Welcome to the Mises Institute's podcast. We have a very special guest today, Lew Rockwell,
who's the president and founder of the Mises Institute and my boss and the boss of everyone
else in this office. We're very pleased to have him. He just got back from a lecture, a speech,
and of all places, Washington DC. So it occurred to us that this would be a perfect time for his
podcast debut. What took you to Washington, Lew? Let me just say I apologize, first of all, for
the cold I've got. I picked up a bug in Washington, I guess, but so if my voice sounds a little bit
odd, that's the reason. But Dr. Ron Paul asked me to come and give a talk, rather his Liberty Study
Committee, which is his organization that attempts to bring together libertarian-minded congressmen,
and Social Friendship.
And Ron and his wife Carol were there. This was at the Capitol Hill Club, which is a sort
of slightly chilling Republican, official Republican club. And I must say, I definitely
felt I was in, I don't know, a nightclub in Mordor or something when I was in this place
because everybody else looked like a crook. I mean, they looked either like a crook or
a war criminal. And I expected to see John Charles Houston or some of the guys from the
old days, the ones who did the Nixon surveillance plans and plans for setting up dictatorships
and so forth. They all looked awful, except of course the Ron Paul people. And it's been
sometimes since I've been in this club, the last time I was there was during Ronald Reagan's
first term, so that's a long time ago. So we had dinner with the staff and with two
of Ron's friends, Congressman Walter Jones from North Carolina, who was the man who went
down in history, I guess, for having said we should no longer call French fries French
Congressman Jimmy Duncan from Tennessee. I had known his dad a little bit. In fact, in the mid-1970s, I went to England with him and a few other congressmen to look at the National Health Service Socialized Medicine, which of course we've now pretty much copied the English here in this country.
This was a guy who voted against the war in the beginning,
got in a huge amount of trouble in his district,
although he told me that now people come up to him and his wife
and congratulate them for having made the right decision.
So when you say libertarian-minded,
do you mainly talk about the war? What does it mean to be libertarian-minded?
No, I'm talking about a broad range of things.
First of all, a decentralized approach. These are all guys who think that there's something
wrong with the federal government running all over the world, just from an institutional
standpoint. They also are anti-tax, they're anti-spending. I wouldn't call them, they're
not sort of members of the libertarian movement in any sense, much to their credit probably,
but they tend to be sort of old-fashioned small government conservatives.
Well, they seem to be popping up in strange places. I mean, are there surprises?
I mean, in the 90s, you sort of knew who the libertarians were, at least we thought we did.
Nowadays, it's slightly different, right? When you're talking about people who don't expect Washington to be running the world,
are you talking about Republicans, mainly, or Democrats?
These are all Republicans that I met at this.
These are all Republicans, okay.
For example, Roscoe Bartlett, who I think was just sort of a traditional conservative,
I was at a luncheon the next day that Ron had some of these congressional friends of his in to talk with me about the gold standard, about the war, about whatever else they wanted to talk about.
He said, you know, we were talking about socialized medicine, he said, you know, the federal government took a problem that was a problem for a few people in the 1960s, that is a problem of not being able to afford medical care or other kinds of related questions.
is it made it into a problem, a huge problem for every single American with Medicare and Medicaid
and he said this is the model of what they've done.
So when you have a sort of a regular conservative talking like that,
I would say to some extent these people are becoming radicalized.
Now it's only a few of them.
And then of course there's all kinds of other great news.
I mean delay being shown up for the crook he is.
Jack Abramoff, who I know a little bit, a Republican lobbyist crook,
who's involved with a whole bunch of other congressmen, very interesting stuff going to be happening there.
The hilarious case of Randy Duke Cunningham, the loudmouth warmonger from San Diego,
who it turned out had taken a Rolls Royce, a Louis Philippe Commode, I don't know what a Louis Philippe Commode is.
Sounds desirable.
Michael Kinsley referred to it as a hilarious conucopia of baubles that he had received.
But anyway, the next day we had this meeting and they came, a bunch of them, maybe seven or eight of them, came in for at least part of the time, a luncheon.
and it was very, very nice and it's nice to see
I mean it's funny that Ron Paul
certainly in the early years that he was up there was all very much a matter of
434 to 1 votes in the Congress
Ron was
pretty much alone. I would say it's a very different thing today without having changed his
views
really it's the power of truth
The fact that he has continued for all these years to say the same sorts of things, stand up for the same sorts of principles against the Federal Reserve, against government spending, against wars, and so forth,
it really has gotten him a lot of respect. So you have an amazing number of people who will come up to him and ask him to explain things, or why are you voting this way?
And he's got a number of congressmen who have openly associated themselves with him and call him our leader. So it's neat.
This is still a tiny minority, of course, but it's still fun to see it.
It was one of the encouraging things about being in that awful city.
Do you think that the Bush administration is, in a sense, forcing Republicans to choose between principle and politics?
