All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And now to continue our Patriots Day coverage, April 19th, 2011, also known as death by government day.
Uh, we turned to Tom Woods.
He's a historian and an economist.
He keeps the website tomwoods.com.
He's a scholar at the Mises Institute.
He's written a ton of books.
You stack them all up.
They probably weigh more than you and I combined, uh, all of you.
And, uh, you can check them all out at, uh, tomwoods.com.
Of course, uh, the latest is rollback, uh, a very important book.
He also, uh, co-edited we, who dared say no to war with Murray Polner and, uh, did a lot of other great work along those lines.
Uh, welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
Doing great, Scott.
Thank you.
Well, uh, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And I was hoping that you could give us a little bit of a history lesson.
I don't want to spend way too much time on, uh, really any one of these things.
Cause there's a few different things I wanted to ask you about, but I was hoping we could start with, uh, the battle of Lexington and Concord on this day, April 19th, 1775, and what was really the beginning, I think, of the American revolution.
Yeah, sure.
Well, let me start off, if you don't mind, just with the basic background as to where the, where things stood politically between the British and the colonists on the eve of this battle.
I mean, basically in the wake of the Boston Tea Party in 1773, the British decided to crack down on the colonies.
They felt that they, you know, they had been lenient in the past.
They had repealed taxes in the past.
They had, they had yielded on the Stamp Act and that now this was a time that they really needed to press on and really insist on parliamentary authority over the colonies.
So the colonists had just, had just, uh, in 1774 had just endured a series of acts called the Coercive Act that were mainly intended to isolate Boston from the rest of the colonies by punishing them particularly severely and more or less, uh, just by making a lot of offices appointed rather than elected, taking away their power of self-government.
But in fact, of course, in the event, the, the other colonies rallied to the support of Boston, uh, Virginia and others, uh, were urging the calling of a continental Congress to deal with the, you know, what, what ought we do in response to the British?
So there was a determination to, to fight, uh, these encroachments on their liberties.
But let's also remember, um, in the same time in 1774, we also had the Quebec Act.
And when people hear about the Quebec Act, they also, they often think that the colonists were against this because it offered, you know, relief to Catholics in Quebec and the colonists hated Catholics.
And that's why they didn't like the Quebec Act.
But the, the key thing about the Quebec Act is the political, the political consequences.
What did that act do in Quebec?
Well, it, it, it basically said that Quebec is going to have a royally appointed council and a royally appointed governor and basically no popular, uh, elected assembly at all.
Uh, virtually all taxes will be imposed by parliament.
There'll be no trial by jury in civil cases.
And it was just one horrendous innovation after another.
And the colonists looked at that and thought, we're next.
This, this is exactly what they're going to try to pull on us.
So it was that sort of spirit.
Well, finally, General Gage in the colonies was under a lot of pressure to really make a stand against the colonists that the revolutionary fervor was spreading.
The British needed to make some type of, of real stand.
And so Gage decided that he would basically kill two birds with one stone.
He would go after John Hancock and Samuel Adams who were, who were popular revolutionary leaders.
And at the same time, also, he would, um, seize the colonial military stores that he, he knew were, uh, and he, but he knew were there and he knew where, where to find them.
And that's where Lexington and Concord began in 1775.
You had, uh, in April, you had the battle in Lexington.
What happened was the British have a very substantial force and it's about 70 minute men who are out there trying to stop them, which is really not, not going to happen.
So they were ordered to disperse and disarm and they were okay with dispersing, but they refused to disarm.
And of course, as we all know, this is when the shot heard round the world so called occurred.
And nobody knows who fired the first shot, but ultimately, uh, eight Americans were killed.
One, only one British soldier was wounded.
And either, depending on the account, either eight or 10 Americans were, were wounded.
And of course, Americans are being shot at as they're running away.
So it added to the, how egregious it was.
And then of course, remember when we were kids and we played that telephone game, you know, where you start off by saying, you know, my mother is baking a pie and then you whisper it to somebody.
And by the time you get to the end, it's turned into, you know, I'm, I'm, I've decided to move into a telephone booth or something like, I mean, you don't understand how this happened.
So likewise, the news of Lexington and Concord got to the other colonies and they were hearing outrageously exaggerated versions of what had happened.
So people were totally up in arcs.
And then the battle continues to Concord where at this time the colonists decided not to make any sort of unwise direct effort to come out and engage the British.
They sort of lulled them into a false sense of security.
They go into Concord.
They get hold of the colonial military stores.
But meanwhile, several hundred colonial militiamen have gathered in the rear and the British have to make a retreat to Boston.
And the whole way they're making that retreat, they are realizing how difficult a spot they're in because they're being hit in guerrilla-like fashion by random farmers and random militiamen.
And of course, from the British point of view, this is entirely ungentlemanly.
I mean, if we're going to have a fight, don't you know, you know, we come out with our guys and you come out with your guys and we stand across from each other and we shoot like you can't just fire at me at random while I'm making a retreat.
So that was the that was really what what kicked things off.
And it was when when Adam Samuel Adams heard about the shots fired at Lexington, his response was, oh, what a glorious morning is this?
