And now comes word via various news reports including a story at MarketWatch that a main Internet proponent of the Peak Oil myth – The Oil Drum – is shutting its doors.

Here’s how MarketWatch describes it:

… A website created and frequented by advocates of “peak oil,” is closing its doors July 31 after an eight-year run. The site will be kept as a repository of old articles, but will no longer offer new ones, according to a post on the site dated July 3.

The decision was reached thanks to “scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors” and the cost of running the site, the post said. The post garnered more than 700 comments from readers mourning the site’s virtual death. Commenters suggested “donate” buttons and other ideas to raise money.

With news of record-breaking North American oil and gas production seemingly every day, maybe it just got too hard to maintain a site devoted to the notion that the world’s oil production was at or near a peak … Detractors gleefully pointed out that the theory did not take into consideration technological advances, while defenders retort that, inevitably, demand for oil will outstrip supply, leading to higher oil prices and shortages.

Count us among the detractors.

For close to a decade, we’ve been identifying and exposing pernicious scarcity memes that seek to scare middle classes into giving up power and wealth to globalist enterprises such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, etc. Peak Oil was among the higher profile of these memes probably because it was among the most useful.

When top men in the US government and at the Federal Reserve wanted to go off a gold standard, they used Peak Oil concepts to justify the petrodollar. People were led to believe that the only large-scale oil reserves were in the Middle East and then various green manipulations made it difficult to gain oil throughout the West. The Saudis agreed to demand dollars for oil and the rest was history. The world had to hold dollars and dollars became a “reserve currency.”

But now the game is changing. Shale oil and gas – extracted via fracking – have suddenly made it clear that far from suffering from oil scarcity, the world is awash in energy.

Here an excerpt from another recent MarketWatch article:

World to use less OPEC oil as U.S., Canada lead oil supply growth … The world will consume less oil from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries next year, even as the cartel increased its 2014 oil demand growth forecast to its highest since 2010.

Demand for OPEC crude next year is expected to decline by 300,000 barrels a day to an average of 29.6 million barrels a day, OPEC said Wednesday in its monthly report. The report is the first this year to make predictions for 2014. This year’s demand for OPEC oil was forecast as 29.9 million barrels a day, almost unchanged from the previous report, and a decline of 400,000 from 2012.

Supplies from non-OPEC nations are expected to grow by 1.1 million barrels a day in 2014, with the U.S. and Canada leading that growth, followed by Latin America and countries in the former Soviet Union.

Did you ever think, dear reader, that you would someday read “US and Canada lead oil supply growth”? Perhaps you felt along with millions – billions – of others that oil and gas were scarce commodities, mostly located in the Middle East.

What is noteworthy about fracking is that the technology has been around for decades. In fact, there’s nothing much that seems new about the process except its application. And that has led us to wonder why the technology has been rolled out now by Big Oil. Our conclusion, which we’ve offered in several articles, is that the petrodollar itself is being purposefully destabilized.

In order to globalize currency, one needs to diminish the dollar. Is it just a coincidence that the BRIC countries and their currencies have grown stronger as the dollar and the euro have weakened? Or that gold has taken a tumble?

Perhaps so, or perhaps various currencies are indeed being positioned to create a more globalized currency basket. This has been a globalist dream since John Maynard Keynes proposed a world currency some 50 years ago.

It is easy to ignore such ideas because they imply that there is enormous monetary manipulation and coordination at the very top of Western societies. But the Anglo-American axis still seems firmly in the saddle to me, and scarcity memes seem to be a main tool of various manipulations just as they have been in the past.

What is fascinating to me is the way that the mainstream news media has quietly shifted from covering an era of energy scarcity to reporting on an era of energy plenty. For half a century we’ve been exposed to vehement promotions regarding rapidly diminishing oil and gas supplies. And now that things are different, the mainstream media reports on these fundamental changes as if they were neither noteworthy nor peculiar.

The expansion of oil and gas supplies is a huge story. Assuming it continues to be for real (and does not prove out as yet another peculiar globalist gambit or get sidetracked by environmental concerns) it is going to have a profound impact on societies around the world and even on the money they use.

Like everything else that is critically important, these changes are taking place without the scale of coverage you’d think they warranted.

