, the number 16, I got that from a friend of mine, Bill Kelsey, who's relief pilot for a non-governmental organization over there and flies the do-gooders around a lot of the times and actual, you know, does good, you know, brings food to people who are about to start their jobs and that kind of thing.
And when I ask him about this, he talks about just the complicated situation that, you know, these people always graze their camels here, but now this guy's planted some tomatoes here.
So who is it, the guy who planted the tomatoes or the guy with the camels who has the right to eat there?
This is what people are killing each other over there.
And there are, at least, he said, as of, you know, the last time I checked, there were 16 major factions fighting over there, just in Darfur, never mind the rest of Sudan.
And the situation changes every single day.
The idea that a bunch of know-nothing North Americans are going to come in there and straighten things out rather than just making things worse is ridiculous on its face.
It's just stupid.
Well, it sounds like it's going to be Somalia, but magnified a few times, where allegedly we went in as a neutral peacekeeper and very shortly started taking sides, as well as confiscating recreational drugs that the people typically used, that weed, that cat that they chewed.
We went in and said, no, you can't do this anymore.
I mean, think of what we would say if some foreign power came and occupied us and took away our beer.
It was equivalent of that to that.
Well, that's for our own American government to do to us, not for foreigners.
Well, I think we'd see the return of the Minutemen or something like that if that happened.
But you're right.
If it's done by an American, then different.
Yeah.
All right.
So now let's talk about economics.
You have a great blog post at SheldonRichman.com, the free association blog here.
First of all, I just want to say in parentheses, I love your letter to the editor of the local paper there.
I couldn't believe that I read that.
You know, the editorials in that paper, the local, the Little Rock paper, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, are written by Paul Greenberg, the syndicated neocon columnist who's in the Washington Times and, you know, Town Hall and all that stuff.
He writes that stuff.
To have him, I don't want to preempt you here, but to have him claim that Herbert Hoover was, I don't know what, but you know, in other words, sat on the sidelines after the stock market crashed is totally absurd, totally ignorant.
And I was even shocked, not fond of that guy, but I'm very shocked that he didn't know that about Herbert Hoover, that Herbert Hoover was an activist and helped to make the Great Depression what it was.
Yeah.
I mean, isn't it, Rothbard's book on the Great Depression is all about Hoover.
He doesn't even really address FDR because he just basically says, well, FDR was more of the same.
Right.
Right.
I think it goes up basically to the election of FDR.
But he wrote about Hoover in a few different essays.
Hoover, and I have an article on the FEE website called America's Engineer, I mean, Hoover was the furthest thing from an advocate of laissez-faire that you could get.
But it's part of the mythology of the interventionists.
They have too much invested in this myth that Hoover sat on the sidelines and said, don't worry, the market will take care of things.
Because to argue otherwise is to undercut their own position.
But it was William Appelman Williams or one of the other new left historians, great new left revisionist historians, who said, who pointed out quite properly that Hoover was not the last of the old presidents, but the first of the new.
That's a direct quote.
Not the last of the old, but the first of the new.
And everything he did foreshadowed the New Deal.
And that's well documented by Rothbard and others.
Right.
Okay.
Now I wanted to get to the revised Concise Encyclopedia of Economics edited by David R. Henderson.
It's online at the Liberty Fund's Library of Economics and Liberty website.
And your contribution to the encyclopedia is the article on fascism.
And now most people, you say fascism and it means men in gray coats, goose stepping down the street, murdering a Jew or acting like a lunatic for no reason because of the terrorist government that they serve.
And yet this is an economic term and it describes a particular economic situation.
In your definition, you're very careful to distinguish it from the state capitalist model that we have here in America, because you say, no, literally in fascism, we're talking about virtually the entire takeover of private property by state power.
And while we have a very neo-mercantilist type imperial system here, we don't have fascism yet.
And I guess my question is, does it look to you like we're headed that way?
My friend in the chat room just notified me that the House of Representatives has gone ahead and passed their version of the $850 billion now, of course, bailout.
And so the victory of last week is over, or the victory of Sunday is over by Friday.
But the Dow was up 124.
You're missing the whole story.
Oh, yeah, I guess I must be.
Sorry, 122.
It's changing by the moment.
122.
But the serious question here, though, is that the U.S. government, in doing all these bailouts, they are taking over this stock.
They own 80% of AIG now, et cetera, like that.
And so I guess my question is, do you really think that this is a serious revolution within the forum happening now, that our state capitalist, mercantilist, imperialist system is actually becoming outright fascism in this country?
Well, if we're going to be very strict about the definition, as I tried to point out in that article in the encyclopedia, the Dow's only up 87.
It's actually falling since the passage.
Maybe they were wrong about this.
But get back to the other point.
In Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, they actually did have four- and five-year plans.
It's very similar to what the Russians tried to do.
So if we're going to be really strict about this, it's not just a heavy presence of the U.S., of the government in the economy owning parts of companies or even substantial parts of companies.
