For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I want to send some thanks out to Bianca Blivin for covering for me last week as I was out of town.
I was lucky enough to be invited by the Young Americans for Liberty at the University of New Hampshire to come give a short speech and introduce Tom Woods, which is what I'm about to do for you right now.
Tom Woods is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He's got his Ph.
D. from Columbia.
He's the author of a ton of great books.
The Church Confronts Modernity, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Who Killed the Constitution, The Church and the Market, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, Meltdown, A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, The Economy Tanked and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, and We Who Dared Say No to War, American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now, which he co-edited with Murray Polner.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott, which reminds me, you should get Murray Polner on the show one of these days.
You would love talking to this guy.
I should.
In fact, now that I think about it, I think maybe I was supposed to one time and screwed up and forgot.
Well, yeah, well, I'll take your suggestion.
It's an excellent book.
And I was asked by a young aspiring journalist there in New Hampshire, which is my favorite of all of Tom Woods' books, and it is We Who Dared Say No to War, American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now.
And it's really great stuff.
And in fact, if you Google around on the Internet, you can find commies who don't like it because it doesn't have enough communism in it.
But other than that, it's perfect.
Everybody else on the left likes it, except there's a Marxist who really, really doesn't like it, precisely because, as you say, it includes all kinds of people who are against war.
And normal people think that would be a good thing.
Well, maybe you guys didn't really bend over backwards to make sure that the most commie people were quoted as well.
Well, our view was that as long as you're not a commie or a fascist, we'll put you in the book.
We even had Helen Keller in there.
She's pretty far on the left.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, communists are actually pretty good on American empire, usually, unless they're Trotskyites, in which case they're the biggest imperialists of all.
But I guess that's a whole other topic.
Actually, that's not a whole other topic.
That's what I want to talk with you about.
Okay.
Communism.
Twenty years ago, right about now, the damn thing started tearing itself apart.
By Christmas 1991, it was done.
And, well, gee, I wondered, Tom, why did the Soviet Union not last?
I mean, I got to tell you, when I was a little kid and I first learned about the Cold War and the nuclear weapons pointed at each other and this massive iron curtain and this Soviet empire that dominated Eurasia, this was a permanent thing.
I was led to believe, I think pretty much everyone believed, that the Soviet Union was going to last throughout our lifetimes.
Then I remember being still a young kid and saying, Wow, Dad, this is really the history of the world being written right here, as the wall was being torn down.
And we watched it on Tom Brokaw at night.
Yeah, it's true, Scott.
I mean, people did have that view.
But it's interesting to look at the conglomeration of people who held that view, that the Soviet Union is just permanently part of the landscape and it's just going to be there and it's a big, strong behemoth.
It was two different groups that were sort of mutually contradictory, yet who took the same view.
One would be the John Kenneth Galbraith fashionable left liberals, who of course were not communists, but nevertheless they thought it was really very low-brow to be just outright against central planning.
So as late as 1984, appropriately enough, Galbraith was saying that the Soviet Union is on the verge of surpassing the West in production and it's as vibrant as ever and so on and on.
But then on the other hand, on the other side, you've got the neocons who have a different reason to trumpet Soviet success, which is to scare us to death, right?
To scare us into buying into the gigantic profiteering going on in the military-industrial complex.
And so there is, we now know, starting in the 70s in particular, although really you could go back to the late 40s, early 50s already, NSC-68 and that stuff, there clearly was a dramatic overestimation of Soviet capabilities.
So it's interesting to note the people who were skeptical that the Soviet Union was going to last.
One of them is Tom DiLorenzo, who was a professor at Loyola, now it's called Loyola University in Baltimore.
His friend Jim Bennett came back from a visit to the Soviet Union in the 80s and he said, we have nothing to worry about.
This country is one giant department of motor vehicles.
Nothing to worry about.
Likewise, Yuri Maltsev, who was an advisor to Gorbachev in the 80s and then finally defected to the West.
I mean, he came over and said, people have been fighting a paper tiger.
Like, why would you think?
The mere fact that it produces a lot of steel and concrete in an age of computer chips is really not that significant.
Or that the United States by the mid to late 80s had 25 million personal computers and the Soviet Union had 150,000.
I mean, this is not even close to a competitor.
And so the thing collapses simply because it's a command economy.
