Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
We're live here every Monday through Friday, 9 to noon, West Coast time.
And you can find the archives of all the foreign policy interviews at antiwar.com slash radio.
All my interviews, more than 1,300 of them, going back to 2003 at scotthortonshow.com.
You can be my friend on MySpace and Facebook if you'd like to.
Alright, so our first guest on the show today is Jacob H. Hubert.
He is an attorney and a professor of law at Ohio Northern University School of Law.
He is a scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, that's mises.org.
And you can find his articles and his blog entries at lourockwell.com.
You can usually find him going by his initials, J.H.
Hubert there at LRC.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing?
Great, thank you for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today on occasion of your brand new book, which I guess just hit the shelves, right?
Yeah, it just came out.
It's called Libertarianism Today.
Here's what I think.
I think there should be a guy dressed all in brown carrying boxes of this book to every college bookstore in America.
Yeah, that sounds like a good plan to me.
I'm talking about the UPS man with the big brown truck.
This would be the perfect primer for college kids, for example, for one example.
Here's what libertarianism is about, and here's how it applies to the issues that are on everybody's mind today.
I guess people vary a lot, but Jacob, your libertarianism is just like mine.
I really dig it.
Great job on this book.
I'm glad to hear it.
So good.
You outlined the purpose I had for this book, and if it works for that purpose, if people can read it and get a sense of what libertarianism is about, and hopefully some of them at least will be persuaded to the ideas, then the book will have been worth doing.
Yeah, well, like Lou always says, it's bad times, but it's also good times for libertarianism.
And of course, the Ron Paul revolution, as you say in the book, just gave our entire movement a kickstart, and I guess, if you don't have something nice to say or whatever, but that never applied to me really anyway.
When you have goons like Wayne Allen Root writing books about, here's what libertarianism is, and it's all about ignorance and repeating whatever Michael Savage said and mongering war against innocent people, it's nice to know that there's somewhere on the bookshelf is the actual primer to what actual libertarianism is, written by somebody who actually understands it, believes in it.
Yeah, well, that's what I thought was needed, one that especially emphasized the anti-war aspect of libertarianism, which usually is downplayed or ignored by a lot of establishment Beltway-type libertarians.
And you know, I have a read Wayne Allen Root book, but I saw his comments the other day about how the so-called 9-11 or Ground Zero mosque that is neither a mosque nor a Ground Zero is an atrocity, and we should do what we can to stop it and all that stuff.
And it's unbelievable and really disappointing to me that there's people out there using the word and the name libertarianism for themselves who are spreading those kind of ideas.
So hopefully this book can do something to counteract it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm really glad you brought that up, that mosque issue, because it's just amazing to me that anyone who could call himself a libertarian would come down on the wrong side of that.
But I mean, hell, even the Anti-Defamation League's piece on it made more sense than Wayne Allen Root's did.
You know what I mean?
It at least acknowledged that they have a right to do this, but you know, still against it or whatever.
Yeah, right.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know if he thinks it should be done somehow peacefully or not, but he somehow finds it outrageous, even though he doesn't, of course, acknowledge that it's not a mosque, not a Ground Zero.
And even some people like Glenn Beck is very good on this issue.
He says that we should leave it alone, and his listeners probably don't want to hear that.
There are a bunch of bloodthirsty warmongers among them, I'm sure, but a lot of sensible people recognize that this is something that we should tolerate, because that's just a basic American libertarian value.
Of course, yeah.
Freedom of religion.
I mean, jeez, you learn that before you're even in kindergarten or something, right?
Right.
You know, I don't know.
It's one they at least give a lot of lip service to and a little more reality to than some of our other rights that we supposedly have that are guaranteed supposedly by the Constitution.
All right, now, if there's one fault with the book, from my point of view, it's that war isn't until Chapter 9, but then again, if I'm reading your mind correctly, I could kind of see why you would do that, because you're trying to sort of, you know, get people who started out mostly as conservatives maybe, but liberals too, get them, you know, part of the way, two-thirds of the way or more through the book before you really hit them with, you know, how the principle that they've just adopted applies to foreign policy.
Was that what you were going for with that?
Well, I saved a couple of issues for nearer to the end that libertarians tend to disagree on more, particularly war, where there is a big faction.
