09/12/11 – Thomas E. Woods – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, and I'm stoked.
I got Tom Woods on the phone from TomWoods.com, Mises.org.
He's the author of a book called Roll Back that I think you might want to take a look at.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you?
Doing great, Scott.
Thank you.
And also, you know what?
You got to read Meltdown, too.
If you want to understand why it's such a lie that the free market excesses caused the giant bubble and the giant crash, and instead figure out how it is that actually capitalism is what doesn't cause booms and busts, and that government intervention is what causes it, you got to read Meltdown.
Tom Woods wrote it, came out right after, within a couple of months of the crash of 08, and it's a free market explanation of how we got into this mess, and it's the correct one.
It's not the Austrian theory of the business cycle.
It's the Austrian fact of the business cycle, and you need to understand it in order to understand what needs to be done.
That way, you don't accidentally give your consent to things that are wrong.
Okay, good.
Now, Tom Woods, what is the revolution super PAC?
Well, let me just first explain what a super PAC is.
They've only existed for a couple of years because of a few court decisions that came down in 2010, but a super PAC is an organization that can raise money on behalf of a political candidate or a group of candidates, and they don't have, they're not subject to the donation limit that individual campaigns are subject to, $2,500 a year.
There is no limit.
You could give a million dollars to a super PAC as an individual, a business, an organization, and all the major candidates all have, Perry's got one at least, Romney's got them, Bachman, so we thought Ron Paul ought to have one.
The difference is, though, when they start super PAC, now the one restriction is that a super PAC cannot have coordinated strategizing with the campaign.
So like, we can't raise money and then call up the Ron Paul campaign and say, what states would you like us to air these ads in?
That's a no-no.
But other than that, we can pretty much do what we want.
Now, the thing is that when you start a super PAC and you're Mitt Romney's friend or something, and you want to start a super PAC for him, usually you start one with the millionaires already in mind.
So Romney raised $12 million from 90 people, and I'd rather suspect those 90 people are not donating that much money to Romney out of a deep philosophical commitment to the inspiring and enduring and centuries-old principles enunciated by Mitt Romney.
I'd rather think it's because they want a spot on the gravy train.
Now, we're different.
We know a few millionaires, but we're not in exactly the position that those super PACs are in.
We didn't start ours for Ron Paul with the idea that we already know who the 58 people who are going to give us $80 billion are.
We don't know who they are.
But we thought if we put out a good product on behalf of the candidate, then they will come out of the woodwork.
The Ron Paul community has a way of getting things out there, making them go viral, and we'll find those people one way or another.
But as you know, and as I'm sure we'll discuss in just a minute, we just produced, for example, our first ad for television.
And I think it's, if I may say so, of exceptional quality.
It conveys an extraordinary amount of information in just 60 seconds.
Yeah, I just played the audio of it in the last segment, Tom.
Oh, good.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm really thrilled with how it came out.
And I think that when people see that, they'll say, okay, well, here's another way I can support Ron Paul.
I mean, anything that supports Ron Paul, like we're all on the same page.
Like, this is all good.
This is what we all want to do.
But the difference, the one thing that hasn't been picked up on in the media yet, though, in spite of the fact that USA Today has covered the ad, and Wall Street Journal has covered it, Politico has covered it, and basically, favorably, they think it's a funny ad, which is good.
But what they haven't noticed is that our Super PAC is different.
As I said, we don't already have the money bags following us around.
But actually, at the end of this ad, on YouTube anyway, the YouTube version, the message comes up and says, want to see this ad air in major primary states?
Then donate at revolutionpac.com.
So we're appealing to anybody of means or just anybody at all.
Because we don't already know who the 50 anonymous people are going to be, that sort of thing.
Well, I think there's an important lesson there, too, about what Ron Paul's about, especially for people who lean left out there.
That the most powerful, richest business interests in the country, they don't support the libertarian candidate.
They sure as hell have never supported the libertarian party.
They can't even raise a million dollars in a presidential election.
One million dollars.
These people, it's really the Democrats and the Republicans, who are the typical liberals and conservatives, they're the rich white man's anarchy.
