08/18/09 – Thomas E. Woods – The Scott Horton Show

This time I will escape.
I'm too young to die.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And Thomas E. Woods Jr. is here.
He's the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
33 questions you're not supposed to ask about American history.
We Who Dared Say No to War with Murray Polner.
Who Killed the Constitution with Kevin Gutzman.
And his newest one is Meltdown, a free market look at how the Federal Reserve completely screwed us.
Welcome back to the show.
Tom, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, thanks.
I'm looking at this great article that you have on 10thamendmentcenter.com.
And it's called The State's Rights Tradition Nobody Knows.
So I'll just go ahead and get us started with Everybody knows that states' rights is just code for oppressing black people.
And in fact, the history of this country is that the national government intervened in the 1860s to end slavery.
And intervened again in the 1960s to end Jim Crow.
And any kind of argument about the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions at this point is just an attempt to reinstate slavery and Jim Crow oppression of people in the South.
Tom, how dare you?
Well, I mean, of course you can give the current examples of people in California wanting to use medical marijuana and the federal government not allowing them to.
Why wouldn't they have every right to tell the federal government to go jump in a lake?
Which is perhaps more polite than Scott Horton would put it.
But nevertheless, why aren't they entitled to do that?
So the argument of my article, which I've expanded on in some of my books, is as follows.
It's true that you can take any meritorious thing and exploit it and use it for rotten purposes, right?
I mean, you might say in another context, even the Ku Klux Klan waved the American flag, but I won't start on the American flag issue on this program.
But my point would be that if you look at the fullness of the history, you look at all of American history, what you find is that a whole lot of the time when Americans say, we want local self-government, we want the federal government out of our business, you know, U.S. out of Virginia sort of thing, they're doing this on behalf of completely worthy causes.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson in 1798 was dealing with violations, flagrant violations of free speech, and he urged the state to resist.
It was an embargo that was imposed on New England that was choking off its maritime economy that was opposed, again, on states' rights grounds.
You have no power to – you can regulate commerce, but you don't have the power to extinguish it altogether.
You're destroying us.
The War of 1812, there were New England states that believed that was an offensive war, and they argued that the federal government had not been delegated the power to determine unilaterally whether any of the conditions calling out of the militia actually obtained.
And the states had to make that determination, and Connecticut said, we're not calling out anybody in the militia until we believe there's an actual danger of an invasion of our territory.
We're not calling them out to invade Canada.
And so when you look at it, case after case after case, it is in fact a mechanism that free people have used on behalf of peace, freedom, and if we define the terms correctly, what are really the most progressive causes imaginable.
We never hear this version of the history, though.
My own personal view – you don't have to share it, but my own personal view – is that it is not in the interest of anybody in the establishment for us to know this.
It's instead in our interest to know that states' rights always means oppression, and only some kind of a guy, you know, somebody with a – hiding his sheets in his drawer, you know, and has a funny hat would possibly want to exercise them.
But when you look at it, you actually see that this is a way that Jefferson and his followers believed you could stand up to the federal government, and for the same reasons that Hitler – and I hate to bring Hitler into this, but I'm going to anyway – for the same reasons Hitler hated these ideas.
I mean, Hitler absolutely hated the states' rights tradition in America, as he made clear in Mein Kampf, and he hated it in Germany, precisely for the reason Jefferson liked it.
It stood in the way of the acquisition of total power in the hands of someone who claimed to speak for the people, as all demagogues do.
Right, all right.
Well, so let's get through a few things here, or, you know, take our time and go through.
You mentioned Jefferson's standing up for free speech, and that's a reference, of course, to – I think his was the Kentucky Resolution, and Madison wrote the Virginia Resolution, right?
Yeah, right.
And these were about basically asserting the power of the states to nullify John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, is that it?
Yeah, exactly.
They didn't, in fact, go ahead and do the nullifying.
What they were doing was proposing to the states that this was a constitutional remedy for an unconstitutional law.
And what I've shown in some of my writing, and my friend Kevin Gutzman has likewise shown, is that these are not ideas that Jefferson just sort of pulled out of a hat as sort of an ad hoc way of opposing the Alien and Sedition Acts.