Yeah, but all libertarians are anti-war, Jacob.
Well, of course, you're just defining people who are pro-war as not being libertarians, which I find perfectly reasonable.
You know, in this book, I say near the beginning that, you know, I don't want to say, well, who counts as a libertarian and who doesn't?
But if you favor, you know, the mass murder of innocent people, it's hard to see why you should be called a libertarian.
Yeah, I say if Anthony Gregory says you're a libertarian, then you're a libertarian.
Otherwise, you know, at best, you're trying out.
Yeah, I would accept that as a witness test for who counts as a libertarian.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, sometimes Ron Paul even has trouble passing Anthony's test.
He's right on the line there.
Yeah, right.
But now, OK, so, well, geez, yeah, we still have a couple of minutes for the first break here.
So tell me a little bit about this, the chapter on imperialism and war that and the war on terror and etc. that you have in here.
It is a very good treatment.
I just wish it had been chapter two or whatever, but still, OK, yeah, well, I mean, like like I do in most of my chapters, I start out by giving the basic libertarian position, which is derived from the idea that you can't aggress against innocent people.
And you would think if you read that in chapter one, the first thing would be immediately obvious to you would be the war is unacceptable because war is just full of aggression against innocent people.
There's the first and most obvious way that it's mass murder, 20th century wars involve the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
And not only that, it's also anti free market, which seems like the overwhelming majority of people who at least pay lip service to the free market don't recognize that it hurts the economy, that it's never, ever good for the economy to go to war, except, of course, for the handful of merchants of death who prosper from it.
Historically, since there's been conscription involved in wars, and of course, that's antithetical to libertarianism.
And of course, there's the quote from Randolph Warren that says that all war is the health of the state.
People will go for anything when they're whipped up into a war fervor.
And of course, the government plays that to the hilt in terms of imposing new forms of taxation, more forms of intrusion on people's daily lives.
And when people hear it's for some sort of national security effort, they don't even question it.
And every libertarian who has any sense at all can see this going on.
So even if you thought some war was theoretically maybe kind of justified somehow to promote liberty in some far off land, you'd think you'd see the terribly destructive effects at home.
You'd see how it grows the state, not only temporary during the war, but permanently.
And you would understand that war is something a libertarian has to oppose.
Unfortunately, there's a number of people around who don't get that.
Well, you know, I think it's in your chapter on why libertarianism is not conservatism.
You talk about how people would mistakenly think that libertarianism is all the way to the right somehow or something like that on that continuum with conservatism, when really it's an entirely different subject of, you know, creature of thought, entirely different philosophy, entirely different premises.
And you know, the thing that well, and you also say, I think, in that same section that, you know, therefore, people perceive libertarians as simply apologists for the biggest businesses and the most evil corporations and that kind of thing.
And yet, as you point out in your warfare section, the worst corporate welfare and the worst violations of the principles of the free market.
It's not, you know, single black mothers collecting a check.
It's Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and the military industrial complex that pushes policy.
That's the worst violation of market economics that we have in the worst big businesses getting away with literal bloody murder.
But anyway, we'll hold it right there and then we'll be back after this break.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Amtrak War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jacob H. Hubert.
He's a professor of law at Ohio Northern University School of Law and is a scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
And now, when we went out to break, Jacob, we were talking about or I was kind of asking you about the idea that maybe you're to the right of Dick Cheney, that you're even meaner than the conservatives and that you must just be, as a libertarian, an apologist for all the big businesses that, I don't know, cash defense department contract checks.
Yeah, well, I can see why some people might think that, because the right, at least, you know, when they're needing to win an election and appeal to their base, often use free market rhetoric.
They say they favor free enterprise.
They favor, you know, businesses because, you know, they think that they talk about how capitalism allows, you know, the best businesses to win and so forth.
And so I can see why people would think that we're basically like them, because we're capitalists.
We like business.
We talk about how businesses exist to serve consumers and that's good and so forth.
And people shouldn't be considered evil because they want to make a profit and all that sort of thing.
So it's really easy for people to conflate libertarians and conservatives.