There’s a lot more to this story than is currently being reported. But we’ll stay on it. The investment implications are vast.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Introduction: Dr. Richard Ebeling is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and professor of economics at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan. He has been a visiting professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (2008-2009), served as the president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008 and was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College, in Michigan (1988-2003). Dr. Ebeling is the author of Political Economy, Public Policy, and Monetary Economics: Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian Tradition (Routledge, 2010), Austrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom (Elgar, 2003) and is also the editor of the Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises(Liberty Fund), based on the “lost papers” of Ludwig von Mises, which he recovered from a formerly secret KGB archive in Moscow, Russia. The last of this three-volume set was published in April 2012. Dr. Ebeling is also the co-author and co-editor of the multi-volume work, In Defense of Capitalism (Northwood University, 2010-2013). In the early 1990s, Ebeling consulted on market reform and privatization with the emerging new democratic government in Lithuania when it was still part of the Soviet Union and witnessed the violent, attempted Soviet crackdown on the Lithuanian freedom movement in January 1991. He also was with Russian defenders of freedom in Moscow during the failed hardline coup in August 1991. Dr. Ebeling earned his PhD in economics from Middlesex University in London, England.

Daily Bell: Thanks for sitting down with us again, Richard. What is going on with gold and silver? The markets seem to be diverging between paper and physical.

Richard Ebeling: In the long run, gold and silver remain the historically important hedges against inflation and government confiscation of wealth through depreciation of paper currencies. The decline in the prices of gold and silver, especially since the beginning of this year, are partly indicative of the short-run fluctuations that always affect commodities because of day-to-day and month-by-month changes in supply and demand conditions.

It is also indicative of the fact that markets are hesitant and uncertain about the future course of central bank monetary policy. The Federal Reserve, the US central bank, has been sending out mixed signals about the course of monetary policy over the remainder of this year and into next.

At the end of last year, the Fed announced that it would continue for an indefinite period its policy of “monetary easing,” with planned purchases of US Treasuries and home mortgages at an average amount of $85 billion per month – which would amount to over $1 trillion in the current year – for as long as the government-measured unemployment rate remained above 6.5 percent and CPI-measured price inflation remained no higher than 2 percent at an annual rate.

Yet over the last couple of months, the Fed has been sending out new signals that it may possibly step back from its “cheap money” policy during the second half of the year, even though the unemployment rate is still around 7.5 percent and the latest CPI-measured price inflation was not much above 1 percent.

If the Fed reduces its purchases of Treasuries and mortgages, interest rates will no doubt start rising from their artificially low levels. As estimated by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, the discount rate and the one-year Treasury bills, when adjusted for price inflation, for a long time have been in the negative range. That is, expansionary monetary policy has resulted in banks being awash in loanable funds such that they are lending money nearly for free to credit-worthy borrowers in the private sector.

This has fed the stock market and bond market booms. But with the uncertainty whether “free money” will continue to be available into next year, people are wondering how much price inflation may or may not pick up in the US.

The doubt is also reinforced by another factor. While the Federal Reserve authorities refuse to admit it, their easy money policy has enabled the US Treasury to finance its trillion-dollar-a-year deficits at rock bottom borrowing costs over the last four years. The government is now estimating that at least for the next few years its borrowing needs will fall noticeably below that annual trillion-dollar level. This means that the Federal Reserve will not have to be as “accommodating” to assure that enough new money has been created to easily “monetize” the government’s borrowing.

But if one takes a wider political and ideological perspective, there is nothing that suggests, either in the US or in Europe, for instance, that governments are likely to reduce the amount of their spending. In the European Union, in particular, all the talk is about ending “austerity,” which is merely “code” language for increasing government expenditures, raising taxes and running up more and larger budget deficits.

In the United States, even if the government’s projections of smaller budget deficits for the next couple of years is correct, the fact remains that everyone knows that the driving force behind the growth in government expenditures are the “entitlement” programs – Social Security, Medicare-Medicaid and soon-to-be fully implemented ObamaCare – with the trajectory of government spending pointing only in the direction of higher and higher taxes and more and more borrowing to fund all of these redistributive promises. This will inevitably mean turning on the monetary spigot in the years and decades to come – if nothing happens to radically reduce and/or abolish the Welfare State.

Daily Bell: It seems like a symptom of a larger dysfunction. You wrote an article recently implying the US was slipping into fascism. Is that a present danger, in your view?

Richard Ebeling: The “larger dysfunction,” as you express it, arises out of a number of factors. The primary one, in my view, is a philosophical and psychological schizophrenia among the American people. While many on “the left” ridicule the idea, there is a strong case for the idea of “American exceptionalism,” meaning that the United States stands out as something unique, different and special among the nations of the world.

That uniqueness arose out of the fact that the American Founding Fathers constructed a political system in the United States based on a concept on which no other country was consciously founded: the idea of individual rights.