You know, there's a continuum here.
But if it's going to be outright fascism, we're going to need to see multi-year plans dictating the terms of production and things like that.
I don't see it getting to that stage, certainly not in the near future.
I think there's something about the American, I don't know what you'd want to call it, just American character, that would be over the line.
I think they need many more decades of being softened up ideologically to permit that.
But that doesn't mean the government can't move strongly in that direction, like it is doing with this bailout and these other things that you just mentioned.
I mean, they now hold Fannie and Freddie in a full conservatorship, even though they were government-related right along.
But now the government is the major mortgagee in the country.
Because over the last year or so, 70 or so percent of mortgages were underwritten or held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, and the government now controls Fannie Mae, fully controls Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
You know, this other stuff, it's going to now be buying up everybody's junk paper, or at least all the big guys' junk paper.
And it now will hold many more mortgages as a result of this.
So the government is ultimately the banker that holds the, I don't know, could repossess that land if you don't pay your mortgage, the government could end up being a huge land owner as a result of all this.
It's a very ominous step that's being taken for lots of reasons.
I mean, in its own right, it certainly is, but what makes it doubly so is that the government created the problem in the first place in various ways.
And the very people you see spearheading this bailout are the very people that got us into the mess, like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and those guys.
This is very, very ominous, very worrisome.
We had that one good day Monday where we could celebrate, but, you know, I never was confident that it would hold.
It doesn't take much to buy a congressman, by the way, you know.
It's within the reach of a lot of people just throwing a little pork barrel stuff.
And I forget what they put in.
You know, it's hard to believe what they put into this bill just to win votes.
Mental health parity in insurance, and that's something they've wanted for years and years and years.
It has no relationship to this issue, and that they called for the bill to win over a few votes.
I mean, this is, everybody should see what politics is and then run for the toilet before you lose your lunch.
I mean, this is totally disgusting.
Well, going back to the Great Depression here, to me this is always such an important lesson.
Basically, the Republicans have been Hooverites all along.
You know, they can call themselves conservatives.
And I guess they are conservatives, and they want to use, progressivism and conservatism are really the same thing in a large sense, in that they want to use state power to make things their way, even if they differ on what way that ought to be, I guess, to a certain degree.
But I think most people just take for granted, they look at George Bush and Dick Cheney and simply see corporatism, you know, right in front of their face.
But, here's the important point to me.
The Democrats are a bunch of fascists, too.
And Philip Drew Administrators, the book, the anonymously published book of Colonel Edward Mandel House, who was basically Woodrow Wilson's Cheney, and in this book he talks about, wouldn't it be great if I was the fascist dictator of America, and here's how I would set it up.
There'd be a bureaucrat on every board of directors, there'd be old age pensions, central banking and a League of Nations, and all these things that are the Democratic Party platform of the 20th and now the 21st century.
And in fact, this was back before Mussolini was a bad guy.
Obviously he was evil all along, but this is back when he was a popular guy.
Here, Colonel Edward House bragged that, I anticipated Mussolini by several years.
And now this is the very same, this is the New Deal.
This is Philip Drew, and his takeover of America is what Woodrow Wilson accomplished to great degrees during World War I, and then FDR finished the job on us, didn't he?
Well, you could say it began in the Progressive Era, even before Wilson, but even in the late 19th century, the ICC in 1887, so it was gestating for a while.
What's the ICC?
Tell us about it.
The Interstate Commerce Commission?
It was the Interstate Commerce Commission.
It's actually one of the agencies that actually died under deregulation of trucking and some other things beginning in the Carter years, and it was actually phased out.
Now, that doesn't mean a lot of the duties weren't reassigned to other institutions, and they were, but the ICC itself does not exist any longer.
I think it finally died under Reagan, but it was also in motion by Carter.
But here's the thing I think, this is a serious issue.
The free market movement is, in my view, back to square one, if not even further back than that, like negative something.
When you think of what's going on today, I mean, we've been at this, he's been at it for 60 years, the Foundation for Economic Education, lots of other free market organizations have existed for 20 years, 30 years, and yet, look what's going on.
The government is taking over, you know, taking over acquiring stock in banks, buying their bad paper, bailing out investment banks and big, wealthy, well-connected people on the basis of, you know, they're either going to print the money or borrow the money, one way or another, the taxpayers or consumers get hurt.
The corporate state has been stripped bare for all to see.
It's not a free market economy, it's not a free enterprise economy, except maybe for, you know, the small businesses.
Yeah, they can go bankrupt, but if you're well-connected, you know, you're too big to fail.
And so it's a con game, and it's clear for everyone to see.
But, you know, lots of free market people, I think, have missed the point about this, and I think part of the problem has been the alliance that they made with the conservatives over the years, as during the Cold War, for whatever reason, they thought they needed to team up against the left, against socialism, against communism, but it was a bargain with the devil, because we ended up getting co-opted, because lots of free market conservatives, unfortunately, seem to act like the following, that essentially, we have a free enterprise economy.