Excuse me. I think that, I think what we're actually seeing, and I was, you know, as you know, we live under the biggest, richest, most powerful government in the history of the world by many magnitudes.
And just because of that, we're sort of living in an unfortunate social experiment, they can't do anything, they can't do anything right, because of the nature of bureaucracy, because of the nature of socialism.
This thing is the most incompetent bunch of boobs and the thugs ever to be assembled in probably the history of the galaxy, let alone the world.
So they can't, you know, they can't go to Hurricane Katrina right, they can't do the trial of Saddam Hussein right, they can't do the war right.
Here they put through, you know, well I saw, for example, this World War II memorial, the ugliest looking thing you've ever seen on the mall.
They can't do a memorial to themselves right anymore.
They can't, you look at this new drug welfare program that
Bush is spending, you know, a quadrillion dollars for the drug companies on.
Nobody can figure it out. They're like 84 extremely complicated choices.
Older people, nobody can, everybody's hating the guts of the government,
including those getting the government's money.
So, when you see this, when you see this city
and as a symbol of the federal government,
They can't do anything. I mean, they're paralyzed.
And it again has to do with the nature of bureaucracy.
And so it's a sort of a teaching moment for us and a very interesting opportunity.
But it's having an effect even internally.
Also the corruption is having an effect internally.
Because the congressmen who are not corrupt are very much bothered by the fact that the leadership is all corrupt.
and I was reminded that Jim Wright, who was the Democratic speaker, was tossed out by Newt Gingrich.
His crime, I hope I'm remembering this correctly, was having a friendly trade union by $48,000 worth of his book and distribute them to people.
for People.
Shouldn't have done it, right?
So Jack Abramoff just on one Indio casino deal alone has made $90 million.
So the whole, there's a lot, and of course that's just a tiny bit of it.
Some people are doing very well because of it, but there's, I think the decent Republicans are worried about the corruption thing.
They're also worried about losing the House.
I mean, a lot of them fear that the coming election, because of the war especially, that they're all going to pay the price.
Wouldn't you, maybe you would expect to see corruption increase as a party expects to lose power.
I mean, if they expect that everything's going to turn at the next election, why wouldn't you, right now, take all you can get?
Sure, that's of course Hoppe's point, right? I mean, that's the nature of democracy.
But I guess it really began, at least with the Republicans, when they came to power.
I mean, when they, especially now that they have all power, they have the judiciary, the presidency, and the congress, and so some of them are, you know, definitely living it up.
But that has an effect on the decent people, even if they're not our kind of people ideologically, it bothers them.
So, and also there's a, and that's not just the Republicans, I mean there are both conservative Republicans and liberal Republicans who are sort of part of the Ron Paul network, and also some Democrats, so, it's very encouraging, people are sort of being educated, it's an interesting example of, I mean, Ron's never had political power in the real sense, and he never will have real political power, probably in this world anyway, but he, he still
These are huge influences. Even though he's in politics, he's using his political office to educate people, not only his constituents, people all over the country, even people in Washington.
Did you get any sense from anybody you talked to about you? Did people say, oh, you're Lew Rockwell, my goodness.
A number of these congressmen, in fact every one of them, all read MisesOrganLewRockwell.com.
And first I thought, well, you know, they've just been well briefed and they're flattering me, and then I thought, well, wait a minute, they have no reason to try to flatter me.
So, I mean, it must be true. And they mention various articles, and they all get the Daily Article.
And also these guys are all well-read. That's certainly not true of everybody in politics.
They're intellectuals.
They're all smart. I mean, they were all smart. They were different, very interesting, different kinds of personalities, all smart and all well-read.
Well, just that it's not a coincidence that the first central bank formed in the 1690s in England was set up specifically to allow the king to wage war on his own say so and to circumvent the parliament.
He didn't have to go to parliament anymore and ask for higher taxes, which was always very much of a problem for the king.
So the central bank enabled him to circumvent that and in effect punish everybody through inflation but enable him to wage his wars.
And of course again that our own Federal Reserve was set up right before our entry into World War I
enabling probably the greatest disaster in the history of the human race World War I to follow out as it did through US intervention
leading eventually to World War II and to Hitler and Lenin and what the deaths of 300 million people through government concentration camps and wars and oppressions, starvations and everything of every sort.
So in some sense maybe if we hadn't had the central bank that all wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had Woodrow Wilson.
So I just talked about that in our own situation here recently, President Bush didn't have to worry about the budget.
It didn't really bother him whether his attack on Iraq was going to cost $5 billion or $50 billion or $500 billion.
They just printed it up at the Fed.
Of course, the new Fed governor, they're all interested in him, Ben Bernanke,
and his specific lauding of the printing press.
The printing press, they were all very interested in the article that he'd had in the Wall Street Journal that day about the Great Depression.
And a number of them pointed out that he obviously hadn't read Rothbard's book on the Great Depression.
Right, yeah.