In the rest of the world, and for all of human history, the presumption has been that the individual was a slave or a subject to a higher authority. It might be the tribal chief; or the “divinely ordained” monarch who presumed to rule over and control people in the name of God; or, especially after the French Revolution and the rise of modern socialism, “the nation” or “the people” who laid claim to the life and work of the individual.

But the American Revolution and the US Constitution hailed a different conception of man, society and government. Each individual, by his nature and his reason, had a right to his life, his liberty and his honestly acquired property. Governments did not exist to give or bestow “rights” or “privileges” at its own discretion. Governments were to secure and protect each individual’s rights, which he possessed by “the nature of things.”

The individual was presumed to own himself. He was “sovereign.” Self-government in this American tradition did not only or primarily mean the right of people to freely elect those who held political office for the enforcement of rights-protecting laws and legislation – though this was understood to be an essential aspect to a free society.

The real and fundamental notion of “self-government” referred to the right of each individual to rule over himself. That is, as long as the individual did not violate the equal rights of others to their life, liberty and property, each person was free to shape and guide his own future, and give meaning and value to his own life as he considered best in the pursuit of that happiness that was considered the purpose and goal of each man during his sojourn on this Earth.

It is not an accident or a coincidence that during the first 150 years of America’s history there was virtually no Welfare State and relatively few government regulations, controls and restrictions on the choices and actions of the free citizen. Such non-interference with each individual was a logical and necessary corollary of a view of man as possessing a right to his own life and the fruits of his own labor. To compel him to do things or sacrifice things against his will for some presumed national or social good was diametrically opposed to the “American ideal.”

But for more than a century, now, an opposing conception of man, society and government has increasingly gained a hold over the ideas and attitudes of people in the US. It has been a “counter-revolution” against this American ideal. It was “imported” from Europe in the form of modern collectivism. The individual was expected to see himself as belonging to something “greater” than himself. He was to sacrifice for “great national causes.”

He was told that if life had not provided all that he desired or hoped for, it was because others had “exploited” him in some economic or social manner, and that government would redress the “injustice” through redistribution of wealth or regulation of the marketplace. If he had had financial and material success, the individual should feel guilty and embarrassed by it, because, surely, if some had noticeably more, it could only be because others had been forced to live with noticeably less.

These two conflicting conceptions of man, society and government have been and are at war here in the United States. It is what is behind all the “crises” around us. They are the crises of the Interventionist-Welfare State: the attempt to impose reactionary collectivist policies of political paternalism and redistributive plunder on a society still possessing parts of its original individualist and rights-based roots.

Daily Bell: How about for the West at large?

Richard Ebeling: The euphoria in the West with the fall of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago and the belief that “capitalism” had triumphed over “socialism,” in fact, was only partly justified.

Yes, there are few proponents anymore of old Soviet-style socialist central planning. But I would argue that the “specter of communism” continues to haunt the world. Not, as I said, in the form of a call to return to a comprehensive command and control economy in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Rather, it is in the form of communism’s and socialism’s critique of capitalism.

Unregulated capitalism leads to “unearned” and “excessive” profits; unbridled markets generate the business cycle and the hardships of recessions and depressions; left on its own, free competition tends to evolve into harmful monopolies and oligopolies, with the wealthy “few” benefiting at the expense of the “many.”

One finds far fewer defenders of free-market capitalism (what historically was known a “classical liberalism”) in Europe, because the collectivist mindset runs far deeper there than in the US. Most Europeans cannot imagine a life without the State caring for them from “cradle to grave.”

It has been captured in all those pictures of “anti-austerity” demonstrations in many European countries. The cries are all the same: “Please don’t take away my government job, don’t take away my government pension, don’t take away my government health care, my government-guaranteed wage and work conditions, my government mandated month’s vacation, my government provided . . . everything!”

From where or from whom the wealth and resources are to come to maintain the unsustainable? Well, from somewhere and from someone. Just don’t take it away. And if it cannot be gotten and guaranteed through the redistributive mechanisms of the European Union and the euro, well, maybe we should return power to our own nation-states to provide the jobs, the social “safety nets” and the financial means to pay for it through, once again, printing our own national paper currencies.

This is the political-philosophical bankruptcy of the West and the dead ends of the collectivist promises of the last 100 years.

Daily Bell: Let’s ask you some political questions. Please relate what we are asking to Mises and his great work, Socialism. Is the EU starting to collapse, or just the euro?