These ideas go back ten years and even beyond, but at least ten years to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, when the Virginians who were at that convention, some of whom were skeptical of the Constitution, were about to vote on the Constitution.
They were assured by supporters of the Constitution, by the Federalists, by people who sat on the five-person committee charged with drafting the instrument of ratification.
They were told by people like Edmund Randolph that this Constitution, the Federal Government created under it, will have only the powers expressly delegated to it.
And they used the word expressly in there, expressly delegated, and that if the Federal Government should go beyond those powers, then Virginia would be exonerated from this agreement.
So this was clear in people's minds, and already by 1790, Patrick Henry was reminding his fellow Virginians of these promises and saying, look at what Alexander Hamilton is doing with his financial shenanigans.
These are unconstitutional.
We were told two years ago that we wouldn't be bound by unconstitutional laws.
Jefferson's friend, John Taylor of Caroline, proposed that the state legislatures ought to be able to review federal legislation, and then later, as nullification theory developed, the idea became that you should convene a nullification convention that would be akin to the ratifying conventions that were had for the Constitution.
So this is not something Jefferson just came up with.
It was his view that this was the moderate middle ground.
He was Thomas Moderate Jefferson.
On the one hand, you could have total submission and just be a lame-o who just said, well, you know, it's the government after all.
Let them do what they want.
Or you could secede from the Union, which Jefferson did believe you had the right to do, which he thought was an extreme remedy to be saved for other situations.
So this is the middle ground.
You can stay in the Union while resisting the unconstitutional legislation.
And in follow-up resolutions in 1799 in Kentucky, the word nullification was, in fact, introduced.
So he's just very clearly stating this.
And at the time, Virginia and Kentucky did not get friendly responses from the other states, most of which either ignored the resolutions or, like in the case of Massachusetts, wrote counter-resolutions that were opposed to them.
But actions speak louder than words, because about ten years later, or even less, what part of the country is most vocal in supporting these ideas?
Well, Massachusetts and New England.
I mean, it sort of depends on whose ox is being gored.
But it turns out that the northern states in the antebellum period were actually more likely to advert to these principles than the southern ones.
Now I just want to pick a fight with you here about semantics.
States don't really have rights.
They have reserved powers.
People have rights.
Yeah, I agree completely that it's an unfortunate phrase, but in a way it's like trying to, you know, I mean, civil war is a dumb term too.
But it's one of these things where either I'm going to spend the rest of my life renaming every single term in the universe and then not being understood, or sometimes you just have to suck it up and just hope people understand you're speaking it short.
Right, I understand.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing for our news headlines, right?
This state does this, this, and that.
Well, it just means their government did this.
Or when we say the Defense Department.
You know, we all know that would be yes.
It's the Office Department.
I mean, the very fact that they needed to establish a Department of Homeland Security indicates that.
Well, then what's the Defense Department been doing?
Well, now, besides massacring Indians, was the War of 1812 the first aggressive war of the new federal army?
I guess in terms of the major wars, yeah, I guess you would argue that.
I mean, to be fair, there were many Americans who were of the view this was a defensive war in that it was meant as retaliation against British depredations on American trade and almost conscripting of Americans by means of its impressment of people into the British Navy.
Some of whom were American citizens.
So you're really not, that is sort of considered to be kidnapping.
So there were some people who felt like that's what they were fighting against.
But if that really were what the war was all about, then how come the New England states, the ones that presumably the offenses against American trade would most affect, why were they the most anti-war?
I mean, that's sort of a glaring contradiction.
And that's why you see a lot of suspicion.
Right, they call it Mr. Madison's War.
Exactly.
Because their view was, you know, we don't like what the British are doing with our trade either.
But they had developed a system whereby they could take out insurance against this.
And they could deal with it one way or another.
Whereas shutting down trade altogether and threatening a very important trading partner, they just didn't, they were totally opposed to this.
Especially because they believed it was really a pretext for people to try to engage in the acquisition of Canada.
Because, again, Canada, and it's really creepy if you read some of the rhetoric.