Largely because at that point, it would be very unlikely that Americans would not, in fact, press forward to the logical conclusion of all this, which was that perhaps a peaceful reconciliation really was ultimately out of the question.
And we would have to push on to independence.
Right on well, and.
Geez, I don't know, I guess we could go back.
Well, there's one point I wanted to ask you about specifically, I guess, more than the others, which is the who fired first thing, because if I remembered right, whoever was the commander of the militia said, now, don't any of you guys fire first?
I mean, we don't know whether any of them did, but there were specific orders, right, to make sure that the British fire the first shot here.
They picked this fight, not us.
You know, I'm I'm inclined in that direction that that that's likely what happened in the same way that I mean, you know, there are a lot of cases in history like the Kent, the Kent State thing, you know, where, you know, somebody throws a rock and then suddenly everyone's mowed down.
So, I mean, it seems likely that that's probably what happened.
But I suppose we can't know for sure.
That is the legend, though.
I remember my junior high school version of history correctly, though, at least.
Right.
No, I'm pretty sure you do.
All right.
Well, now, another thing that's funny is when I was looking up this day in history, I found that in 1764, the British Parliament took America off the paper money standard and put us back on gold.
And I think that really pissed off Benjamin Franklin and them.
Right.
Well, partly Benjamin Franklin.
One of the reasons that he's been pushing for various paper money schemes was that his print shop got the contract to print the money.
So, I mean, there is, you know, there's a little bit of venality involved here.
It's not pure devotion to the common good, I would say.
Yeah, I just think that's a little bit ironical that now when we come back, I want to talk to you a little bit about the end of the gold standard in 1933 and what that may or may not have to do with our imperial circumstances as they exist right now, as they're as they're beginning to cease existing.
So everybody hang tight.
It's the great Tom Woods from Mises dot org.
Tom Woods dot com.
We're talking about this day in history, Patriots Day.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Tom Woods.
His website is Tom Woods dot com.
He's the author and or editor of Rollback, Nullification, Meltdown, We Who Dared Say No to War, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
Thirty three questions you're not supposed to ask about American history.
Well, actually, strike that and reverse it around about American history.
You're not supposed to ask the politically incorrect guide to American history and who killed the Constitution.
He writes at Lew Rockwell dot com at Mises dot org.
And again, yes, at Tom Woods dot com.
And actually, Tom, now that we're safe this side of the break, let me ask you a little bit about the Civil War.
It's the sesquicentennial of, I guess, the South's attempt to invade and conquer the North and and then Abraham Lincoln's heroic defense of the Republic from their aggression.
And so I was wondering, you know, if maybe you could touch a little bit on maybe some of the politically incorrect questions about the Civil War, as it's known, and maybe even the importance of why people ought to get their head straight about who really did what and why.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, you know, there's a lot of apologetics and myth making on both sides of this, frankly.
But I think people who are inclined to accept the, you know, the seventh grade textbook version, but yet who are also very anti-war and anti-American empire should realize that, of course, you know, the neocons constantly make reference to the Civil War.
They they view this as the example par excellence of the righteousness of the federal government stomping out its enemies.
And I mean, that's exactly how they view the whole world, the righteous federal government stomping out the angels versus devils view.
If you're inclined to believe that, you know, I think it needs to be revisited.
Now, it's true that I don't think it's helpful to argue that, you know, that the Southern secession didn't have anything to do with slavery.
I don't.
You can see in their own documents, they acknowledge a link between secession and slavery.
The issue is, what about the war and slavery?
That's an entirely separate question.
It's entirely separate whether the war itself was fought over slavery.
And the answer here is that, well, at least the first 18 months of Lincoln couldn't have been clearer about this.
I mean, I want to save the union.
I've said that again and again.
And if I could save it without freeing any of the slaves, I would I would absolutely do that.
And, you know, and he was willing to support an amendment to the Constitution that would have forever forbidden anyone from ever establishing any anti-slavery law or amending the Constitution in the future to abolish slavery.
If that's what it took to keep the union together, then that's what he's willing to do.
Now, again, there's no need to go to extremes.
I take him at his word that I see no reason not to take him at his word that he was morally opposed to slavery.
But he obviously had priorities that were greater than that.
And so what eventually happened was that you had one and a half million people dead, wounded or missing, basically on behalf of a political abstraction, namely the union.
One, you know, funny enough, by the time the thing was over, there was no union, it was the nation.
Right, exactly.
It was the United States is going to do this and that instead of our anymore.
Exactly.
And so it's not a surprise that, you know, people predicted that now that we've got this giant consolidated union and we have smacked down the states, it was pretty, you know, Robert E.
Lee said, look, I guarantee you this is going to become an imperial power now.
Guaranteed.
That's exactly.
Now, of course, we're not supposed to like Robert E.
Lee because he was in the South and whatever.
We all have to act like fifth graders.
But, you know, how prophetic could a guy be?
And Richard Weaver said the same thing, you know, was a great conservative in the 20th century.
He said it's no surprise that, you know, within a generation or two after the consolidation of the empire at home, we start to see movement toward empire abroad and kicking around our weaker neighbors to the South.
Well, yeah.
