All right, y'all, we're back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're on chaosradioaustin.org and lrn.fm.
Keep the archives of all the foreign policy-type interviews at antiwar.com/radio.
Also, you can stream the show live from there every day, 9 to noon Pacific.
All right, our first guest on the show today is Tom Woods.
His website is tomwoods.com, and he's the author of a ton of books.
I thought I'd go ahead and pull up the site and read off the list of books for you because there's a ton, and they're really good.
Hey, Tom, welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Tomwoods.com, and check out, these are some of the books that he wrote.
Meltdown, A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, The Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Who Killed the Constitution?
The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush, co-written with Kevin Gutzman, Sacred Then and Sacred Now, The Return of the Old Latin Mass, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, The Church and the Market, A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, and Nullification.
Where's Nullification?
How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.
Excellent book.
Great stocking stuffer for your loved ones who hate the state.
Nullification, this one's more about how you can get your more local state to stand between you and the bigger, meaner state, the federal government.
About a good summary?
Yeah, I think so.
The way I put it is, you pit one group of sociopaths against another and hope that that buys you some time.
Right, like James Madison said, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
You just use a little bit more frank language than him.
That's exactly right.
So that's what I put up to.
I was very gratified to see that in the American Conservative Magazine there was a review of nullification, but it was a review by a left progressive who loved it.
And I thought, finally, a real progressive who actually understands what his own position is supposed to be.
Oh, great, I didn't even see that.
Who wrote that?
Yeah, a guy named Jeff Taylor.
He's a professor.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, he's a great guy.
He's a counterpunch.
We talked with him on the show a couple of times.
Okay, yeah, yeah, he's totally great, and he says he definitely considers himself to be on the left.
But his view is that being on the left does not mean that I support the idea that 309 million people should look to one city to make all their decisions.
I mean, like, hello, why would that be progressive?
That's not what the new left believe, that's for sure.
So that's the sort of thing I'm trying to recapture, is this old kind of view that both you can find on the left and the right, from even in the 60s when there were 60s new leftists who were friendly with Murray Rothbard, who even said, you know, probably the best document in American history you've ever had was the Articles of Confederation.
That's what William Appelman Williams said.
I mean, really.
I mean, he was a new leftist.
I mean, that's back when the new left was all about participatory democracy and local control and, you know, we hate big, giant, oppressive structures.
Whereas now it's, well, you know what?
I think I'm okay with big, giant, oppressive structures as long as I'm doing the oppressing.
And, of course, I don't think of it as oppressing.
I'm a nice guy, so anything I do must be wonderful and great.
But that's just how the right feels.
Oh, we're all for limited government except when our man, you know, the Bible-believing George W. Bush is in office, then the heck with it.
Then you are some kind of despicable poltroon if you don't go along with what the central authority says.
So this is just trying to cast all that aside and say, you know, if we have our disagreements left, right, center, green, whatever, let's have the disagreements honorably, face-to-face, like real human beings, instead of letting, you know, Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid and all these crooks and losers stand in for us.
Boy, and especially when you put it that way.
The decisions they make don't satisfy anybody.
Yeah, I mean, especially when you put it that way.
Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, those are the leaders of the United States Senate in 2010.
Is that amazing or what?
These are the best people our country has to offer, Scott.
At least to be U.S. Senators it is.
Yeah.
Jeez.
Yeah, boy, oh, boy, I'll tell you.
Well, I got a whole Harry Reid rant and I'll save it.
So, yeah, I mean, well, this is going on in Vermont, right?
There's a big movement to have Vermont secede from the United States and become an independent republic.
I guess they'd have a closer alliance with Canada at that point or what?
Yeah, yes.
You know, Vermont is going way beyond even, I mean, they would think that what I'm saying in nullification is much too timid, which indeed probably it is.
They're not satisfied simply to say, you know, the states ought to be able to resist the federal government, in particular areas where it's overreached, but that it ought to just say, look, this thing is obviously broken.
Every time you try to reform it, it just gets worse.
And you change political parties and, if anything, the civil liberties violations intensify, the wars don't go away, the debt calamity gets worse.
I mean, what could you possibly do about it?
Maybe after a while you have to just say, forget it.
Forget it.
This thing is so dysfunctional, so beyond the ability of human beings to repair.
What the heck is the point of repairing?
Can't we just live?
I mean, Vermont is probably, I mean, it's a small American state, but it certainly would be viable.
It could have international trade.
I mean, there are smaller states in the world that are flourishing.
If this is a free country, what would be?
Why is that so unthinkable?
Can we get the prejudices that were rammed into our heads in 6th grade out of our heads for just 15 seconds to think about some forbidden alternatives, given that the alternative we live in right now is an unthinkable nightmare scenario and would have been to all the founding fathers?
Right.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I guess it is interesting, isn't it, that these are such kind of verboten topics where people think, oh, you want secession, then you're for the Civil War, the seceding states and pro-slavery and all kind of madness, when, well, geez, really?