It has no way of responding to consumer demands and no particular desire to.
Why would you bother if you're the central planner?
Who the hell cares?
You'll take what I give you and you'll like it.
Hang on a second there, Tom.
I want to get into the economics of communism and why it didn't work.
I mean, you know, the left-wingers will say, well, it wasn't really communism, it was sort of fascism and that's why it didn't work or whatever.
But we can get into all that, but I want to talk about a little bit of this history here that you discussed.
You know, the great reporter Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com, he has done such great work on Team B, that group of neocons that you talked about.
That's what I was thinking of, right.
They were the ones who went and dug through the CIA's trash to cherry-pick together a story about how the Soviets have all these submarines that we don't know about.
In fact, the reason we can't find them is just proof of how silent and sophisticated they must be.
And they have all these nuclear weapons and all of these things.
And Robert Perry really says that this blinded, you know, half a generation through the whole Reagan years.
There's so many people that have bought into this that Bob Gates, our current Secretary of Defense, he was really one of the head guys politicizing this intelligence on the Soviet Union.
And at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, he was the director of the CIA and was completely taken by surprise because he had worked so hard to lie to us all that time.
This is Gates, our current Secretary of Defense, which I think is really interesting.
But another thing that Perry said is that in the 1970s, the American and Soviet establishments were coming to an understanding that we can only do so much brinksmanship here.
And led by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, the American policy was detente with the Soviet Union, the cooling off, I guess.
I forgot what language that is.
But basically, peaceful coexistence.
We understand that there's going to be a Soviet Union for as long as there's going to be one anyway.
And so maybe we can ratchet down some of this Cold War.
But then when the Reaganites came in and wanted to ratchet the Cold War back up again, the way Bob Perry says it is the Soviets didn't want to play anymore.
They were broke, and they knew they were broke, and they were tired of this game.
And I guess the right-wingers, maybe they knew they were lying.
They were trying to bankrupt the Soviet Union by forcing them to play the brinksmanship game that they didn't want to play anymore.
Although, maybe they were just trying to sell bombs.
I don't know, Tom.
They sure seemed to be taken by surprise for their strategy working so well.
It's interesting, Scott, that on the one hand, the right-wingers you're talking about are the ones who supposedly are the most free-market, anti-communist from an economic point of view.
So they should be the ones who would most expect the thing to collapse.
Don't they believe what they're saying?
Don't they believe their own principles that if you organize an economy like this, it's not going to work in the long run?
And yet you're right.
They're just completely taken by surprise by this.
But that's precisely why the so-called old right, the pre-neocon, pre-super-duper militarist right, that's why they weren't interested in getting involved in a Cold War.
Because their view was this thing is unsustainable, obviously.
And if it wants to build a giant empire around the world, every single country it's going to add to that empire is also going to be an economic basket case in need of subsidy.
Let it do that.
If that's what it wants to do, if it wants to bankrupt itself, the U.S. bankrupts itself, but the Soviet Union would be bankrupting itself even worse.
Who wants to add Vietnam to your, at least communist Vietnam, to your basket of imperial conquest?
Every single one of them is going to be a basket case.
That guy John Mueller from the University of Chicago that wrote the book Overblown about the terrorist threat, one of the things that he says in there, he talks about how they overblew the threat of Japanese invasion during World War II, and how during the era of the Cold War, that really it wasn't containment that protected the world from Soviet communism, it was the end of containment.
And how after America got beaten in Vietnam, the people and their support for the containment policy had really waned.
And so the Soviets, and in fact not only did they abandon containment, Brzezinski actually baited them, former CIA agent Mel Goodman was on the show just a couple of weeks ago and confirmed that yes, in fact, Brzezinski came up with a deliberate plan to bait the Soviet Union into expanding into Afghanistan.
And they also picked up all these new commitments in South America and in Africa, and this was what really drove them to the edge.
All empires fall.
When we finally stopped containing them and allowed them to expand, they took on way more, they bit off way more than they could chew.
I'm totally persuaded by that line of argument.
But let me add to it that if there's one silver lining, and I actually hate to use that sort of term, but if there's one thing good that we might be able to take out of the unbelievable moral and political disaster of Iraq, it's that the propaganda surrounding the war in Iraq was so transparent and so pathetic and embarrassing to anybody who wasn't just a rah-rah, whatever the Pentagon says is holy writ sort of person.