And of course he takes the standard line that the Great Depression was brought on by deflation.
And the lesson from that is the Fed always needs to err on the side of running the printing press 24-7.
And he, in fact, has held this out as one of the great things about the Fed. They can print as much money at virtually no cost as they need to do.
It seems to be the neoclassical consensus of this point. It's like a combination of Keynes and Friedman or something.
And it does seem like, almost as if the Austrians are the only dissidents on this point, doesn't it?
No, it's true. And, of course, the whole, you know, even the whole helicopter effect.
Friedman implying that somehow inflation takes place as if money dropped from a helicopter.
Bernanke, some people call him helicopter Bernanke because of this point.
But of course, as the Austrians know, that's not the way the new money comes in at all.
It comes into the banking system.
And if in fact everybody's cash balances were increased to the same amount by the same time, by the same percentage,
they would have no reason to inflate.
I mean, it's because some people are forced to pay more than others
and some people get the new money first. This is why they inflate, that and of course for the reasons that any counterfeiter inflates to pay the bills.
So they were very interested in monetary questions, in war questions, very worried about what's going to happen, worried about, all of them I must say were outraged by the attacks on Murtha.
They all liked Murtha and thought he was a significant guy.
John Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, who had said it was time to get out. The war was lost, and when he said this, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and all the rest of them immediately smeared him as a coward and a traitor and a bum, probably in the pay of a sum of a lot, I'm kidding of course, but that was sort of the implication.
and so forth. And we should have a debate. It's okay to have differing views and so forth.
There has of course never been a debate in Washington in this war. The House and the Senate never held a debate on the war, ever.
In fact, some of these guys are trying to do various parliamentary maneuvers to try to bring about a debate that involves pro-war people as well as anti-war people.
But of course they don't want a debate for the fact that they've got nothing to say, except you're a traitor for wanting to question me.
You know, at some level it's just outrageous though, isn't it? I mean, how long has the
war been going on now? Very long time. And for people to be only now insisting, you know,
that the thing be debated and that some decisive action be taken to rectify what are obvious
injustices.
Yes, of course it's true, but the whole point of it, one of the great things about a war
The war from the state standpoint is where they get to shut everybody up, that saying
anything counter to the official line makes you a traitor.
Also I just want to mention one other thing, Merther said that I think set them back after
Cheney went after him as a traitor and a bum and a terrorist, pro-terrorist and so forth.
He said he didn't like being instructed by a guy who had taken five deferments during
Vietnam about who should be going to get killed in the war and telling him who had actually
People who use drugs into prison, whereas he himself, of course, feels that he should be able to use drugs and nothing would happen to him.
So the fact that people are all such hypocrites is actually helpful.
But did you say anything that rattled anybody at that Q&A session?
Well, I think I was more radical than any of them, but that's why I was there.
I'm not there so that I'm for a gold coin standard and while they're all for less inflation except for the exception of Ron Paul and I'm for, I think the only thing we can do in Iraq is stop doing evil things, there's actually nothing good to be done, all we can do is get out, we can't actually fix the place, we can't stop a civil war from happening which is happening right now anyway,
I think the U.S. is not at all unhappy with that, but that we just have to stop doing
bad things. That's the only thing that we can look to the government to do, whether
it's in Iraq, whether it's with the Federal Reserve, whether it's with regulation or spending,
taxation, whatever. We should never look to them. In fact, this was the subject of a talk
that I litigated the same day to Congressional aides. We can't look to the government trying
Your comment implies that what seems to be the case, the biggest reservation about an
immediate pullout is precisely that people worry that the whole of Iraq will just collapse
into just an uncontrollable chaos and this would spread and would result in mass violence
in the U.S. would somehow catch the blame for this. So, your comment then addresses
that point that you don't think that that would be the result or there's nothing we
can do to that? Well, I just, I don't, there is mass violence, there is mass chaos. People
are still, you know, everybody's unemployed. There's, of course, a huge regime of price
controls and other kinds of interventions the U.S. has put into place in Iraq. There's
still gasoline price controls. So they've got long lines to get gasoline. Here's a
The Federal Reserve is a country that's second only to Saudi Arabia for its known oil reserves.
They've created a shortage of gasoline.
It's a lot like the Soviets in Afghanistan, isn't it?
Of course, there's an underground economy.
One of the things a lot of young boys do is they get these jerry cans that hold five or ten gallons of gasoline, very heavy of course,
The U.S. does is arrest these kids. The soldiers arrest these kids for the economic crime of selling gasoline outside the approved system. It's definitely Soviet. The soldiers, I mean, it's not their idea. They're being told what to do. The whole thing is a disaster. We can stop killing people. We can stop killing people. We can stop killing people.
I think that's about all we can do. Is there going to be a civil war there? Maybe. I don't know. I mean, it's the fact that the U.S. has set up, in effect, a Kurdish slash Shiite government that's going after the Sunnis for the things they feel the Sunnis did to them in past years. That's already happened. Most of the violence, of course, in Iraq is directed at the U.S. as the occupiers. If we got out, that would end. What else would happen? We don't know.