The view was that the Canadians were suffering under the oppressive yoke of the British.
And they were just waiting for their liberators to come marching over the border.
And they'd throw flowers at our feet and it would be wonderful.
However, if they didn't throw flowers at our feet and they resisted, well, then that meant they were a race of debased paltroons who deserved every bit of violence the Americans could shell out at them.
So it's the usual sort of propaganda, I mean, just 200 years old.
Yeah, the exact same thing over and over again.
Well, now, so this is an interesting thing.
You have John Adams, who was nominally a Federalist, or the Federalists were under him anyway.
He was kind of before that, the real party thing.
But basically you have Jefferson and Madison writing these Kentucky and Virginia resolutions saying, let there be no more faith in man to govern, but let him be bound by the chains of the Constitution.
And Jefferson gets in power.
And as you mentioned previously, he puts on this embargo, which is basically one of the major causes leading up to the War of 1812 of his buddy James Madison, his successor in power.
These two guys got us into this war.
And at the same time, you had people like Massachusetts adopting the principles of the Virginia and the Kentucky resolutions against the authors of them.
Yeah, that's true.
And so it's understandable that people would draw the cynical conclusion that nobody really holds any principles.
You know, this is all just, you know, whatever you can reach for that's going to support the position you hold, you'll reach for it.
And that's a perfectly legitimate complaint.
And I think it touches on something you and I were talking about privately the other day, which is that a lot of times, you know, libertarians look at left and right and feel like they're totally inconsistent.
You know, they supposedly favor property and freedom, but they favor police state.
And the other ones are supposedly all about questioning authority, but then they'll do whatever the Department of Homeland Security wants.
I mean, whatever.
I mean, whatever it is, there's a lack of consistency.
But that doesn't mean that there weren't some people who were very consistent.
And so there are followers of the Jeffersonian version of the Republican Party, like John Randolph Roanoke, who belonged to the so-called Tertium Quids, who were basically more Jeffersonian than Jefferson, who hectored Jefferson all during his political career on the ground that he wasn't living up to his professed ideals.
So there were people like you and me back in the 19th century trying to say, you know, Tom, you're killing me here, baby.
Come on now.
You get to be president and you're going to act like this?
So it's Lew Rockwell's rule that the presidents are always better, you know, after they leave office.
Because Jefferson went back to being great.
Jefferson was better than ever after he left the presidency.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and it's one of my favorite parts of his story, that he didn't want president on his tombstone.
He only wanted author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the – oh, author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and founder of the University of Virginia.
No mention of the presidency, because he was ashamed of what he'd done.
And, you know, two of those three things pertain specifically to Virginia.
He had such a commitment to his state that two-thirds of the things he wanted to be most remembered for had to do with his state.
Nobody thought this was evil or wicked or unpatriotic.
This was just normal, that you have more of a connection to things that are closer to you than you do to abstractions that are far away.
By the way, let me point out, just because I want to make sure we do get to it, one of my favorite examples of people referring to what became known as the Principles of 98.
These are the principles we laid out in the Virginia-Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which are, very quickly, the federal government is a government of limited, enumerated powers.
It has only those powers the states have delegated to it.
And if it should try to exceed those powers, then the states are duty-bound to nullify the offending laws.
Well, in 1814, one of the great speeches in all of American history was delivered by Daniel Webster, who was serving in the House at that time from Massachusetts.
And Webster was concerned about military conscription in order to beef up the forces for the War of 1812.
And he got up and gave a speech, which you can find anywhere.
Just type in Daniel Webster Conscription, and it will come right up.
And you can find it in We Who Dared Say No to War.
That's right.
Thank you for promoting my book.
You can also find it in We Who Dared Say No to War.
And he says in there, it's fantastic, wonderful.
I mean, the whole thing is quotable.
But what's very significant is he says that if the federal government should attempt this mad plan, then it would be the duty of Massachusetts to interpose its authority, which is, in effect, the same thing as nullification.
There's no difference I can see.
The idea would be the government of Massachusetts should stand between the federal government on the one hand and its clawing hands, and the people of Massachusetts, the free people of Massachusetts on the other.