So sure, they'll say that, you know, we're worse than them because we not only favor big business to the hilt, unlike the Republicans, we want to take away all federal government protections for workers, and we want to take away welfare too, so we're just the worst of all possible worlds.
But of course, they've got it all wrong, and the reason they've got it all wrong is because libertarians often aren't clear enough about this and don't draw the line between real successful capitalistic businesses and phony capitalistic businesses, which would be like the merchants of death who would profit from war, people who get the contract to make weapons and so forth.
And of course, the conservatives actually do favor this and really are fascists in that sense, and libertarians aren't.
We oppose all of that.
Big businesses should not be in business because if it weren't for the warfare state, they wouldn't have anything to do.
They have no customer except for government.
And of course, this is terribly destructive to the true free market because all the resources that are poured into creating those weapons are resources that aren't going toward producing things that consumers actually want.
So all these conservatives who claim they like the free market are simply lying.
They don't like the free market.
They like the state-controlled market, and government-favored projects like this.
And it's a really, really destructive thing because then you get people who are dependent on these jobs, who keep voting the same guy in, so he'll keep their jobs there.
And of course, these people don't have other jobs to go to, other manufacturing, blue-collar-type jobs, because the government's terrible economic policies have resulted in destroying all of those.
And it just gets worse and worse and further destroys our free market.
And libertarians have an important job to make clear that we're not like that, and that the kind of privatization you see when the military privatizes its services is not what we favor.
And in fact, when the military privatizes services, it's even worse than normal military services because these people have no conscience about it all.
They have no notion of being honorable soldiers or anything like that.
And their whole business is war, and the more war we have, the better their business is, and so we have to make clear from the outset that we oppose all this stuff.
The next question is going to be something that you kind of referred to there, which is government intervention in the economy, and this is something that you really, you don't just explain the government intervention in the economy, you really take on the myth, which I'll go ahead and agree with you on the outset, forget devil's advocate, of course you're right, that government ruins the economy and freedom takes the rap, libertarianism takes the rap.
And so I was hoping you could just give him the three-minute version of the business cycle theory here, Jacob, and explain how it is that it's not freedom's fault that everybody's unemployed right now.
Well, you know, that's a tough thing to give in three minutes, and I try to, I think I do a pretty decent job of condensing it at least into a single chapter in the book where I talk about war and the economy.
And of course, you'll see this in the mainstream media and from supposedly reputable sources where they say, oh, libertarianism is actually at fault for the crisis we have.
The problem with the Bush administration is that they were too libertarian, they were too laissez-faire.
And of course, that's just obviously ridiculous, George W. Bush and his administration group government in every way, more than many, many presidents beforehand.
And so the very idea that they were adherents of laissez-faire or libertarianism is ridiculous.
And when you talk about banking in the business cycle, you know, the government made it very, very easy to borrow money, much easier than it should have been.
On the free market, you would only be able to borrow money that people had actually saved, and banks wouldn't be able to lend out anything beyond what people had actually put in and agreed to let the bank lend out.
But of course, under our system with the Federal Reserve, banks can lend far in excess of what they have.
And in our system with the FDIC and with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and so forth, banks can know that they can make very risky loans and ultimately be bailed out if they don't have enough money on hand.
And so as a result of this, you get people borrowing money who shouldn't borrow it.
You had with our mortgage situation, banks lending to ever riskier and riskier people.
And as a result, of course, you had all these people buying houses they couldn't afford.
Many of them were taking like, you know, adjustable rate mortgages and all that sort of thing, thinking they could flip them very quickly because this government-created boom that was letting people buy houses would continue forever.
And of course, it didn't continue forever.
And it all fell apart.
And of course, you had many businesses invested in things they thought people were going to buy, invested in the thing that we use to make these houses and so forth.
You have people who are manufacturing or at least selling luxury consumer items and so forth.
And suddenly, when this whole thing collapses, the money isn't actually there.
People don't actually have it.
People don't have their jobs anymore.
And they can't afford any of this stuff.
And so the government has distorted the economy terribly through this money and banking manipulation.
And you can get a pretty concise summary of it in the book, in Chapter 2, if you want to go beyond that.
And of course, Thomas Wood's book, Meltdown, is a great source to get the whole story.
Well, now, some people may be familiar with this.