Probably half people are unemployed, half the people would like jobs, can't get jobs, there's no electricity, the whole thing is very, very bad.
None of the oil is being produced, we've made a desert and called it peace, we've made a desert and called it freedom, but it's not.
And of course the answer is also not foreign aid, as some liberals think. I mean, foreign aid is also itself, of course, an imperial action.
No, they don't seem to understand that.
It's actually that that's the U.S. controlling things for the benefit of the U.S. state, its puppets in Iraq, big business in this country and favorite business interests in Iraq, ripping off the American people, ripping off the Iraqi people.
We don't want foreign aid there or anyplace else.
So, true bad things may happen, but I don't think we can buy the stupid Colin Powell analogy that he refers to as the Pottery Barn rule that if you break it, you own it.
First of all, that's not the Pottery Barn rule. That's not the way Pottery Barn runs its business.
But I always think of it as a case of, it's always useful to put these things on a more local level.
If the police end up wrecking somebody's house looking for a criminal and maybe they capture the criminal and then they wreck the house, then they own the house?
And they can tell you how to live and the other people in the house? No, you can't. That's just ridiculous.
All we can do is stop doing evil. Internationally or domestically, there may very well be more bad things to happen in Iraq.
But let's look at what the U.S. has already achieved in Iraq in terms of bad things through our intervention.
First of all, there was the first, President Bush, the first attack on Iraq.
We don't know how many civilians killed, probably 100,000 civilians killed.
Then he imposed the starvation blockade that Clinton then continued.
Twelve years, we don't know how many people were killed.
During the Clinton years, Madeleine Albright admitted that the figure was probably 500,000 children and old people killed by starvation.
She said it was worth it in an attempt to overthrow Saddam. The thing went on much longer.
Some people think maybe a million people were killed by our starvation blockade.
It's not often talked about, but right at the end of the first Gulf War, the U.S. deliberately bombed
every single sewage treatment plant in Iraq, and then forbade any chemicals, chlorine, other chemicals,
water purifying chemicals from being imported into the country, deliberately attempting to cause disease.
The US government did that. Now, again, we've had at least 100,000 innocent civilian casualties, and not to speak of all the insurgents that were killed, the American soldiers that were killed, the whole mountain of skulls the US has created in Iraq. So the idea that this same bunch should be able to stay there to make things better, I think is just implausible, and really, we just have to get out.
You believe that, too, concerning various plans. It seemed somewhat plausible to divide the country up, split it up into various pieces.
Well, that may very well happen, right?
But it should just happen, it should.
Well, I think, yeah, it should not be up to us to decide, because there'd be some...
The U.S. ... tough for some, as people understand, the U.S. is not a charitable institution, the U.S. government.
So that even though it might be claiming to break up the country for freedom or whatever,
there would be various other things happening in terms of the U.S. wanting to have control.
We also have to relinquish all the military bases we've got there.
The first act of the Coalition Provisional Authority after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein
was to sign an agreement between itself and the U.S. government,
as if these were two different entities,
setting up 14 huge permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq forever.
So this is one of the reasons why the Iraqis don't believe that the U.S. intends to ever get out.
This is why the insurgents believe that the US intends to be there permanently.
These bases are being built by Halliburton right now and similar military contractors.
Some of them are thousands of square miles.
We need to stop it.
It may very well be that there should be three different countries.
Maybe there should be 33 different countries.
I don't actually know. I'm all for breaking it up. I think that's a great thing.
On the other hand, it's not really true that Iraq was formed by the British Empire.
I mean, that region of the world, which is pretty much equivalent to Mesopotamia,
has been a coherent region for many thousands of years.
So maybe it wouldn't break up, maybe it would break up.
Maybe there would be several Kurdish states. Maybe there would be several Shiite states.
The Shiite states. Maybe the Sunnis and the Shiites would end up being together. Who knows. A very interesting figure, Maqdur al-Sadr, who even though he's a Shiite, is very much an Iraqi nationalist and rejects religious, even though he's a religious leader himself, rejects religious bias in the new government and wants actually a more secular government.
So there's all kinds of interesting things. The one thing we can be sure of is that we
don't know anything. None of us know anything about Iraq, the history of Iraq, the tribal
questions, ethnic questions, religious questions. And it's not just, because of course the Kurds
are Sunnis. The Kurds are ethnically different. They're not Arabs, but they're Sunni Muslims.
So anyway, there are all kinds of very interesting degrees of complexity that absolutely no American
And none of which seemed to have occurred at all to the Bush administration when they first
went in there. They seemed to accept the line from some of the Iraqi dissidents that all
you'd have to do is go in and get rid of the dictator and then peace and freedom for all
would just break out immediately.