And Massachusetts should stand up and defend them to make sure not a single person is taken out of the state of Massachusetts against its will to fight in this foolish war.
Now, that is a states' rights argument against the empire.
And Lew Rockwell often talks about the good left and the bad left.
He says the good left are people who, whatever their monetary views, they're willing to disagree with the New York Times and Newsweek and their seventh-grade teacher on the subject of the Federal Reserve, because obviously the Fed, as we all know, was established by the wealthiest, most influential bankers for the purpose of enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of the public.
Or you could, by the way, say the wealthiest, most influential bankers established the Fed out of a sheer desire to promote the common good, which would be the only time I'd ever hear the left taking that naive a view.
But leftists who see this and say there's something fishy about the Fed, they're the good left.
Well, likewise, I also believe another qualification, I realize how condescending this sounds, I'm going to decide what the good left, but from my point of view, leftists who are willing to use any peaceful means at their disposal that is within the American tradition, like nullification, I consider to be among the good left.
Kirkpatrick Sayle is an example.
His view is that the American empire is a moral abomination, and if we can use these smaller units, as imperfect as they are, I mean, nobody thinks the government of Massachusetts is a wonderful thing, it's a criminal organization, it's terrible, but if we can use it as a shield against the federal government, then for heaven's sake, why don't we use it?
This is not Birmingham 1963.
It's time to move on.
Well, you know, I don't know about the state where you're from, or wherever you've lived, but in Texas, where I'm from, the Bill of Rights reads quite different than the National Bill of Rights.
The National Bill of Rights says, Congress, you can't do this, and this right shall not be violated, and you may not violate this or that, and if you're going to put somebody on trial, you can only do it following these guidelines, and that kind of thing.
Now, the Texas Bill of Rights, I believe virtually every single one of them, and it's like 14 or 15, they are mandates to the state government.
The state of Texas must protect your right of free speech.
They must protect your right to bear arms.
They must protect your right to be secure in their house.
So, if we just take that literally, if the national government is violating the Fourth Amendment, it ought to be the job of your sheriff's department or your state troopers or whatever in your state to stand and block them at your front door until they produce that warrant, if it comes down to it.
And instead, we have this supremacy clause, I guess, over rules all, and all local authorities defer to federal authorities no matter what, always.
Right, and we should remember, though, and I've heard this a lot as an argument against nullification, that, oh, well, it disregards the supremacy clause.
But this begs the question, because the supremacy clause says that the Constitution and laws made in pursuance thereof override and supersede any other laws to the contrary.
But that's exactly the question at issue.
Is the law itself, is it pursuant to the Constitution?
Is it, in fact, a constitutional law?
That's the question.
So if the laws that the federal government are passing are not constitutional, then the supremacy clause is totally irrelevant.
But we've been trained in our government detention centers, the propaganda factories that we send our unfortunate kids to, that this is one nation, indivisible, and so it would be almost traitorous to stand up to the federal government.
Well, yeah, of course they would love us all to be a bunch of stooges like that who believe that it's traitorous to stand up to a group of creeps in Washington, D.C.
It's not in any way traitorous, whatever that term means in this context, because that would be news to Thomas Jefferson and the whole line of Virginia political thinkers who followed him.
And, you know, if it's between me and Jefferson on the one hand and some centralizing neocon hack on the other, I'm pretty happy with those odds, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and it doesn't matter if you convince the majority of the people as long as, you know, you're right.
Well, let me ask you about this, too.
You talk about the good left.
How about the abolitionists of the north?
Certainly they must have been, all to a man, a bunch of nationalist centralizers who wanted the presidency to abolish slavery, right?
Yeah, you know, you would think that's the impression you get, and interestingly we've got some very interesting stuff by anti-war abolitionists in We Who Dared to Say No to War, a book I encourage, by the way.
But we'll just focus on here, of course, William Lloyd Garrison, who was the most uncompromising fighter against slavery and who had a wonderful newspaper, The Liberator.
Garrison required, because he also was part of the New England Anti-Slavery Association, he required members, and the American anti-slavery one as well, to swear that they would work toward the dissolving of the American Union.