Richard Ebeling: Well, Ludwig von Mises’s book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, originally published in 1922, demonstrated how and why a socialist, centrally planned system was inherently unworkable. The nationalization of productive property, the abolition of markets and the prohibition of all competitive exchange among the members of society would prevent the emergence and operation of a price system, without which it is impossible to know people’s demands for desired goods and the relative value they place on them. It also prevents the emergence of prices for the factors of production (land, labor, capital) and makes it impossible to know their opportunity costs – the value of those factors of production in alternative competing uses among entrepreneurs desiring to employ them.

Without such a price system the central planners are flying blind, unable to rationally know or decide how best to utilize labor, capital and resources in productively efficient ways to make the goods and services most highly valued by the consuming public. Thus, Mises concluded, comprehensive socialist central planning would lead to “planned chaos.”

Mises also extended his criticisms of socialism to the interventionist-welfare state. Government control of prices and/or regulation of production do not completely prevent markets from working, but it is like “sand in the machine.” Government intervention prevents prices from “telling the truth” about the real supply and demand conditions thus leading to imbalances and distortions in the market. Government production regulations, controls, restrictions and prohibitions prevent entrepreneurs from using their knowledge, ability and capital in ways that most effectively produce the goods consumers actually want and at the most cost-competitive prices possible. Thus, the interventionist state leads to waste, inefficiency and misuses of resources that lower the standards of living that we all, otherwise, could have enjoyed.

You asked about the euro and its future. The first thing we need to keep in mind is that the euro and the US dollar are currencies subject to monetary central planning. They are monopoly monies controlled and issued by central banks. Their quantity is determined by the decisions of the monetary central planners who oversee them; they influence the amount of “reserves” banks have for lending purposes, and through this control over the supply of money in the banking system can manipulate a variety of interest rates, especially in the short run.

As a consequence, financial markets do not work like real markets. We cannot be sure what the amount of real savings may be in the society to support real and sustainable investment and capital formation. We cannot know what the “real cost” of borrowing should be, since interest rates are not determined by actual, private sector savings and investment decisions. And, therefore, there is no guarantee that the amount of investments undertaken and their time horizons are compatible with the available resources not also being demanded and used for more immediate consumer goods production in the society.

This is why countries around the world periodically experience booms and busts, inflations and recessions – not because of some inherent instabilities or “irrationalities” in financial markets, but because of monetary central planning through central banking that does not allow market-based financial intermediation to develop and work as it could and would in a real free-market setting.

The divisions in the European Union go beyond monetary policy alone, of course. It is closely connected, as I said earlier, with the fiscal crisis in the EU due to the contradictions and conflicts within the welfare state.

Daily Bell: Can the ECB save it with more monetary stimulation?

Richard Ebeling: The European Central Bank only could “save” the euro if it stopped playing central planner, that is, if it stopped manipulating the money supply and interest rates. This is highly unlikely, given the economic philosophy that guides those who run the ECB and the political demands of the member governments. So monetary mismanagement in Europe will continue to persist.

Given the more “conservative” views of the governments of some of the member countries on the question of monetary “stimulus,” I think it is highly unlikely that the ECB will follow a monetary policy course, in the foreseeable future, which would threaten hyperinflation.

Daily Bell: What is happening to the IMF’s austerity? That didn’t work very well.

Richard Ebeling: What is “austerity”? I think most ordinary people, when they hear the word, think that it means that someone has been spending too much, has gotten themselves into unsustainable debt and now has to significantly get their personal finances in order so as not to “go under” – that is, lose their home, be delinquent on their credit cards and face bankruptcy.

The individual has to “trim” his current spending out of income: find ways to cut corners and reduce buying those things that he decides are of a lower priority and which he can get by without. At the same time, he might see if there are any avenues to try to earn some extra income to help take the pressure off their budgetary problems.

But in the United States and especially in Europe, government “austerity” means merely temporarily reducing the rate of increase in government spending, slowing down the rate at which new debt is accumulating and significantly raising taxes in an attempt to close the deficit gap.

The fundamental problem is that over the decades, the size and scope of governments in the Western world have been growing far more than the rates at which their economies have been expanding, so that the “slice” of the national economic “pie” eaten by government has been growing larger and larger, even when the “pie” in absolute terms is bigger than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.

Too many European governments, in general, take the view that “austerity” means squeezing the private sector more through taxes and other revenue sources to avoid any noticeable and significant cuts in what government does and spends. So there is “austerity” for the private sector and a mad rush for financial “safety nets” for the government and those who live off the State.