I mean, it was so embarrassing.
The whole world knew it was BS.
That anybody who's really paying attention and using his brain would draw naturally the conclusion that, wait a minute, you know, if they lie this badly on this Iraq war, I wonder if they were lying to me 20 years ago or 30 years ago.
I wonder if maybe during the Cold War the Pentagon was lying just as much as it's lying now.
So it has, I think, at least in some cases, made people stop and think, wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe I've been had all this time.
Maybe this is just an aberration.
I mean, you think so, Scott?
Yeah, I think absolutely.
You know, the best example of that that I can think of, of course, is Chalmers Johnson, the brilliant author of the blowback trilogy, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic.
And it was actually before the Iraq war.
For him, it was the end of the Cold War.
And he was, I guess, a Buchananite on the question of, well, so the Warsaw Pact has dissolved.
Obviously, now it's time for NATO to dissolve.
We were promised all along that all this empire was simply for the duration of the emergency to protect the world from the Kremlin.
But now that the Soviet Union has fallen apart, he saw almost immediately there was no peace dividend.
The empire, as George Carlin said, couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over so we can go play with our toys in the sand over there in the Middle East and expand the empire.
And Chalmers Johnson immediately said, wait a minute.
Maybe I was a sucker.
And maybe the Cold War was not defensive.
And he went back and revised his own understanding of the era when he was a Cold Warrior, a spear carrier for empire, he says, where he taught the importance and the value of the Cold War to his USC students, I believe it was, for years and years.
And then went back and said, no, wait a minute.
America went wrong.
You nailed it, Tom.
NSC-68.
I mean, we could argue about World War II itself, but at the end of World War II, they deliberately decided we are going to embrace empire.
From now on, we have to steal and kill to get what we want.
Yeah, I'm afraid that's the case.
And then what sort of disappoints me is that there aren't more people who describe themselves as conservatives who wake up and realize that Milton Friedman's dictum that there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program applies to the American empire itself.
You know, we were sold this as a temporary measure.
We know this is a threat to Republican form of government, but, you know, desperate times call for desperate measures.
We were given that whole line.
And then the thing, obviously, even if you thought the Cold War was necessary, it obviously isn't necessary to have this empire any longer after 1989 to 1991, and yet they still have it.
They look to expand it.
They give us the propaganda line about the world is still a dangerous place.
I mean, you know, slogans fit for a seven-year-old, and it persists.
And, I mean, you know, it's one thing to say, you know, we better not fund these school breakfast programs because you never know where that's going to lead.
But, you know, if you're staying up nights worrying about a school breakfast program, what about an imperial structure that sucks trillions of dollars into a nothingness black hole of profiteering and death?
I mean, isn't that slightly worse than bacon and eggs for poor kids?
You would think so.
But, you know, there's also this weird dichotomy with the military, right, where the enlisted guys don't think of themselves as government employees.
They're the people.
The government is their officers, right?
And there's that whole kind of weird thing where I think in the minds of regular American civilians, too, for some reason, the military is separate from the rest of the federal government.
It doesn't count.
In fact, it's the most believed-in government program of all, despite the fact that it's the worst of all.
Yeah, exactly.
This we cannot emphasize enough.
This point we cannot emphasize enough.
This is just as much a government program.
It's the worst of the government programs.
It's the least efficient.
It's the most monstrous.
And, you know, I'll just admit that I do an awful lot of travel.
I'm on planes all the time.
And so, inevitably, and, you know, I'm not saying that every kid who signs up to go fight is, you know, a bloodthirsty whatever.
Because, I mean, some of them don't know what they're doing.
They, you know, they may have good intentions.
They may believe the propaganda.
And, yes, it is morally their responsibility to learn the truth.
But, subjectively speaking, they may not think they're going over to engage in conquest.
They're protecting the country.
But, by and large, my point is that when I'm sitting there on the plane, and I'm told by the pilot that I'm supposed to applaud because we've got people from the military on board, that this is the most honorable pursuit, in effect, is being implied.
And everybody, I mean, left and right, Democrat and Republican, everybody applauds.
Every single person applauds.
And I'm thinking, look, I'm not going to clap for, gee, our military invaders are sitting here on the plane with me.
I guess I need to applaud.