That was his view, that we've got to get out of this thing.
It's a moral abomination that we have to uphold slavery in this union.
So here he disagreed with Lysander Spooner, who actually held the Constitution was anti-slavery.
Garrison said, no, it's a compact with the devil.
He used to publicly burn it on July 4th.
And so his view was, no, the sooner we get out of this, the better, because we won't be morally tainted by slavery any longer, and secondly, it'll be easier to help the slaves to escape, because we won't be under any legal obligation to return them.
And then in tandem with this, we have, of course, the fugitive slave...
Wait, wait, wait, you're talking real fast.
Elaborate on that a little bit.
Oh, sorry, just because I took a run out of time.
Elaborate on it again?
Elaborate on the people of the North being forced by the national law to return slaves to the South, and how that served as a subsidy and protection for slavery.
Yeah, exactly.
In fact, there's a great scholarly article you can Google, by my friend Mark Thornton, called Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process, in which he goes down, ticks off the ways in which slavery was being subsidized by various government measures that socialized the cost of slavery onto the whole population.
And one of these is fugitive slave laws, which it's true, there is a clause in the Constitution, unfortunately, that at least strongly appears to call for the return of runaway slaves.
Spooner disagrees with this, but the consensus is it calls for the return of runaway slaves.
So you would think that this means the federal government then can use any means whatsoever to go chasing after those slaves.
And the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, according to many abolitionists, was just full of constitutional outrages, requiring people to go out and round up slaves, and requiring the states to do this and that, and not allowing jury trials.
The guy, the slave owner, could just show up and say, yep, that's the guy, and just pull him out, and that was the end of it.
That was it.
And so a lot of northerners were of the opinion that this was an abomination, and so they did everything they could to be as uncooperative as possible in enforcing that law.
And when Wisconsin was challenged on this, that, hey, you're really, really lax in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1859 responded by quoting word for word from Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 on the grounds that we are not under any obligation to enforce an unconstitutional law which they believe the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to be.
To the contrary, we are bound to oppose it, because if we simply say that whatever the federal government does, well, it has a monopoly on interpreting the Constitution, so it's automatically right, well, then we have no Constitution.
So they took the complete hard-line Jeffersonian position on this, and they used these ideas in the battle against slavery.
And you know, it's funny, because when the case of – I know I forget exactly, but I'm sure you cover this at length in your book, the Marbury v.
Madison decision.
If I remember right, that was the first one where the Supreme Court basically assumed to themselves the ultimate power to decide what's constitutional and what's not.
And Jefferson was so angry, he said that this decision ought to be brought out before the people and denounced as not law.
Somehow there ought to be a way for the people to overrule the Supreme Court.
How dare they usurp this power to themselves.
It's interesting to recall what Jefferson's view of the Supreme Court was, even though he wasn't at the Constitutional Convention.
His view was that the Supreme Court should be largely an advisory body, that if you just say they've got a monopoly on interpreting the Constitution, then they're just running the country, in effect.
So his view was not judicial review, but concurrent review, in which all three branches of the federal government were each obligated to interpret the Constitution as they believed it should be, which is why, even though the Supreme Court had said a government-established national bank is perfectly constitutional, Andrew Jackson was perfectly at liberty under this constitutional understanding to oppose it strongly on the grounds that, in his view, it was unconstitutional.
Now, I realize that this sounds like from another universe, where the Supreme Court would be the lenient one, and the President would be the constitutional stickler.
I mean, this is probably not going to come up again in the near future, but it did happen.
Well, Andrew Jackson was from a different set than Nicholas Biddle, that's all.
Well, now, check this out.
Anthony Gregory, your friend and mine, has this article at StrikeTheRoot.com called The Mere Absurdity of Checks and Balances.
And, of course, this is a very anarcho-capitalist perspective, but here he's quoting Thomas Paine, and I forget if it's from Common Sense or the Rights of Man.
It's from Common Sense.
Thomas Paine says that, To say that the Constitution of England is a union of three powers, reciprocally checking each other, is farcical.
Either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.
First, that the king is not to be trusted without being looked after.