But the problem is, there's this thin layer of government regulation overlaying it, and if we don't scrape away that thin layer, we'll have a free market economy again, and we'll have capitalism again.
I don't like the word capitalism, because capitalism means, I think, what, historically, it has meant, namely government intervention on behalf of capital.
That's not the free market.
But here's the problem, it's not the case that there's just a thin layer of intervention that we need to scrape away, and then everything will be fine.
The government's tentacles, the government-business partnership has tentacles that go very, very deep, and a very long way back, particularly through finance.
The government's always been involved in money and finance.
It's been more ad hoc before the Fed was actually set up, but it was always involved, and states have been involved as well.
And of course, finance means the whole economy's involved, because finance ends up touching everything.
You know, money is everywhere, it's half of every transaction, and businesses are constantly having to borrow money, and so if you control finance, you have a good bit of control over the entire economy.
So this is not just some little thing we need to scrape away to reveal the free market.
We need a radical solution that will literally root out the government's entrenched hold over our economic activities, and by that I mean that and their business partners outside.
And you know, I think another symptom of the partnership that some libertarians have made with conservatism has also given libertarians the name of, oh, you people are just concerned about staying rich and white and damn everybody else, and your biggest priority is kicking the poorest, weakest among us off of welfare, rather than seeing us as the very best opposition to the warfare state, and to all the corporate socialism, and all the ways that the very richest and most powerful among us transfer wealth from those poorest and most weak among us to themselves.
That's right.
I agree with that, and this has done incalculable damage to us.
We're constantly fighting it, we're constantly on the defensive.
Conservatism is the progressivism, the truest form of progressivism, the truest form of defense of the most vulnerable people in society, because they are made vulnerable and kept vulnerable and then exploited by state intervention.
And we have a very difficult time communicating this, because we have all that right-wing baggage.
And, you know, here's another way to put it.
Any free market guy that says, you know, I don't like Obama, I don't like McCain, but McCain's going to be more free market, even if it's a little bit more struggle with McCain.
That is such a losing strategy, you'd think people would know by now, for the following reason.
Let's imagine Gore or Kerry had been elected president, and they were having all these financial problems, which we would have had, because nothing would have changed.
Would anybody, would the New York Times or anybody else be saying, if it wasn't for that do-nothing, hate-government, laissez-faire Gore administration, we wouldn't be having these problems?
No one would be saying that, because no one would believe it.
But any time there's a Republican in there, they can blame laissez-faire.
Even though there's no laissez-faire, no resemblance between George Bush and laissez-faire, that won't stop a whole bunch of people in the establishment from saying, that's what's causing the problems.
So we are constantly stuck fighting on the defensive against that sort of thing.
I'd rather have a Democrat in any day.
At least I don't have to fight that war.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know how loud the Libertarian movement's voice is.
I guess it's louder than it has been in a long, long time.
And at least we have Dr. Paul on TV opposing this bailout at all costs.
And it's funny, actually.
I saw one yesterday where he was on Bloomberg or something, where the lady, she's just convinced, I don't know for what reason, but the lady interviewing him, just when she's telling him goodbye, she says, eh, Ron Paul, firm in his beliefs.
She was clearly puzzled.
But at least there's somebody up there who everybody knows is the most pro-capitalist and is the most opposed to this bailout.
I don't know whether that's really going to get through to anybody, but it's one good example of us out there in the mainstream.
Well, we have to hone our message.
I saw Ron on CNN probably last week, the week before, and I thought he was kind of all over the map.
I think we needed to have a more of a sort of a laser beam answer.
You can't bring everything in and think people are going to grasp it.
And I think, for example, in the current matter, we really need to zero in on the government-sponsored enterprises that got all kinds of favors from the government, plus the implicit guarantee of a bailout, and all the ways that the government promoted homeownership to low-income people.
We should not be presenting this as a failure of the welfare state, which is sort of what the right wants to do.
And some of them even blame minorities, because this was a program presumably to get minorities into homeownership.
Well, that was part of it.
But first of all, it's not the minorities' fault.
But this is not really a welfare state failure.
This is a corporate state failure.
The poor, once again, are the pawns for rent-seeking and political profit-seeking.
This whole stuff about getting low-income people into homes might have been presented in the name of spreading the American dream through homeownership, but the real agenda was to divert money from all the ways that consumers would be spending it, divert it into the banking and to the housing industry, the construction industry.
This was a corporate state failure, not a welfare state failure.
Yep.
Well, you keep telling them.
I'll try.
All right, everybody, that's Sheldon Richman.
He's a senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org.
His blog is called Free Association, SheldonFreeAssociation.blogspot.com, and SheldonRichman.com leads right to it, too, right?
Yes.
Okay, good deal.
SheldonRichman.com.
Thanks very much for your time today.
My pleasure, Scott.