First thing they did was combine the northern southern armies together and send them west to finish killing off all the Indians.
Exactly right.
Yeah, there there's there's your righteous federal government marching on.
And so it goes to show that, you know, you get this giant consolidated union.
You know, I was just reading, I don't know, because everybody's weighing in on this subject.
I don't know.
Might have been something in Newsweek, my own fault for for reading a source like that.
But the guy was saying, well, you know, gosh, let's think of what would have happened if things had turned out differently.
And one of them was, you know, my gosh, if we'd had more than one political unit in, you know, in what is now the United States.
Well, gee, maybe we might not have entered World War One and think what a disaster that would have been like with both Americas or it was three or whatever units we would have been.
Would they all have entered World War One?
What a disaster if we had.
Are you kidding me?
Maybe the world might have been a lot different in a better way if the U.S. hadn't entered World War One.
Hey, if the U.S. hadn't entered World War One, no Soviet Union, no Nazi Germany, no French and British domination of the Middle East, then no Cold War, no none of this madness.
Now, maybe other bad things would have happened, but nothing as bad as what Woodrow Wilson did.
What you are proposing is an entirely reasonable and defensible, contrary to fact scenario that could very well have happened.
But we are all trained to believe that history had to turn out the way it did.
And the way it turned out is always the best possible way it could have turned out, because for some reason we've just been taught to always give the national government the moral benefit of the doubt.
Everything it did was always the best possible thing.
And so, I mean, if we could just have enough imagination, if we could stop being so brainwashed about just always constantly giving our allegiance to this centralized government and thinking that that's the only way to live, if we could just think independently for five seconds that maybe the alternate universe that might have existed might have been an improvement.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, before we run out of time here, I got to ask you about gold.
It was on this day in 1933 that Franklin Roosevelt outlawed it.
And, you know, the thing is, it's a complicated kind of thing, Tom.
And I know you're real good at saying it's simple, but I want to start with kind of everybody knows that if you're into the gold standard, that's just kookiness.
That was a long time ago.
You can't go back to that.
That's some crazy thing that weird gold bug type people believe or something.
And so do you have a real argument as to why our money ought to be based on gold instead of just the full faith and credit of the American government that promises to pay back the bondholders plus interest, which is the system now?
Well, given the limited time, I have an argument that should appeal to anti-war people, which is this again.
Yeah, I know that this is out of the mainstream, but, you know, peace is also out of the mainstream and peace deserves to be listened to.
Also, I would say that let's consider that during the major during World War One, for example, the major belligerents basically went off the gold standard.
I mean, the U.S. didn't, but it was a kind of phony baloney gold standard.
But basically, the major belligerents went off the gold standard so they could wage the war.
That should make you stop and think, wait a minute.
So you mean that if they observe the gold standard, it would have been harder for them to wage the war?
I mean, ask yourself that question.
Well, then wait a minute, then maybe all this stuff I've been told about how kooky and stupid the gold standard is, maybe the people who are saying that are the same people who say Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are kooky because they don't believe in the mainstream narrative of the U.S.
Well, that narrative is all screwed up.
So it is they are called they're golden.
They're not called golden fetters for nothing.
It limits the ability of the government to siphon off resources from the productive population for whatever purpose.
And typically it's for war making purposes.
The fact that you have to you don't have to go off of fiat paper money standard to wage a war.
You have to embrace that to wage a war.
Think about that.
If you really want to stop war making, maybe we have to stop the the money making a money creation machine.
That to me is the key thing.
Even Joseph Schumpeter was a great 20th century economist.
And he said very quickly, he said that even if you accept all the economic arguments that have ever been raised against the gold standard, he said you could still have a plausible reason for supporting it because of its link to political freedom and peace.
Well, you know, even under the nightmare scenario where, say, the European Union and the Chinese all build a bunch of ships and try to come and invade our coasts, it seems to me that, you know, in a real righteous war where it was actually worth it, we were really defending ourselves from the domination of some foreign government, then people would be willing to pay their taxes.
It's these imperial adventures that people aren't willing to pay for, that they have to bribe us with a stimulus check at the same time they're spending the money that they're printing that we'll feel the pain from later.
Exactly right.
I mean, people, when they really feel like they're threatened, they will go defend themselves.
Whereas in World War One, when after Wilson got us into the war, they had to propagandize the population endlessly to get enough people to to come along and be willing to fight it.
They had to do propaganda the likes of which the country had never seen.
Well, to me, if we really, really do need to defend ourselves, you don't need the propaganda.
People will see that people aren't stupid.
They'll they'll defend themselves.
Right.
Yeah.
Wilson said, well, the people, that is him and I guess Colonel House decided the people have volunteered en masse.
And that's what we call conscription of millions of people who did not come to volunteer and sign up.
What a scam artist that guy is.
We're going to tear him down from all the American classroom walls.
Yeah, no doubt.
Start with him.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I really appreciate your time, Tom.
You're the best.
My pleasure, Scott.
The guys in the chat room agree.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Tom Woods.
Tom Woods dot com, Mises dot org.
Read the new book, Roll Back.
I swear I'm going to get you on about that book here soon.
We'll be back.