Well, you know, I know they said that. I don't think they actually believe that. I think
that they have, I think that these people, when we think of them as neoconservatives,
which is sometimes a useful term have an almost religious belief in the ability of force to
accomplish things. They believe that put the gun to the guy's head and everything will
be okay. Bombs and bullets will shape society exactly as they want it to be shaped and that's
what they thought would do it. So that was, I think, the great illusion. I don't think
I think that was just propaganda for the American people to get us into the war.
No conquered people throw flowers in the feet of the conqueror. It just doesn't happen.
People don't want to be ruled by foreigners.
Even if one might say from some other perspective that some of the former British colonies were better off being run by the British
than by their local leaders in one sense, but people don't want that.
Here we are in Alabama, and I think, let's say, a country that were freer than the United States, Switzerland or Hong Kong or Singapore or whatever, conquered Alabama and was going to fix us up and make us freer, and we certainly could be a lot freer, what would the average, and then of course, in these cases wouldn't necessarily, if it's Switzerland, wouldn't be the case where we would have people who are as foreign as we are in Iraq, linguistically, religiously,
Ethnically and historically, and every other sense, sense foreign.
Let's say we had English speaking Swiss people came here and were running Alabama.
Would the average young Alabama guy, who's of course well armed as a hunter and otherwise,
would he be saluting and doing what the Swiss said?
Or would he be heading to the woods and taking pot shots at them?
I think we know the answer to that. That's the way human beings are.
And I don't agree with that.
I don't think that, I wish the people in Iraq were using a non-violent form of resistance.
I don't like the fact that they're, I don't, it's, it's, it's not good in many, many different,
different grounds to be killing people. It's not a good thing.
But that's the way people react. People don't want to be governed by foreigners.
That's why colonialism is one of the reasons colonialism doesn't work.
Maybe you could say that the English did a better job of running India than certainly the Indians until the present time.
Socialists, Nehru and maybe the Maharajas before, maybe in some sense the English were more progressive in a good sense.
They stamped out the thugi cults where they had a religion that would kill people, pick up travelers and kill them as a religious right for the goddess Kali.
Well, you know, the British got rid of that.
But still the Indians like to be run by themselves. They don't want guys from London telling them what to do.
And that's human beings. The Iraqis don't want us telling them what to do.
People in Alabama wouldn't want the Swiss telling them what to do.
In fact, those of us in Alabama don't want Washington telling us what to do, by the way, guys.
This relates to the topic of your talk later in the day.
Yeah. Ron also asked me to talk to congressional aides.
So they sent out an invitation to the various offices and virtually no Republican aides came, very interesting.
There were some outside visitors, Jim Beauvoir, the wonderful libertarian author who's got a new book coming out, was there, and other friends.
But most of the Congressional aides who were there were from Democratic offices.
Some of them were greatly outraged to find out that I was supposed to welfare, for example.
A couple of them stalked out of the room.
but I would say most people were interested and pretty much what I what I
talked about was the title of the talk was in the impossibility of of imposed
freedom and that part of the that the right-wing response to the left of the
left obviously thinks you have to have total government control in order to
prevent discrimination or poverty or unfairness and all the rest of the things
The Republicans, too, sometimes the right seems to think that we need the government using market-based incentives to run the economy and society to fulfill the government's goals for us.
Let's take, for example, the whole question of social security. A horrible program instituted by Franklin Roosevelt based on the original horrible program instituted by Bismarck in Germany, Bismarck, sort of the Lincoln of Germany, a guy who crushed the freedom of the various German states, united them into a single state for war purposes and one of the things he thought would help with this and help him circumvent the opposition of the left was to
has a much poorer people, it's set up all kinds of very bad incentives, it's promoted
the rotten idea of retirement, the ridiculous evil idea that men and women should stop working
at age 65 and just vegetate on a golf course and stop contributing to society as productive
members of the economy and as leaders among society. So this has been a terrible program,
has caused vast amounts of resources to be transferred from productive investment uses
in the economy into consumption. It's made people feel they don't need to provide for
their old age because the government is going to take care of them. So now we're starting
to see as the taxes go up and up and there are fewer and fewer working people versus the
The people who are receiving social security becomes a cry for reform. People realize that there has to be something done.
So what are the republicans and the DC types come up with?
Well, it's have privatized social security, but which they don't mean, by the way.
They've distorted the word privatization. They don't mean the idea of the government withdrawing from areas of the economy
or society it's not controlling, but they mean the government running us in a new way for its own benefit.
So the privatized social security, so called, would have set up a whole new system of forced savings
and enable the government to control the stock market to a greater extent than it does,
to control all of our lives to a greater extent than it does,
have vastly increased spending, vastly increased deficits in the name of freedom and privatization.
In other words, just a lie and a crime.