I mean, it was widespread enough knowledge for The Onion to parody it and that kind of thing.
In the last 10 years, especially, the last 15 years, really, but especially the last 10, there's been the era of giant concrete skate parks being built all across especially the West.
And I know a guy who is a skater who has this giant property in the hills west of Austin, Texas.
And I wondered, how did he do it?
And what happened was he made a ton of money, some of it anyway, building skate parks all across the West.
And I asked him, so, you know, are you still in that business?
And he said, oh, no, no.
I just read The Wall Street Journal and I waited until Ben Bernanke raised the federal funds rate.
And as soon as he raised it one tick, that's when I sold all my equipment and got out because I knew the whole thing was a giant bubble and I wasn't going to be the one caught.
Here's a guy who understands Austrian bank business cycle theory.
And he got into the business because he knew it was a bubble.
And all he did was he just watched the federal funds rate to see when they were going to prick the bubble.
And then he was out.
So if there's Austrian business cycle theory in action, and it's actually probably the best part of Alan Greenspan's legacy is all those permanent concrete skate parks.
We'll be right back with Jacob H. Hubert, author of Libertarianism, today after this.
Listen to LRN.
FM on any phone, any time, 760-569-7753.
That's 760-569-7753.
Hey, everybody.
I'm Scott.
You're listening to Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with J. H. Hubert, Jacob H. Hubert, that is, author of Libertarianism today and scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
This book really is a great primer on libertarianism for people who, I don't know, say like you're a liberal or a leftist or a progressive, and you realize that, wow, these people mean to wage war until at least the next Republican administration picks up where they left off.
And all their opposition was false.
And maybe the Ron Paul people were the only ones who really meant it.
Well, this is the philosophy that keeps us really mean in it right here, Libertarianism today by Jacob H. Hubert.
And I get emails like that.
I know that there are people like that.
So Jacob, during the commercial break there, you might have heard Montel Williams talking about medical marijuana.
And that brings up chapter, whichever it is in here, all about the war on drugs, which I thought was really good.
So why don't you take us through?
And you know what?
I'd like you to address your argument, if possible, to, I don't know, say a widow in her 60s who is just can't possibly imagine legalizing drugs, who thinks that that is might as well be embracing the devil himself.
I want you to convince her about the war on drugs, please.
OK, well, what I try to do in this chapter, I start out by showing that, look, for most of this country's history, drugs were actually legal and things really weren't that bad.
You had, in the 19th century, you could go to the drugstore, you could get heroin, you could get cocaine, you could get opium-derived drugs, you could get all kinds of stuff, whatever you wanted.
There were no federal laws whatsoever on this.
And we didn't have junkies all over the place.
You had some maybe middle-aged housewives or whatever who got hooked on something or other.
But you didn't have any kind of drug epidemic like people seem to think we have now.
What you didn't have also was this war on drugs that we have now, but more about that in a minute.
So things were basically OK.
And what I show in the book is we didn't get these laws abolishing heroin, cocaine, eventually later marijuana, because there was a terrible drug problem in the country.
The reason we got these things, or one of the leading reasons at least, was because there were powerful special interests that wanted to get rid of these things.
Interests within government and interests outside of government.
An interesting example is the case of marijuana, which came along in the 30s.
You had this bureaucrat named Harry Anslinger who had this drug that was in charge of dealing with narcotics and fighting against narcotics.
And he needed something to do, and so he started going after marijuana.
And there was no problem with too many teenagers getting high so they weren't being ambitious and going anywhere in life or anything like that.
Nothing like that, let alone the kind of horrors they drummed up to try to get marijuana abolished.
They made up stories about marijuana making people's teeth fall out and all kinds of crazy stuff like that.
And they tried to, you know, you did have marijuana coming into the country via Mexican immigrants, so they played up people's bias against immigrants and so forth.
And so the government tried to drum it up in that way.
And then they got support from big business, particularly DuPont came in and testified against or supported the drive against marijuana in favor of prohibiting it.
And they had every reason to, because hemp products, products derived from the marijuana plant, competed with their synthetic, chemically-based products, their ropes and so forth.
Hemp was much cheaper, and if they could get that off the market, then they would have less competition.
They'd just be able to sell us their artificial stuff.