Or, in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.
Secondly, that the commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the crown.
But as the same Constitution, which gives the commons the power to check the king by withholding the supplies, gives afterwards the king the power to check the commons by empowering him to reject their other bills, it again supposes that the king is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him.
A mere absurdity.
And this is the same thing you could talk about on the national government level, but, of course, the same thing applies when it comes to the separations of powers between the states and the national government in this country, especially because of all the wars we've had and all the massive changes to our society and the rule of law every time we have one of these wars.
The states, wouldn't you say, Tom Woods, are basically just big counties now that exist at the whim of the national government?
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the national government, the president, or, hell, the Joint Chiefs of Staff started appointing our governors or something.
Would you?
Well, I mean, I think, by and large, they want to maintain the outward appearance of the republic, you know, sort of as Garrett Garrett would say.
So I would be slightly surprised by that.
What they'd rather do is just make sure two stooges are running for the office so that they win no matter what happens.
But, yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
First of all, Jefferson himself was skeptical of the separation of powers thing, because he said, what would be to stop the three branches from just ganging up on the people?
And I don't see why that wouldn't happen.
And so that's why he was more interested in the state versus federal government issue.
But even there, later in his life, he began to think that even that was insufficient.
And so he proposed a scheme whereby the vast bulk of decision-making authority would be reposed at the level of the ward, which is just really a part of a city, no more than that.
And that would be where all these decisions would be made.
So it would be the ward against the state, against the federal government, but all with the aim of maximizing the liberty of the individual.
I mean, these are all pragmatic.
These aren't arrangements to be worshipped.
These are arrangements that are means to an end.
They're not ends in themselves.
But the idea is that you are more likely to, as Hayek said, F.A.
Hayek said, that liberty is more likely to be preserved in the future in small states.
That at least there's the remotest chance in a small area, when a lot of people know each other, that it'll be harder to get away with stuff than it is.
I mean, we have no idea what these crooks get away with on a daily basis, right?
I mean, things like, let me just take a current example.
There's all this interest in auditing the Federal Reserve System.
And people are asking, well, what do you expect to find when you audit the Fed?
And the very fact that we really don't even know what we expect to find indicates how utterly remote these institutions are from us.
I have a funny feeling that one thing we might find is the involvement of the Federal Reserve System in foreign policy.
And it's involvement with the CIA.
I mean, how could we not expect something like this?
And yet, how could that happen at your local town hall?
I mean, there's just no way with people keeping an eye on it.
So I'm not saying, therefore, I favor tiny little states rather than bigger ones.
But I say that if I had my choice, I'd rather have a whole bunch of tiny ones than one gigantic one.
Well, and I'm afraid the lesson may be lost on most progressives and liberals now.
But there was a time, oh, I don't know, a year ago, when you might could have got some liberals to, well, like, for example, key into one of your early messages there about the drug war and how the states are starting to decriminalize more and more medical marijuana and these kinds of things.
And the state continues to run roughshod over that.
And in fact, there was an article at TomPain.com, which was a progressive website, maybe still is, that was saying, yeah, rethinking states' rights and federalism and whatever.
And it's not like even in Missouri, they're not going to go back to Jim Crow, even if we did reinstate the Constitution, right?
We'll pass that.
Yeah, and beyond, I mean, all you have to do there is look at, I mean, especially in an age of instant communication, I mean, no one would ever possibly let this happen.
But beyond that, look at the demographic shifts.
Where have blacks been moving to the past 20 years?
They've been moving from the north to the south overwhelmingly.
Why have they been doing that?
Because they found that actually, at this point in history, this is actually, the south where I live is a very congenial place for blacks to live.
My experience living down here for several years is that relations between the races are much, much warmer than they were when I lived in New York for many years.
And you could cut the tension with a knife half the time.
You do not see that down here.
So I think that that's not anything to worry about.
But I think what we're facing here is there are some people, again, I mentioned Kirkpatrick Sale, but there are others, possibly my friend Murray Palmer, who have the belief that whatever the outcome of a local decision, the fact that it's a local decision is what matters.