So this is the Republican response to the left-wing social security.
both are wrong and all I've tried to make the point that in what I think is the Jeffersonian point
that liberty is not something to be imposed or given to us by the government
but it's something that is natural it's a natural right and what we want is the government to not
interfere with our liberties that's what our focus has to be on but we can't ever look to the
government to give us freedom because it won't give us freedom it'll give us a counterfeit freedom
It'll give us a yoke with another name on it.
It does seem to be a critique of a certain brand of liberalism or neoliberalism, doesn't it?
The Chicago School of Economics seems to think that you can kind of use the courts to establish a more perfect market economy.
economy, and there's so many proposals out there that you would have Congress pass this
or that bill to secure private property rights from invasion, from local governments, these
are the kinds of plans you're referring to then?
Sure, and I'm sure you're exactly right about the Chicago school, and we have a lot of libertarians
is sort of advocating that in effect a judge rules society and the judges in making use of the Chicago School idea should define property rights and as they think brings about efficiency, economic efficiency, of course as Austrians we know that efficiency only has meaning in a subjective sense, I mean what's efficient for the property owner? What do they want to do with their property? That's obviously the correct position.
The idea that judges, notice in common parlance too, I mean some people think judges are not part of the government, but they somehow stand apart from the government, of course they represent the government, they're part of the government, and Hans Hoppe has done some wonderful work on this to remind us that when you have the government, when you have an institution having a monopoly of justice, you've got problems.
So it's why one of the things I tried to talk about was how wonderful the whole private arbitration movement is, in fact private courts in so many states handling so many commercial disputes and bringing actual justices versus the government courts leading.
I must say one young lady who was with Congressman John Conyers office, to stalk out of the room, one of the things they did was they gave out copies of Speaking of Liberty to any of the congressional aides who came.
and she this is your book yeah she tossed back the book to the Ron Paul's
that you had given it to her and just sort of stocked up that would be it so
the other hand I I had one very interesting question from a young man
from Congress and Wexler's office and I congratulated him on being from Wexler's
office Wexler being one of the people who had really not taken a strong any
War Stands, one of the three people who voted to end the war immediately just recently.
So he in his question said, well really aren't you saying, and he said it seemed to him that
that was correct, that the real problem was the central government and that we had less
to fear from the states and the localities, that maybe a decentralized approach was a
better one.
And this guy, by the way, is just, Wexler is sort of, I always thought of him anyway,
I'm now going to have to examine him a little bit more on more than the war issue.
But here was a democratic liberal aide making a great old right Jeffersonian, old conservative libertarian point about the dangers of consolidated government,
a point unfortunately very few Republicans of the non-Ron Paul sort would agree with.
At least not today, ten years ago.
Yeah, but of course it was just a trick ten years ago, right, because Clinton was running the government.
So I think that, you know, by the way, a lot of these, one of these congressmen from Idaho came in and was talking to me about,
yeah, he just read a great book, Tommy Lorenzo's book on Lincoln.
So, right, I mean, there, so he was just thrilled about that was, and of course that's exactly right.
And again, a reminder that, and I say this as somebody who was a Republican all his life
and now not associated with any political party, but the Republican Party was born in big government and big government, big business partnership and suppression of civil liberties and inflation and aggressive war and protectionism and all the rest of the rotten aspects of the Lincoln government and then we have McKinley and the war on Spain and the Taft and the income tax and the occupation, the colonial war against the people in the Philippines.
They don't know how many, nobody but no American knows about this.
Probably the U.S. government killed 200,000 Philippine civilians for the crime of wanting
to run their own country.
They didn't want to be run by Spain, there was a big revolt against Spain.
They didn't want to be run by the Americans out there.
And the U.S., it's where we got the whole program of strategic villages and concentration
Prison camps and the sense of prison camps, just a horrific anti-guerrilla war in the
Philippines and the U.S. of course held the Philippines as a colony until after, until
the Japanese took it away and then the U.S. got it back but then they have to thank goodness
let it go at the end of World War II.
Filipinos didn't want to be run by the Americans any more than the Iraqis did.
This unfortunately the Republican Party, and then we think of Herbert Hoover, well I must
Let's say he was pretty darn good on foreign policy, but really started the new deals Murray
Rothbard showed so eloquently in his book on the Great Depression.
So unfortunately the Republican Party's got a bad history.
Then there are great people as an opposition to Roosevelt and of course Taft and the great
Howard Buffett, Warren Buffett's father who was a congressman from Nebraska, opposed the
Cold War, opposed the Korean War, a friend of Murray Rothbard's.
I don't know if they're great Republicans, but they've been in the minority, so I'm afraid that the Bush regime actually is the real Republican Party, not a...
But still, it's striking...
Any more than the Democratic Party is not the party of Jefferson, just in case anybody would think that in this case.
But ten years ago, you're making a case against nation building internationally, nation building domestically, too.
But these same points were being made by all the anti-Clintonites.
I saw a great quote from Tom DeLay the other day during the Bosnian War, and he's denouncing
Clinton for not having set a timetable and for not having a nexus strategy, for not defining
what victory is, when do you know you've accomplished what.