And so our only hope, Tom, really is that out of all the rich businessmen in America, somewhere in there, we have somebody who's ideological enough that he'd rather fairly compete in the market than buy up a couple of congressmen and get on the taxpayer welfare train.
Yeah, that's exactly what we've got here.
I mean, we've got a guy who supported Barack Obama.
It was Goldman Sachs and AIG gave him millions.
Yeah, exactly.
And whereas with Ron Paul, you know there aren't going to be any bailouts.
You know that going into it.
You know there aren't going to be any special privileges.
You're not going to have any special White House access.
Why would you want this guy?
I mean, there is this myth out there that Wall Street wants unregulated capitalism.
That is the last thing Wall Street wants.
That is an unbelievable misconception, really, to me, that people would think that.
They have no desire for that whatsoever.
They like things like the Dodd-Frank bill that are incomprehensible to most people, but that contain at least a hundred times the words, the committee shall determine.
Well, guess who gets to have lunch with that committee to arrange for emergency meetings with members of that committee?
It's not Joe's Country Bank.
So these people are perfectly happy with the labyrinthine system we have right now.
They don't want a Ron Paul who's going to upset the apple cart.
They want a stooge who's going to stand there and preserve the status quo.
Well, you got your run of...
I got an idea for your next ad.
It's got to be all about the realignment.
There's us and there's them.
You know what you ought to do?
You ought to have it where half of it is about Obama-Perry 2012 and how these guys agree on everything and how what we really need is a separate two-party system, us and them, the people of this country versus the political interests that run Big Pharma, that run the big farms, that run the warfare state and banking on Wall Street.
It's us versus them.
Well, look, I mean, you know, you know, Scott, that I couldn't agree more with that sentiment.
I'm afraid that that is maybe too much educating to try to do in four months of the public.
I mean, basically saying to people, you have to rethink everything you've been taught.
I mean, Ron Paul is implicitly saying that already.
I mean, he's...
Yeah, but look, with your ad, you just had some dancing cartoon puppets make a lot of really good points, and it's really easy to just...
I mean, you have actually Barack Obama giving Mitt Romney a star of approval in that ad, right?
Just run with that theme.
Obama-Perry 2012, Obama-Romney.
What's the difference between these guys anyway?
Don't you want a real two-party system?
Wouldn't you like to have an actual alternative to choose, you know?
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I would like the people to get that.
You know, a lot of people really aren't that strongly ideologically liberal or conservative Republican or Democrat.
They vote for the person, you know?
Yeah, it's true.
It'd be a lot easier if we didn't have these closed primaries, you know, where people would like to vote for the person, but then it comes time to do so, and they realize, wait a minute, if I want to vote for this guy, I needed to register Republican six weeks earlier.
So it's very, very frustrating, the whole system.
Very frustrating.
The hope is that, of course, if he does well in Iowa, which is entirely possible...
I mean, he got 10% last time in Iowa, even though his poll numbers were much lower, and plus there were logistical nightmares in the Iowa campaign at that point, and yet somehow they still pulled out 10%.
Well, I mean, he had a great straw poll show.
I think he's likely to do much better if he comes out really strong out of Iowa.
Well, it's like McCain.
I mean, McCain just came out of nowhere and took New Hampshire, and then all of a sudden everybody was at foregone conclusion, well, McCain's the nominee, so I have to go out and vote for him.
I don't like McCain, but I heard people saying this, like they were quoted in the news, I don't like McCain, but I gotta go vote for him.
What?
What does that even mean?
Well, if that's the way people are, then maybe they'll do that for Ron.
I don't know, as long as they vote for him, I don't care what the motivation is, inertia, whatever, I don't know.
All right, now tell me fast, the music's playing, how do people help the Super PAC?
Just go watch the ad, revolutionpac.com, spread it around to all your friends, especially your millionaire friends, but help us out, send us a donation, let's get this ad on the air, let's get the show on the road here.
All right, Keller, thanks very much.
Thank you, Scott.
Tom Woods, everybody, tomwoods.com, look up the new ad at Lou Rockwell's blog as well.