Now, don’t get me wrong, some governments have had to make cuts in social benefits and redistributive programs simply because the money is not there to cover all that has been promised and citizens have been used to receiving. But the attitude of those affected by any such “trimming” is that it should be reversed, preferably immediately, since they can’t conceive of life without what the government provides and guarantees; and those in political power clearly view it all as an “emergency” to get over, so that when “normal” times return, the “trend line” of growing government can be restored and continued.

In reality, of course, it is the burdens of government regulation, taxation and impediments to more flexible labor and related markets that have generated the high unemployment rates and the retarded recovery from the recession.

Daily Bell: Will Britain leave the EU?

Richard Ebeling: I think that if a referendum was held many people would vote for departure or reconsideration of Britain’s membership in the EU. However, such critics of the European Union have a wide variety of reasons for wanting Britain to withdraw.

In my view, the fundamental reason for “disappointment” with the EU is that it has strayed from an earlier conception that it was meant to offer opportunities for mutual improvement and reduced conflicts that might lead to war by establishing a system of freedom of trade among the member countries.

Instead, the “common market” ideal has been transformed into the goal of a European Union “Super-State” to which the individual countries and their citizens would be subservient and obedient. The tentacle of regulations, restrictions and politically-correct social controls are spreading out in every direction from Brussels and its European-wide manipulating and mismanaging bureaucracy.

What Britain and Europe should have as its goal is the ideal of the classical liberal free traders of the 19th century – non-intervention by governments in people’s lives, at home and abroad. That is, a de-politicization of society, so people may freely work, trade and travel as they peacefully wish, with government merely the protector of people’s individual rights.

We are a long way from that ideal in both domestic and foreign affairs. But it is the alternative that friends of freedom should be espousing for a truly better world for tomorrow.

Daily Bell: What do you make of UKIP?

Richard Ebeling: As with many political movements and parties, there are various strains of policy views. The issue is why does the UKIP support withdrawing from the EU? What would they want Great Britain to be like “outside” of the European Union? Listening to some UKIP supporters quoted in the media, one has the impression that too many want to reduce or limit trade with Europe and “protect” British industry through trade barriers.

Or they express anti-immigrant sentiments that ignore the benefits that “new” blood can offer to a society – risk-taking entrepreneurs, those who will take jobs that British subjects may be reluctant to perform, skilled and unskilled labor that helps keep market wages from significantly rising and therefore keeping costs down so British industry can become more effective in both its domestic market and in foreign lands.

The “problem” with free immigration into Britain from other EU countries is not the arrival of more hands to do work that can be done. Rather, it is the availability of incentive-destroying welfare and related benefits that undermine the incentive for too many people to find productive employment.

Take the benefits away and tell people they are free to come and work to support themselves and their families. Restore more flexibility and competitiveness to labor markets and reduce taxes and business regulations. Then those who come to Britain’s shores will be those wanting freedom and opportunity without being a burden upon others.

But in the eyes of some UKIP members and supporters, Britain needs more and better welfare guarantees and more government financial supports. Needless to say, these that got Britain and many other nations, to begin with.

Daily Bell: There is now a German version of UKIP. Are the Germans rebelling against the EU finally?

Richard Ebeling: Many Germans resent that other members of the European Union expect Germany to pick up the tab for the loans to be made to cover the financial embarrassment of those countries far more fiscally irresponsible than the Germans.

Furthermore, many Germans wish the Mark had not been abolished as their own national currency. One indication of this is that according to publications like Der Spiegel, people in Germany use over 30 regional and local alternative “private” currencies in place of the euro.

I think there are a significant number of Germans who see the benefit of open commerce and trade with any and all of their European neighbors. But they do not believe that the EU serves, any longer, as the vehicle to sustain and secure it.

Daily Bell: Mises was correct, wasn’t he?

Richard Ebeling: On issues of European economic integration, Mises was a strong advocate of free trade in goods, money and people. But he believed that this was unlikely to come about through intergovernmental bureaus, agencies and departments. What was needed was a change in ideas from the statist mentality to one of individual freedom and unhampered free markets.

In an epoch of collectivist ideas, don’t be surprised if governments regulate, control, intervene and redistribute wealth. And it does not matter if such policies are introduced by national governments or super-national political entities such as the European Union. The greater danger from the EU structure is that bad polices get introduced in all of Europe at the same time. Where political control is decentralized into the hands of the traditional nation-states, one country may follow an especially foolish economic policy direction; but the surrounding countries need not do so, also. The lessons from implementing wrong and misguided policies can be learned before other countries going down the same bad path.