All the kinds of questions that are of course considered Osama bin Laden-ish to ask today
of the Bush government, these guys were all asking of Clinton.
Well, you'd think that you would hope that, with the left studying the Bush administration
so carefully, that the left would draw broader lessons from the experience, that you don't
want a mega-state with all of this power because look what it can do to the country, look what
it can do to the world.
But for some reason, the right had the chance to learn that lesson from the experience of
Clinton and it didn't stick.
Yeah, you know, it's true I had a young man write me a few weeks ago and describe himself as a left winger and said that he was now beginning to question whether he really wanted the same government that was running the war in Iraq running him here at home.
The Left, I was listening to driving home last night from the airport to Mike Malloy, who was a left-wing talk show host, great stuff to say about the war, and then he went on in the most unbelievable, I would describe it almost like a Hitler-like or a Stalin-like attack on Wal-Mart. It was just really chilling. It sounded like a problem in the 1930s going after the records.
just horrible so yeah we have our work cut out for us in every sector I guess
well after being in Washington for for a couple of days did you have any regrets
that the Mises Institute doesn't have Capitol Hill headquarters no of course
the the city has become the how shall I say the concrete barrier cop capital of
the world I mean all these former streets are shut off with guards and
with Barriers, and of course the thing is a cop afoot. I mean all over Washington they've
expanded the Capitol Hill police by some unbelievable percentage and I must say it looks like they
hired people for what a surprise on political reasons rather than, how shall I say this,
Rather than for reasons of ability to say chase somebody down, I mean there were a lot
of people who didn't seem like they had sort of the normal, which we think of as the policemen
body shape, who were just standing around and soaking up tax dollars and making trouble
and stopping people and the whole place is very unpleasant and on the other hand there's
another unpleasant aspect to it, if you sort of in the outserts of the district, vast building
going on, vast shopping malls, so of course they're sucking in all the money from the
country and the world and living it up. I was put at the Pentagon Sheridan where as
far as I could tell I was the only non-CIA guy in the hotel and right there is this huge
Pentagon shopping mall and they all are living very well, they live very well. It's the most
It lived very well. It's the most prosperous part of the country. But of course, they're all parasites.
And it's one of the things we hope to do at the Mises Institute is try to protect and talk about the importance of the producers as versus the parasites.
And businessmen as versus politicians. And when you're in that place, it's definitely the political capital.
You know, did you have a sense when you were there that as you were saying these things,
as you were speaking and talking to the audience of general shock or relief to finally hear
I think they sort of knew they were going to hear something different. I would say some people were shocked. Some people were interested. Some people were glad to hear a different perspective. There were some conservative, retired bureaucrats there from various agencies who all thought they were going to hear, I think, a simpatico presentation. One of them was a bit of a
they were going to hear I think a simpatico presentation and one of them was a big fan
of distributivism, economic ideas of Chesterton and Bellwau and were shocked to find out that
they didn't hear a sympathetic presentation. So sort of the old, I remember some of the
old conservatives I remember from Washington, doesn't mean they aren't fine people, but
there's something bad about living off others by force, it has a bad effect on you. People
People have been lifetime bureaucrats, they may start out good, they may be still decent people, they're not beating their wife or robbing the bank or whatever, but still there's a, really if we care for, if we exercise a form of Christian love towards the bureaucrats and want the best thing for them, we have to make them get a job.
I mean in fact that's what I said to all these congressional aides, get a job, get off the payroll, become producers, contribute to society, don't be parasites.
So, you know, people, I didn't put in quite those terms, but that's in effect what I would say.
But it's a strange aspect of Washington culture that people on the outside don't entirely understand,
just how isolated sometimes it seems that people who live and work in Washington
really are from any kind of productive activity, any kind of real world setting.
I mean, inside the Beltway, it does have its own kind of internal culture of isolated culture.
Yeah, it does. And you get that when you look at the Washington Post, which is like a house organ, like a company house organ.
I mean, it's very different from a regular newspaper. And looking at the Washington Post helps remind you of this.
And when I was flying home, I was sitting behind two people who were talking very loudly.
One man who had some job at the White House, not a political job, but in some sense of some sort of catering manager or something like that.
Women worked for some other aspect of the government, and I remember him, they were saying to her, laughing, and said,
Well, we can sure agree the government exists for one purpose, to employ us.
And she laughed, she said, that's right.
And I didn't pour my coke in their head or anything, right?
I was good, but I thought that's, you know, so they are, but it's differently, they're very much apart, they're a very strange breed.
I've spent time in Washington. I worked for the honor of working for Ron Paul, which was a great experience.
But I was reminded of all the things that I dislike about Washington.
It's been a long time since I've been there. It'll be a long time since before I go there again.
But they're happy to live off of us. It's not in their own interests.
Do you think it's extraordinary, given that, at least according to the official statistics, the economy is not in terrible shape?