No, I don't want to applaud.
I want to tell them to stop doing this.
Man, you're stealing my thunder, Tom.
That was going to be part of my whole TSA rant coming up later in the show.
I'll have to leave that off.
What he said, everybody.
That's exactly how I feel about that, too.
And, you know, I think part of it is, right, because we all know that there are 17- and 18-, 19-year-old kids who don't know shit from apple butter.
And so we kind of just forgive them for their ignorance.
So we can't, nobody wants to spit on them and shout baby killer like the legend of the Vietnam War era.
So we have to, you know, it's okay maybe to attack the civilians in charge, but never is it okay to question the honor and valor and glory of serving the empire.
Yeah.
I mean, every right-wing radio show, right, somebody calls in and says, yeah, I was in the Navy for 13 years.
They go, well, thank you for your service to our country.
Yeah, this is what really creeps me out, particularly even sometimes in some sort of libertarian light, let's say, sort of circles.
You will hear things like this about the military or somebody will say he was in the military and they'll say, you know, thank you for your service.
Thanks for protecting our freedoms.
This is creepy.
Damn it.
I mean, this is creepy.
Saddam Hussein is not threatening your freedoms.
I mean, I got a form letter once from actually one of the relatively better right-wing organizations.
And the form letter was a fundraising letter and he was saying, ignorance of the tradition of Western civilization could be an even greater threat than Saddam Hussein.
I thought, no, not that great.
Even greater than Saddam?
Really?
You mean the guy who had an unmanned drone program that turned out to be a single prototype made out of plywood and string?
Not that great.
You can't possibly be telling me.
I mean, this is...
I'm sitting there rolling my eyes every time I get this.
They're protecting our...
From whom?
Where?
What?
What are you talking about?
What are your nuclear submarines doing about Al-Qaeda?
I mean, it is such a...
Well, actually, there's an answer to that.
They're shooting cruise missiles at women and children in Somalia.
Yeah.
And the idea that they're using these, I don't know, $10 billion submarines or whatever to do so ought to be a clue that maybe the submarine salesmen have taken control of the policy.
Maybe so.
Maybe so, yeah.
So let's talk a little bit about the economics of Soviet communism and why it didn't work.
And maybe if you can work into part of your answer something about how people who do lean hard to the left will tell you that the Soviet Union wasn't communism.
It was fascism and that's why it was evil.
Yeah, I mean, I can understand this point of view, although...
The point would be that even if it were...
Even if you had the purest example of communism, communism is the opposite of capitalism in the sense that the purer it gets, the worse and more evil it is.
Whereas from my point of view, the free market, the purer it gets, the more morally defensible it is.
It's when you start introducing the impurities and the subsidies and the bailouts and the cronyism that it gets bad.
But in the case of communism, the key point is that private property is not allowed in the means of production.
And in particular, for example, in agriculture, they did ultimately, grudgingly allow toward the end of the regime that something like 2 or 3 percent of all the agricultural land could be privately owned.
The rest of it is collectivized, government owned.
Well, isn't it interesting that the 2 or 3 percent of the privately owned land produced one third of the food?
Now, either this is the greatest coincidence in the history of mankind, or there's a causal connection here.
That somebody, in other words, allowing people to use their own know-how on their own property and keep the fruits of their own production yields a lot of production.
Whereas you treat people like human garbage, like replaceable pieces of nothing, who have no stake in anything that they do, you wind up getting very little production.
I mean, this is a central aspect of the Soviet system.
So, in that strictly economic sense, taking all the personal morality out of it or whatever, but, in a sense, a fascist system where at least there's prices and nominal ownership of property, even if it's completely controlled by even the Kremlin, still works better than having the government just make things up and tell people, here, you farm that, you farm that, share and share alike.
I mean, I don't like being put in this position, of course, but my point, my argument would simply be that to the extent that you allow individual voluntary actors to make decisions about the disposition of their own voluntarily acquired property, that's moving in the right direction.
But at the same time, I mean, a fascist system, which is by and large what we're moving toward, is completely unsatisfying because of the influence peddling, the fact that the government gets to decide what the various production priorities are going to be, and, you know, who gets to, I mean, if I say to you, Scott, here's your car, this is your car, now here's when you can use it and here's where you can go with it, well, you know, I mean, I suppose it's still your car, but that's still not so great.