Daily Bell: How come, despite Mises’s contributions, nation-states around the world use Keynesian formulas?

Richard Ebeling: Keynesian policies offer people and politicians what they want to hear. Claiming that any sluggish business or lost jobs are due to a lack of “aggregate demand,” Keynes argued that full employment and profitable business could only be reestablished and maintained through “activist” government monetary and fiscal policy – print money and run budget deficits.

In the name of assuring “national prosperity,” politicians could spend money to buy the votes that get them elected and reelected to government offices. And every special interest group could make the case that government-spending programs that benefitted them were all reasonable and necessary to assure a fully employed and growing economy.

Furthermore, the Keynesian rationale for government deficit spending enabled politicians to seem to be able to offer something for nothing. They could offer, say, $100 of government spending to voters and special interest groups but the tax burden imposed in the present might only be $75, since the remainder of the money to pay for that government spending was borrowed. And that borrowed money would not have to be repaid until some indefinite time in the future by unspecific taxpayers when that “tomorrow” finally arrived.

This type of fiscal sleight-of-hand can work and go on for a long time. But eventually, the debt comes due and it is discovered that someone is going to have to pay the bills for all the previous years of government spending with borrowed money.

This is the bill that too many European governments are finding it hard to pay – without either dramatically cutting spending or raising taxes. In other words, as Ludwig von Mises warned more than once during his lifetime, eventually you reach the longer-run consequences of short-run policies. That is where we are today.

Daily Bell: The biggest problem that Keynes had, from our point of view, is that he never defined how a depression or recession comes about. What was his explanation, if he had any?

Richard Ebeling: In a nutshell, Keynes argued that the market economy’s inherent “instability” arose from the “animal spirits” of businessmen, who were subject to irrational and unpredictable waves of “optimism” and “pessimism.” This set off waves of unsustainable investment spending followed by a prolonged period of money hoarding by people in the society that pulled money out of the economy, which caused the fall in “aggregate,” or economy-wide, demand that could only be filled by government borrowing the sums of unspent hoarded savings, or by printing money.

Keynes also claimed that workers would not accept cuts in their money-wages to make themselves less costly to hire because of “money-illusion.” That is, the idea that workers only thought about the nominal amount of money in their paychecks, and not that at a time of falling prices in a depression, they could accept lower money-wages and be no worse off in real terms if the prices of the goods they bought had decreased more or less by the same amount as their wages had gone down.

Thus, the economy could get stuck in a prolonged depression or recession with a relatively high level of unemployment, unless cured by the “stimulus” of government borrowing and spending.

Daily Bell: Contrast that to Mises, please.

Richard Ebeling: Mises argued that there was nothing inherent in the market economy to bring about these swings of economic booms followed by periods of depression and unemployment. If markets got out of balance with the necessity of an eventual correction in the economy to, once again, set things right, the source of this instability was government monetary policy.

Central banks too often followed a policy of trying to create “good times” in the economy by expanding the money supply through the banking system. With new, excess funds created by the central bank available for lending, banks lower rates of interest to attract borrowers. But this throws savings and investment out of balance, since the rate of interest no longer serves as a reliable indicator and signal concerning the availability of real savings in the economy in relation to those wanting to borrow funds for various investment purposes.

Due to the artificially lower rates of interest, investment projects of various time durations are undertaken which, in retrospect, will be found to be unable to be completed or operated on a profitable basis because the savings needed to finish the projects or operate them profitably does not exist. The economic crisis comes when it is discovered that all the claims on resources, capital and labor for all the attempted consumption and investment activities in the economy are greater than the actual and available amounts of such scarce resources.

The price inflation that usually accompanies a monetary-generated economic boom period is an indicator that people are trying to purchase and use more of the scarce resources of the society than are available for all the investment projects attempted.

The recession period, in Mises’s view, is the necessary “correction” period when in the post-boom era, people must adapt and adjust to the newly discovered “real” supply and demand conditions in the market. Any interference with the “rebalancing” of the economy by government raising taxes, imposing more regulations, or new artificial government “stimulus” activities merely makes it more difficult and time-consuming for people in the private sector to get the economy back on an even keel.

Daily Bell: How come Keynes retains any credibility at all?

Richard Ebeling: In my opinion, it is because of the theory’s naïve and superficial simplicity. People are out of work,businesses are operating at less than full capacity and goods are not selling at the retail end of the market? Nothing is simpler than to believe that all can be set right if only “someone” – the government – is out spending more money so the goods on the shelves can be sold and profits can once more be made by getting the machines working in the factories and hiring back unemployed labor to get the necessary work done.