Things are growing, the inflation is rising on the producer level, but it's not terrible on the consumer price level.
and Consumer Price Level, unemployment is low, that you would have the public opinion
in polls so expressing such discontent right now with the federal government.
Yeah, I think of course part of it is the war, but I think it's because the economy
is not actually as good as the statistics would legitimately believe.
I mean part of the statistics would tell us that the gross domestic product is increasing
and isn't that great, but of course as we know one of the problems with the GDP statistic
The thing is that as government spending increases, the GDP goes up even though that's not only not a, as Rothbard pointed out, not only an indicator of increased prosperity, it's an indicator of decreased prosperity.
So when New Orleans is destroyed and the government is going to rebuild it, that's considered economically a great thing from the standpoint of the GDP and people who pay attention to those statistics.
It's actually a very bad thing. It's economically a bad thing. So it's not actually a good thing to destroy property, even though you're able to rebuild it.
Hazlitt, and of course this is the constant Austrian message, that we're not paying attention to what might have happened to that money and those resources otherwise.
So I think, I don't agree with Paul Krugman on many things except the war.
He had a good column recently about
median family income
being down again
people are struggling
so even though the official employment statistics
are looking pretty good even though
the official CPI statistics which are also
I think don't at all indicate what's actually going on, any of us who go to
do grocery shopping
realize that
prices are going up at a faster rate than the government claims they are
So I think people are picking up on this, and of course they're worried again about the future.
They may have a job today they're worried about, but maybe they have a job, don't have a job a year from now.
And of course one of the things the Bush government has done by increasing the government
in sort of LBJ, FDR terms, I mean the amount of increased spending has been just horrific.
And even though they're all living it up in Washington, they're all having a great time.
and fancy restaurants, mansions of all the limos and it's a far wealthier area than say Beverly Hills or whatever.
I mean you can't believe it. They're all in it, so unlike Beverly Hills, entirely parasitic.
So they're all doing great, but this is so destabilizing and deep, destroys economic growth, destroys prosperity,
everything the government is doing and it's because it's stepped up things at such an amazing rate under the Bush administration,
Magnificent things going on, entrepreneurs are still doing wonderful things, many American
industries are growing and producing magnificent products, the constant battle of the market
against the government, I think in many ways the market is winning, and certainly the market
will win, but the government is capable of amazing damage, and they're doing damage right
now, and I think people pick up on that.
I was going to say, when you're talking about positive things, the extraordinary growth
of international trade and the expansion of the division of labor into China, Russia,
Eastern Europe. Hasn't that just been astonishing how wonderful that's been for international
productivity and for trade and far beyond I think probably what anybody really expected?
I mean the entry of the Chinese people to the world economy has to be one of the great
events in the entire history of the human race. I mean it's just extraordinary that
We have the Indian people brought in. They weren't kept out in the sense of communism, but they had a very rigid socialist system.
They were kept out. Obviously, the peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe were kept out.
They've all, to one extent or another, come into the world economy.
Very good for them, very good for us, very good for the cause of freedom, for the cause of international amity.
So yes, it's just thrilling. And when you look at what's going on in China, you look at the Chinese cities.
What do you say about a country that, at the time when Nixon was going to China, had vast concentration camps, vast famines, a horrible political regime, maybe the worst of the worst political regimes in the history of the world, since then to have developed a society that still is officially communist, but the corporate income tax is still there, and it's still there, and it's still there, and it's still there, and it's still there, and it's still there, and it's still there, and it's still there.
The tax is at 5%, that's my kind of communism, and the unbelievable prosperity, it's still a poor country overall, but nobody's starving, concentration camps are gone, still a long way to go, but it's been a tremendous, we see it every day when we go to Wal-Mart or whatever, the benefits of trade with China, and even from a political standpoint, the neoconservatives
and the Religious Right were beating the drums for a new war with China just before 9-11.
That was their preferred war of the moment.
They couldn't get away with that, I think, because so many Americans have a stake in
doing business with China, American businessmen and American consumers, and it's Bastiat's
point and Mises's another one.
The free trade, besides bringing increased prosperity, brings increased human friendship
and is an anti-war device.
So it's one of the reasons why those who advocate mercantilism and protectionism are not only
wanting to make us poor and make other people poor, but are in effect promoting warfare
and bombs and killing, as versus human flourishing.
George Reisman went to China a few months ago and blogged a wonderful item on the topic
that very much reflects exactly what you said, and he thought it was one of the great trips
The average Chinese businessman has nothing to do with the government medical system, has private doctors, private hospitals, and that sort of thing, and they advertise for customers. What an amazing thing, actual capitalism. Thrilling.
The average Chinese businessman has nothing to do with the government medical system,
has private doctors, private hospitals, and that sort of thing, and they advertise for
customers.
What an amazing thing, actual capitalism, you know, thrilling.
I hope we don't have to wait till that trip for your next podcast.
Thank you very much.