This is just not even radicalism, but just plain old Americanism to me.
I mean, I guess the founding generation set a pretty radical standard or whatever, but of course people got the right to secede.
If the whole premise of the Constitution is that the people create it, and people come first, and then they create a security force because they want to, like it says in the Declaration of Independence and all that, then of course they have the right to secede.
It's their duty, it says in the Declaration of Independence, to throw off oppressive chains.
Well, it's very creepy to hear people on both sides of the spectrum treating the Union as if it's some kind of an idol to be worshipped, like we must sacrifice to Moloch or something.
It's just a practical, utilitarian thing.
You don't worship it, you don't salute it.
It's just a thing.
And if it helps to promote liberty, then fine.
But if it doesn't, then you do something else.
You don't just stick...
They're screaming at people who happen to be dissidents.
I mean, the real dissidents in this country are the ones who defy conventional opinion and who say, you know what?
I know I'm going to get criticized by Media Matters, and I know I'm going to get criticized by Michelle Malkin's website, whatever it is.
I know that both of those are going to criticize me, but that's how I know I'm on the right track, because I'm breaking out of this straitjacket, this intellectual straitjacket that has suffocated sensible thinking.
But you're right, the idea that all these things are forbidden, but it's not forbidden.
What is absolutely not forbidden is to wage totally unjust wars that lead to who knows how many hundreds of thousands of deaths, that lead to all these sorts of things that go on every single day.
We've got now an entitlement system that practically is so far behind in terms of provision that we've made for it or have not made for it, that people in my generation are never going to be able to retire.
They have to spend their entire lives propping up this system.
Everybody, it's Tom Woods, TomWoods.com, the Mises Institute.
We're talking about the fall of America.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Scott Horton on the line is my friend Tom Woods.
He's a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
That's Mises.org.
He's got his degrees from Columbia and Harvard.
And he's a hardcore anti-statist, man, and wrote a bunch of great books about it, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Meltdown, Why It's All the Government's Fault that the Economy Sucks, and Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.
And so I guess really what we're talking about is the disillusion of Americans coming one way or another, it seems like.
And I don't know, do you think that all this push, because there is a new renewed push, and no doubt you're to thank in great part for this, toward nullification, the state standing up, suing, and not just suing but refusing, or claiming they will refuse to participate in Obama's fascist health care plan, for example.
But is all that too little too late?
Is it going to have to come down to the Vermont and Texas solution, secession?
It's hard to say.
Before the break, I'm not used to there being a break on your show, but the point I was driving at was that there are so many totally insane things that we take for granted about this system, involving the destructiveness of the wars and the civil liberties violations and the debt explosion and all these other things that are just sort of normal.
This is mainstream America.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But if you say, well, wait a minute, maybe this is an impossible situation they put us in.
Maybe there is no solution.
Maybe we've got to try something different.
That's what you're demonized for.
Not for any of these other things.
I mean, you can be a well-respected statesman on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, who advocates carpet bombing of civilians, whatever, and that's okay.
That's a policy preference that you have.
But if you simply think that the country is just too damn big, well, that's just unthinkable.
You're an extremist.
You have to be written out of polite society.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's just not normal.
But what will it take?
It's hard to know.
And I think you're right.
I think there is more interest in local sorts of solutions.
But it may well be that until the checks start bouncing from the federal government and things really get bad, that it will be hard to get the attention of enough people.
I'm hoping that's not the case, which is why I do what I do.
But it is encouraging to see these ideas spread all over the place in spite of the fact that you do get this demonization from the neocons and from the progressive left.
Every time they hear states, they think slavery, even though nullification was actually used against the fugitive slave laws and was never used on behalf of slavery.
It's nice to see that in California, it didn't pass for various reasons, but there was an attempt, in effect, to decriminalize marijuana, more or less, which would have flown in the face of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
I mean, that was great.
That was great kind of defiance.
But the creepiest thing of all are the progressives who would criticize nullification, even to the extent of criticizing California for trying to do this.
Like, you've got to just obey the law, obey the law, obey the law.
I mean, really, what am I, sitting in a third-grade classroom, saying the Pledge of Allegiance?
I mean, what about the content of the law?
Forget about unconstitutional.
We know that.
So this is all very good, but who knows what it will ultimately take.
But I suspect that a lot of people won't begin thinking in this important way.
They won't begin shedding some of their conventional thoughts until the collapse of the system is just all around them.
Right.
Then it's too late.
And then they start looking towards authoritarian leadership to get things done.
That's what I worry about, because it is like you say.
Like Anthony Gregory has said on this show, we've got to repeal the Constitution, the Bill of Rights last, and that kind of thing.
But that's the part we get rid of first.
Now we're even attacking the freedom of the press, the freedom of religion.
Never mind your right to be secure in your house, or get a fair trial, or not be tortured, or any of the other most important things in our Bill of Rights.