Plus, as I explained already, it is a convenient explanation for politicians to use as a rationale for increased government spending with borrowed money to feed the special interests the politician needs to stay in office. As one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s staff members said during the New Deal Days of the 1930s, “Spend, spend, spend – elect, elect, elect.”

Daily Bell: Does printing money ever work? What are the effects?

Richard Ebeling: The most concise answer is: No. Of course, the central bank can create money out of thin air and governments can proceed to spend it. This may put people to work, producing what the government is spending that money on. And after a while, prices in general – “price inflation” – can emerge as one of the symptoms.

But in the longer run the jobs created in this way by the monetary “stimulus” are totally dependent on its continence. That is, it more or less requires government continuing to spend sums of money on the same particular goods, and on the basis of which businesses find it profitable to hire specific types of workers to do particular jobs that produce the goods the new money is being spent to buy.

Thus, once any spending with this newly created money is slowed down or stopped, the very jobs “created” by the government in this way inescapably start disappearing, resulting in emerging unemployment. As Mises’s longtime friend and colleague, the Austrian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Friedrich A. Hayek, once observed, unemployment is not “caused” by stopping an inflation, but rather inflation induces the artificial employments that cannot be sustained and which inevitably disappear once the inflation is reined in.

Daily Bell: Why are the Japanese now embarking on it? What will be the end result?

Richard Ebeling: The Japanese government has been very clear over the last several months since it came into office. They want to create a price inflation equal to at least two percent a year to try to push up “aggregate demand” and “create” jobs. In my view, the end result will be the same as everywhere else: a short-run impact that sets the stage for another downturn in the future.

Daily Bell: How about in the US? We are told that Bernanke saved the US economy by printing money. Can Bernanke now engineer a soft landing by gradually withdrawing the stimulus? Or would that put the US in another deeper recession/depression? Is the US really recovering?

Richard Ebeling: The recession of 2008-2009 was the result of several years of central bank stimulus. From 2003 to 2008, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about 50 percent. Interest rates for much of this time, when adjusted for inflation, were either zero or negative.

Awash in cash, banks extended loans to virtually anyone, with no serious and usual concern about the borrower’s credit-worthiness. This was most notably true in the housing market, where government agencies like Fannie May and Freddie Mac were pressuring banks to make mortgage loans by promising a guarantee that they would make good on any bad home loans.

Since 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve has, again, turned on the monetary spigot, increasing its own portfolio by almost $3 trillion, by buying US Treasuries, US mortgages and other assets. So why has there not been a complementary explosion of price inflation?

In some areas there has been, most clearly in the stock market and the bond market, But the reason why all that newly created money has not brought about a higher price inflation is due to the fact that a large part of all newly created money is sitting as unlent reserves in banks. This is because the Federal Reserve has been paying banks a rate of interest slightly above the market interest rates to induce banks not to lend.

In my view, the idea of a “soft landing” is an illusion based on the idea held by central bankers, themselves, that they have the wisdom and ability to know how to “micro-manage” all the changes and adjustments resulting from their own manipulations of the monetary aggregates. They do not have this wisdom and ability. So hold on for what is most likely to be another rocky road.

Daily Bell: What about employment? Why hasn’t employment rebounded in the US or Europe?

Richard Ebeling: European Union unemployment is at historical highs. This is the worst jobs recovery in US post-World War II history. Among the reasons for the sluggish jobs growth in the US are: (a) general “regime uncertainty,” that is, no one knows what government policy will be tomorrow; will ObamaCare be fully implemented after January 2014?; (b) what will taxes be for the rest of the current president’s term in the White House; (c) what will the regulatory environment be like for the next three years – in 2012, the government implemented around 80,000 pages of regulations as printed in the Federal Registry; (d) how will the deficit and debt problems play out between Congress and the White House and will it threaten the general financial situation in the country; and (e) what wars, if any, will the government find itself involved in, in places like the Middle East?

In Europe taxes are high, regulation is pervasive and “activist,” labor market rules make it difficult to fired workers, new debt crises could break out at any time and no one knows for sure what is likely to happen with the euro and the EU as a whole. This is not a positive economic environment for job creation.

Daily Bell: Will the Miracle of China continue or is that economy headed down?

Richard Ebeling: I was in China for a brief time in January 2013. First impressions when you are in Shanghai are of a modern society whose people are striving to catch up with and match the West. But a little bit more observation and questioning of people makes it clear that this is still a controlled and commanded society, with a government that works hard to try to determine what people read, see and think.