And that's just one example of how we got these laws in the first place, not because there was a huge problem, but because of powerful special interests.
And if you look at what a drug like marijuana actually does, it's much less dangerous, much less harmful than alcohol, and there's just no sense in prohibiting it.
In fact, if you're concerned about teenagers and their welfare, we would do well to legalize marijuana and hopefully, we would hope they would use it instead of using alcohol, so fewer of them would be killed on the road and so forth.
So there's really no good reason to keep marijuana illegal, and the same really applies for the other drugs.
I mean, of course, it's terrible to get addicted to heroin or whatever, but when heroin was legal, we really didn't have that many heroin addicts, and there's no reason to think we would have that many now.
And that's just one side of it.
The other side of it is, what does it mean to make drugs illegal?
Does it mean nobody uses drugs?
Well, of course not.
People are still using drugs all over the place.
It hasn't stopped people from using drugs much at all.
What it does mean is that we now have police who are breaking down people's doors, conducting raids, shooting people, shooting the family pet, whatever happens to be there, because they're looking for some quantity of drugs.
And you have lots of innocent people, meaning innocent people who don't have anything at all to do with drugs or who aren't drug dealers, at least, or anything, who are getting caught in the crossfire.
And of course, if you do use drugs, well, that's no reason, really, if you're not bothering anybody else, why you should have your door broken down or be shot at or have anything like this.
So, you know, there's this terrible war that's being waged.
It has a real human cost.
And what are we gaining from it?
That's what I'd like to say, you know, to the ordinary person who, like me, I've never used any illegal drug, and I have no interest in ever doing it, and I find the whole business sort of unsavory.
But at the same time, I can see that it's crazy to make this stuff illegal.
It doesn't stop drug use.
And it costs us tons of money, makes us less safe, serves no useful purpose.
Well, you know, it's funny, because even a totalitarian, I mean, quote, unquote, totalitarian like William F. Buckley said, this is ridiculous.
We've got to call this off, this drug war.
And it seems like it's the kind of thing that is sort of universally acknowledged or universally agreed upon, but never acknowledged, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Everybody knows that you're right, Jacob, but nobody ever changes anything about it.
And I guess really what it comes down to is when people are running for election, they just can't say legalize drugs, because people immediately connect, you know, a law with an opinion.
These are the same thing.
And so if you legalize drugs, that's the same thing as telling 10-year-olds to shoot heroin into their eyeball.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think among educated people, even many who aren't libertarians, there's a lot of consensus about drugs, certainly about marijuana, and to a large extent even about other drugs.
But you know, the masses have been influenced by anti-drug propaganda that's been fed to them from a very young age when they're in the government schools, which is one major purpose of the government schools, to indoctrinate people and make sure people understand that government is supposedly necessary to do all this sort of thing.
So people believe this stuff, the masses do, and they're very resistant to anyone who wants to legalize drugs, because they picture all these terrible things they think would happen.
They think that the government is just, you know, our only defense against descending into drug-fueled chaos.
And so they resist politicians who favor that, and politicians are understandably very scared.
I talked with Paul Armentano, who's involved with Normal, about this, and he told me, you know, politicians see the polls and they see that with respect to marijuana, in many cases, there's a majority favoring legalizing medical marijuana, in some cases legalizing marijuana possession, and politicians see this and they say, yeah, I know, it makes sense, I know most people support it, but I'm not confident that the people in my district support it.
And so they're not willing to go out on a limb and take that chance when they know the other guy isn't going to propose it either, and it's just safe for everybody to just leave the issue alone.
And you know, I think a lot of liberals support drug legalization, or at least drug law liberalization, but once their guy's in office, it's not their priority.
They don't want to spend political capital on that, because they know the right will jump all over it and will say, look at these crazy leftists, they get into office, we have all these problems, what's the first thing they want to do, legalize drugs, and, you know, trot out all these horrible things that could happen, and so, you know, for all these political reasons, it's really, really tough for it to happen.
But it's encouraging to see people take matters into their own hands, as they've done with ballot initiatives in California, I think states need to save money, are going to see more things like this initiative in California, and hopefully we'll see some incremental moves in the right direction, hopefully in the near future.