We're actually now at the point of giving up freedom of the press over, what, one or two hardcore weeks' worth of propaganda about the scary white-haired Australian dude.
And we're willing to now make it a crime for a reporter to let us know about a secret that they found out about.
Yeah, and you know, Scott, I mean, I still...
Maybe there'll be a time when I won't think of myself as in some way being a conservative.
But I still sort of think of myself that way, because not all of life is politics.
And in non-political things, I do, by temperament, think of myself as a conservative.
I mean, I lead an extremely square, bourgeois kind of existence with the minivan and the kids and all that.
But beyond that, though, I can't imagine that I ever belonged to a political movement that would look at this situation and say, the criminal here is the guy who is exposing what a bunch of exploiting, creepy, disgusting human beings rule over us.
We don't want to know about the people who rule over us.
We want them to rule over us and kill people unimpaired.
So shut up.
I can't believe I ever belonged to anything that would say something like this.
But that is basically their position on WikiLeaks.
We don't want to know about what our ruling class is up to.
They have a right.
We are born to be ruled.
We are born to be ruled over by these people.
And stop getting in the way.
Check this out from the Washington Post.
Poll.
Americans say WikiLeaks harmed public interest.
Most want Assange arrested.
The American public is highly critical of the recent release of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website and would support the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by U.S. authorities.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds most of those polled, 68% say the WikiLeaks exposure of government documents about the State Department and U.S. diplomacy harms the public interest.
Nearly as many, 59%, say the U.S. government should arrest Assange and charge him with a crime for releasing the diplomatic cables.
Yeah, I mean, so then the question becomes, do these people even deserve to live in a free society?
Yeah, well, the problem is they're going to pull me down over the cliff with them.
They already are, you know?
Like, what's the point of even fighting for people like this who are...
I mean, seriously, the ruling class must be laughing hysterically in their private meetings.
And I'm not talking about private conspiracy meetings.
I'm talking about, you know, at the White House, where they must be laughing so hard at these stupid rubes who, you know, when finally somebody's about to try to take the wool off their eyes, they're scrambling to tie the knots tighter, get that wool on there as tightly as they can and jump to the defense of people who are ripping them off.
I mean, it must be an unbelievable spectacle to be in on this and say, I can't believe these people are so stupid.
Yeah, well, here we are ripping them off and screwing them every which way and laying waste to the whole freaking world.
And what they think the big crime is, is somebody who tells the truth about it.
Right, yeah, Ron Paul on the House floor said, well, do the American people have a right to know that we're at war in Yemen?
Let's put it really simply here.
Do we have a right to know this or not?
You know, come on.
Yeah, it's incredible, which is why, you know, I'm pretty much tired of all the stuff about, you know, there's just too much spending, we've got to limit the government.
But we need this gigantic empire with, you know, 800 bases all over the world, operating in complete secrecy with security clearances, like a million people sworn to secrecy about all kinds of things, not even being told about what's going on.
And I'm supposed to stand up and salute that, and then at the same time say, gosh, you know, the government's a little bit out of control.
Well, you don't say, you don't say.
But these people are the very people who complain the most about government spending are the worst enablers of the system there is.
Well, you know, maybe it's just, you know, like Obi-Wan Kenobi says, the truth is all dependent on your point of view and that kind of thing.
Like, on one hand, I guess I can see how, you know, the USA is just living out Hamilton's dream, you know what I mean?
This is what it's supposed to be.
It's the ultimate fruition, the ultimate repudiation of the Bill of Rights and the standing army that never stops and all that.
But then on the other hand, I kind of think, nah, you know, if only we would act right and what we know is supposed to be what America's about, then everything would be okay, you know what I mean?
Because I'm really worried about, you know, the fall of the dollar.
And, you know, like after September 11th, everybody's paying attention for a minute, right?
The dollar breaks, everybody's paying attention for a minute.
And now what are they going to do?
Are they going to go with the totalitarians who propose that the Pentagon be in charge of making sure everybody has enough food and water?
Or are we going to just start acting right, maybe abolish that Pentagon and, you know, let prices fall where they may and start getting to work on having a free society again, you know what I mean?
Maybe it's already past the choosing point, but it seems like maybe the fork in the road is still right ahead of us there.
Maybe it's not too late for at least when the crisis comes that we can, that people can realize that, you know, the Ron Pauls of the world were the ones who we should have been listening to this whole time.
Yeah, I mean, that's our hope and that's why, you know, we've got to use all the media that's available to us, which is much more than it was than we had 10 or 15 years ago.
We've got to use everything that's available to us to promote precisely this idea.
Hey, can you tell us about your new book?
Let's save that for another show.
All right, well, there's the topic.
Tom Woods has a new book, and we're going to find out about it.
All right, listen, thanks a lot.
I really appreciate your time, Tom.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's Tom Woods.
He's from the Mises Institute, tomwoods.com.
And go to barnesandnoble.com and buy all his books.
There's about 20 of them or something.
More coming soon.