Let a hundred flowers bloom.
You'll have a place to live that you like, and I'll have a place to live that I like, and we won't have neocons telling everybody how they all have to live.
And sure, I'm not going to like what you're doing.
You're not going to like what I'm doing.
But as long as we're not trying to enforce this on everybody through nine Supreme Court justices or through force, well, we can still make our society kind of livable in a country of 300 million people with radically different approaches to how they look at the world.
Whereas you have, on the other hand, people on the left and right who are of the belief that, yes, I like local self-government when the bad guys are in power so I can get the things I want.
But then when the good guys are in power and I can force these things on everybody else, then that's what I want to do.
Well, then these are basically imperialists.
It's very hard to talk an imperialist off the ledge.
This is how they're going to be.
They want to run people's lives.
But people who believe in freedom and in kind of a more humane way of living don't need to be persuaded that in an imperfect system, at least one where you've got some prayer of controlling the outcome is preferable.
Well, you know, I'm kind of cynical about the way that the right wing has all of a sudden rediscovered liberty and all this.
We're just supposed to pretend like the last eight years never happened or something like that.
But on the other hand, I've got to, I guess, take dissent against the central state where I can find it if it's close to for the right reasons.
I see like in the Wall Street Journal, which is all for nationalism and social engineering projects when it comes to foreigners' lives, they've become much more skeptical of that kind of domestic policy at least now that the Democrats are in power.
And they ran an article not too long ago even about, well, maybe we should have secession and split the United States up.
Of course, I agree with that.
I forgot if it was Murray Rothbard or Walter Block or somebody.
I think it was Walter Block said, yeah, I'm for six billion nations in the world.
6.2 or whatever it is now.
But it seems to me like for all the people talking about secession, that how about we just go and reinstate the Constitution for a good start?
We'd be 95% of the way to anarcho-capitalism from this point if we just reinstated the Constitution.
Yeah, that's why I know there are some purists out there who think you're some kind of a sellout or a constitutional fetishist if you even mention the Constitution.
But the fact is, warts and all, it's what we've got.
It's a start.
It's a benchmark.
It's something a lot of your fellow Americans will recognize as being authoritative.
Well, and it's a hell of a lot better than what we've got.
Exactly.
So why not refer to it?
But when you're talking about how this pendulum seems to swing depending on who's in power where, let's remember that – did you see that movie Frost-Nixon?
Did you see that?
No, I didn't see that.
It's really worth seeing.
Okay, I'll check it out.
It's really well done.
But what's interesting about it is that everybody hates Nixon and so on and on at that time after he had resigned and they want to interview him.
What's interesting is they've got – gosh, what was that journalist's name?
The name will come to me.
He's James Reston.
And Reston has the most annoying line in the whole movie because he says that the thing that really kicks him off the most, that he just can never forgive Nixon for, and you're thinking, let's see, slaughtering people, Nepal.
Cambodia.
Or maybe it's whatever, spying on people.
He devalued the presidency.
Oh.
I mean, Reston, that's the one good thing the guy did, right?
So that we don't superstitiously look to some creep and wave incense in front of him.
That's what everybody said about Clinton, too, is that he's disgraced the presidency, the hallowed, sacred halls of the White House.
Exactly.
Let's all bow down.
Everybody have your incense ready so we can wave it.
This is so beneath the dignity of any self-respecting person.
That's the one good thing.
And I remember saying to my wife, I'm just impossible to deal with at the movies sometimes.
Just saying, I don't think I can watch the rest of this thing.
I want to get through the screen and strangle that Reston.
That's funny.
All right.
Everybody check out what Tom Woods writes.
Check out his website, TomWoods.com.
His books are – and this is not a complete list – The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, 33 Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask About American History, Who Killed the Constitution with Kevin Gutzman, We Who Dared Say No to War with Murray Polner, and the latest one is Meltdown, which I'm begging you to go out and get.
It is exactly what you need to understand our current financial crisis.
It is awesome.
Every single page is exactly what I would have told my right father smart enough to think so.
So good on you, Tom, and everybody go get Meltdown.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks a lot.
I'm always happy to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.