It's better than me saying, you can't have a car, but why should we be satisfied with these alternatives?
I mean, why don't we instead...
Well, it doesn't seem like that would work in a utilitarian argument.
It doesn't seem like that would really work any better than just outright communism.
Yeah, I mean, probably it doesn't, probably it doesn't, but outright communism means that you've got one single owner that controls all the inputs into all the potential production projects.
So, it can't even produce, because there's only one owner, there's no buying and selling going on.
Why would you buy and sell if you already own everything?
So, because there's no buying and selling, it doesn't give rise to any prices whatsoever in the capital goods sector.
So, therefore, you don't know how to allocate resources most effectively, which things are scarcest, and therefore, should go in this production process instead of that one, and where should I put this plot, should I put this building, should I put it here or there?
So, it's a tiny, tiny sliver of freedom.
Well, they might be able to generate some kind of meaningful prices that allow production to take place in something other than a completely arbitrary and utterly uneconomic way.
Well, now, I'm no Condoleezza Rice, but if I remember my understanding of Soviet history here, Lenin basically gave up on communism in 1921 with his economic reforms, and the reason Lenin is because he tried to re-communize everything where Lenin had begun to back away.
Yeah, he had because the first initial years of communism, where they tried all kinds of half-baked things like moving away from a money economy entirely, led to such unbelievable chaos, and it wasn't simply because of the Civil War going on.
It was clearly because of the economic system itself, otherwise, why else would Lenin, he instituted what was called the New Economic Policy, and he referred to this as taking two steps forward and one step back.
This is only after four years, three years after the Revolution, right?
Exactly, exactly.
We've got to take our one step back, we've got to consolidate our gains, and then we'll think about moving forward.
Then he dies in 1924, and you're right, Stalin's view is that, we're going to have a socialist country, but we are going to have socialism, dammit, and that includes, we're going to force these peasants onto these government-run farms, they're not going to be able to be little lords any longer, we're going to force them all on, and supposedly this was being done as part of the class warfare against the kulaks, the land-owning class, and if you didn't have an extended belly, if you didn't have evidence of starvation, then they assumed that you must be hoarding grain somewhere, so it was a completely perverse twisted policy, but again, it makes perfect sense, you cannot allow there to be multiples of producers, the state is the producer, and the people are to be shoveled around like concrete, and in fact, that's what the people were in the Soviet Union at that time.
Alright, well, so now, make some parallels if you can, I guess, and help explain the economics of the American Empire and how they relate to the economics of the Soviet one.
I mean, obviously, America is not a communist country with a single property owner in Washington, D.C., and yet, it sure does seem like they, you know, don't rule too much over the decisions of the government.
I guess I'm really kind of taken aback by seeing, you know, people like you and Ron Paul saying, hey, we're bankrupt, while at the same time, I see the National Security Council talking about, you know, whether we should expand just into Pakistan or also whether we should expand into the Middle East, because we're so broke.
So, is somebody, somewhere, the capitalist check and balance of the bookkeeper saying, hey, we're out of money here, and we have to scale something back.
We have to take that one step back to consolidate our gains or whatever.
So, there's a decision-making process as to whether I should produce potato chips at all, and if so, what kind, in what quantities and at what price.
Well, all those things, I have to deal with consumer feedback.
If people don't want to buy potato chips for five bucks a bag, that stinks for me.
I'm going to have to either lower the price or lower the price.
But when both people you're voting for support the empire, in what way does that count as feedback?
So, there really basically is no feedback.
So, in effect, the empire angle of American life is, in effect, very much sovietized, in the sense that it has been made by a very small group of people who are completely insulated.
It's a revolving door group of people.
No matter who gets elected, we get the same empire.
So, that is the opposite of the free market.
I mean, when the new Coke came on the market, everybody hated it, but there was no feedback.
I mean, when a huge number of people who voted for Obama clearly voted for him to get him to stop these wars, and now he's going to accelerate the Afghanistan war, what the heck is going on?
So, this is the part of our society that is the most fragmented.
So, to me, a nation-state is communism, from each according to their ability to each according to their security needs.
I mean, if we're talking about the most minimal state, that's what we're talking about, right, is communism in, at the very least, keeping foreign countries out.
And, you know, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get some more clarity about this.
And, I think we need to get