All right, everybody, we're talking with Jacob H. Hubert, he's the author of Libertarianism Today, he's a scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, that's mises.org, of course he writes at lourockwell.com as well, and we'll be right back after this.
You can interact with other LRN listeners in our message board at forum.lrn.fm, that's forum.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm talking with J. H. Hubert, Jacob H. Hubert, author of Libertarianism Today, which is a great primer on libertarianism, the philosophy, and how it applies to all the issues, so he talks about individualism and decentralism and revisionism and markets, and why we're not liberals, we're not conservatives.
He talks about, of course, economics, the drug wars, healthcare, the FDA, I love all this stuff about the national healthcare industry and the government's involvement in that, education, of course, guns, and the constitutional law, and war, intellectual property, and all you need.
It's like For a New Liberty, only for 2010, it's great, and it's my kind of libertarianism too, the only kind.
All right, now, Jacob, when we left off, we were talking about the war on drugs, and one of the things I wanted to focus on was, well, actually, I want to set it up this way.
You ever played the video game Grand Theft Auto?
I haven't, but I know what it's like.
Yeah, so, what I'm trying to get at is the desensitization.
The first time I ever played that game, I thought, oh my god, I think I said a lot, oh my god, I can't believe this, I'm tracking blood across the street, and get a hooker, and then robber and killer, and then you can blow up the whole FBI and everything, and it's just insane.
But then after you play it for an hour or something, you're totally over it.
It's just a video game, and the shock completely wears off, and maybe there's a little bit of a change.
It's just a video game, but it's an example.
But there's a little bit of a change in you, that it's no longer shocking to track blood across the street like this anymore, and whatever, and it seems to me that after generations of the war on drugs, they say war is the health of the state, but it's poison for the soul, and we live in a society now where we've just got prisons everywhere, where they've re-legalized slavery in the form of prison labor, they don't just have you making a state product like a license plate, they have you making whatever they want, for pennies on the dollar, in prisons all across America, you've got the prison bar industry and the concrete industry are heavily invested in the drug war.
We've got two million plus people in prison, seven million people who are within the system with an electronic bracelet on their ankle, or probation, or parole, fines they've got to pay every month, and piss in a cup, and everything else, and what's happened to us?
We've got more people in prison than China, and they've got more than twice the population we've got, and they're run by Apollo Bureau, man.
We've turned America into a totally different thing now with this drug war.
Yeah, you're absolutely right, I mean, you said it all right there, it is crazy, if people had, if anyone had suggested, I think, 110 years ago that it was going to turn into what it is now, no one would have believed it, and if they had believed it, they would have never had us go down that path, because that would have been shocking to the majority of Americans.
Now, as you observe, it's not shocking to the majority of Americans, because we've grown up, unfortunately, in a country like that, and particularly for the segment of the population that doesn't affect it as much, relatively privileged white people, it's easy to just say, well, yeah, of course that should go on, of course drug dealers are just, they're bad guys, they should be put away, in fact, your prisoners do good for them, really, we should be executing them, you hear this stuff, and it's just insanity when you think about what we're really talking about.
We're talking about a product, for the most part, that people peacefully use without going out and harming anybody else, and just to stop people, I mean, marijuana in particular, from doing something that's going to make them a little bit buzzed, we're going to organize this huge police, military, prison system, it's just insanity, and if you suggested it to America's founders, they would have never believed it, if you suggested it to people when we started prohibition, they would have been shocked, and yet today, we're surrounded by it, people accept it, and I think it's going to be very difficult to turn the tide, but I think people are slowly, slowly opening up to the recognition that marijuana prohibition doesn't make much sense, they've seen kids growing up, yeah, they've been around drug prohibition, but they've also been around other people using marijuana, and they've been around people using alcohol, and they can see that one's worse, and one doesn't involve people getting put in jail, and that's alcohol in both cases, and I think people are seeing the irrationality of that, and hopefully that's a step towards seeing irrationality in the whole thing.
Whether it'll play out that way, I don't know.
Well, you know, I guess about 15 years ago now, a biologist I knew said to me under his breath, yeah, I got this thing going on where me and some of my other friends, we go out and we distribute clean needles to the junkies, and this was a secret, because it was a crime, to distribute clean needles to junkies, it's better the government decided that they all get AIDS and spread it and then die, than to have my biologist friend bring them a clean needle.
Hey, listen, you ought to clean up, but if not, at least use a clean needle, pal.
That was criminal behavior in Austin, Texas, at least 15 years ago, for all I know it still is.
Yeah, it probably is, and of course, and that just reflects the insanity in the whole thing.
I mean, it's better for you to be locked up in a prison where you'll be raped and so forth, than for you to use cocaine in the privacy of your own home.
It's just, it's insanity, there's nothing else to call it.
Well, you could call it that.
And it's un-American, that's what I say, since that's the highest form of morality, is what's American and what ain't.
I think it's un-American, although it's been so permanent for so long that maybe it just is American.
Well, around the world, I'd say people think that is American, if it involved forcing your will on someone else and killing people who would stand in your way when you do it, why wouldn't people around the world associate that with America anymore?
Yeah, well, and you know, in your drug war, I'm glad I have a way to wrap this back up where we started with foreign policy.
You really go in-depth about the, well, not really in-depth, but you cover in the book Libertarianism Today, the drug wars in Mexico and how the law creates the problem rather than solves it, and also foreign policy in terms of Plan Colombia and all kinds of Latin American policy.
Since we don't have a Soviet Union anymore, it's all built around the boogeyman of cocaine now.
It has been for, you know, a generation.
Yeah, right.
And you have all these poor, poor people in Latin America who have their coca crops that are being destroyed by the U.S. government alongside non-coca crops, and it just, these people have to suffer terribly, have their property destroyed, have their lives ruined because the U.S. government needs to stop some people in the U.S. from using a particular substance.
It's just atrocious.
But of course, in the U.S. government's calculus, and in most Americans' calculus, the foreign people don't count at all.
Their liberty doesn't count.
Their lives don't count.
You know, when we hear about the cost of the Iraq and Afghan war, we never hear about the number of people over there who were killed because they just don't count, which is absolutely disgraceful.
And unfortunately, it seems like libertarians are the ones who consistently recognize that, us and a handful of humane liberals and maybe some paleo-conservatives.
Well, so let's wrap up with this then.
Do you think it's possible we could have a realignment here?
I mean, we can't convince all liberals and conservatives to become libertarians, as many as we can.
And this book is going to convert quite a few, I guarantee.
Libertarianism Today, it's called, and it's on your shelf and on your Amazon.com right now, y'all.
But you know, I wonder whether instead of having Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman in the center, we could have libertarians in the center, forging the best of the paleo-conservatives and the true blue civil libertarian and peacenik liberals as the center of influence of ideas in the society, rather than having these so-called moderates who are really for all the most extreme and violent totalitarian measures imaginable.
Well, I'd like to think we could do that.
We certainly, you know, we're the sensible ones, the only reasonable ones, as far as I can tell.
I don't know, democracy seems to be rigged against us, unfortunately.
Democracy keeps the special interests getting what they want, keeps the politicians who are in power in power.
And how we can counteract that, I don't know.
I think things are going to have to probably get even worse, maybe a whole lot worse, before people start coming to their senses and we see that kind of thing.
But I hope you're right, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
Yeah, well, you point out in your book that, you know, as George Bush used to like to say, and I just love this, it's my favorite quote, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
And you know, no matter how bad it gets, there's always a little bit of optimism there.
You know, in his case, it was his war.
But in our case, it's trying to spread the philosophy of liberty, or at least keep it alive for, you know, people later on to pick up and maybe, you know, act that way.
Yeah, of course.
And, you know, education needs to be libertarians first and foremost, a mission just to keep these ideas alive, to spread them among more and more people.
And I don't think we can count on immediate success, but the only way for long term success is for us to just keep on spreading the word, keep educating ourselves and others.
And even if we don't win in the political arena, there's some satisfaction to be had in being right and in spreading the word to others.
And that was my point right in the book.
Right on.
Everybody, please go out and get it.
It's really great.
Give it to your friends.
Loan it out.
Never see it again.
It's called Libertarianism Today.
It's by Jacob H. Hubert, and it's awesome.
And he's a scholar at the Mises Institute.
Check him out at mises.org.
Thank you, Jacob.