A bit of travel around the country also makes it clear that China is facing the danger of its own economic bubbles bursting. The vast construction boom is far out of any proportion to what the society is wealthy enough and economically developed enough to efficiently utilize.

Impressive row after row of skyscraper apartment complexes everywhere one looks in cities and on the roads between cities are often dark and empty at night, with vacancy rates of 80 or 90 percent. Shopping malls and government-planned entertainment and “restaurant rows,” with literally dozens of restaurants and bars next to one another, are practically all empty even on a Friday or Saturday night.

All these building projects have been brought into existence by a government that not only controls the money supply and manipulates interest rates but also heavy-handedly tells banks whom to specifically loan to and for what investment activities. Central planning is alive and well in China, with the motives being both power and profits for those inside and outside the Communist Party having the most influence and connections in “high” places.

In my opinion, China is heading for a great economic crisis, resulting from a highly imbalanced and distorted economic system still guided far more by politics than sound market decision-making. Whether China’s bubbles burst next month, or two years from now, it did not seem that there was anyway for them to spend their way out of these wide and unstable mismatches between supply and demand.

This makes it highly unlikely that their currency, the yuan, has any chance of becoming a major monetary player in global financial markets in any foreseeable future. It is a money that still primarily exists to serve the political purposes of those who sit in the “inner circles” of power in Beijing.

Another worrisome impression is that Chinese leadership is determined to play the closely controlled “nationalist” card to maintain the loyalty and obedience of the population. Students at universities, I discovered, know little about the history of their own country other than what the Communist Party sees that they know.

There was surprise and shock among some Chinese students when in my lectures at a university in the industrial city of Wuxi I explained to them the costs in lost human lives under Chairman Mao in the name of building socialism – estimated at 80 million innocent men, women and children who were shot, worked to death, or starved to death in government-caused famines.

Their understanding and view of the West, including America, is one designed by tightly controlled government educational propaganda. And most people don’t want to find out anything different from what the government wants them to know. This is partly because they “don’t want trouble,” and partly because they just want to focus on getting a good job and becoming wealthy if they can.

The “Great Leap Forward” or the “Cultural Revolution” that destroyed tens of millions of lives to serve Mao’s purposes? Well, they know just that it happened a long time ago, are bad things that happened to a grandfather, that it is not relevant to the young student’s life. As for Tiananmen Square in June 1989 . . . almost none ever heard of it and know nothing about it.

But what is known is that while corruption is rampant and power is everywhere abused, the leaders are working hard to make China strong on the international scene, to restore China’s rightful place as a “great power” to be feared and respected. The young Chinese can feel pride and loyalty to the government that is undoing the humiliations China long suffered at the hands of the Western powers in the 19th and 20th century.

Daily Bell: Where does the West go from here … a gradual, continual unraveling?

Richard Ebeling: If there is one thing that history can teach us, it is that the future course of human events is unpredictable in all their detail. One hundred years ago, in 1913, how many could have predicted that a year later a European-wide war would break out that would lead to the destruction of great European empires and set the stage for the rise of totalitarian collectivism that resulted in an even worse global war two decades later?

In the 1970s, how many predicted the end of the Soviet Union before the end of the 20th century and that it would end not in a terrible global nuclear conflict but through a domestic economic implosion with relatively little loss of life in bringing about its disappearance from the map of the world?

How will the West get through its current cultural, political and economic crisis, looking toward the rest of the 21st century? That will depend upon the power and influence of ideas in the context and circumstance of actual unfolding events.

No one knows the answer to that. It will, no doubt, seem “obvious,” when a historian looks back at our time from the perspective of, say, the year 2113. But we who are living through that history cannot completely or confidently see what tomorrow fully holds in store for us.

A major reason for this uncertainty is that it depends upon what we decide to do. In other words, our ideas and deeds will determine the shape of things to come. It does not already exist in some “big book in the sky,” from which nothing can deviate. Each of us, in our own corners of life, gets to help, in big ways and small, to make that history.

Thus, whether, at the end of the day, freedom triumphs and the future is one of liberty and prosperity is partly on each one of us. Near the end of his great book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises said:

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us . . . Whether society shall continue to evolve or where it shall decay lies . . . in the hands of man.”

The circumstances and the specific battles have changed since Mises wrote these words in the context of the, then, challenge of comprehensive socialist central planning of man and society.

But it no less rings true for our time, as we fight over the right of individuals to be free men, instead of puppets at the end of the strings manipulated and pulled by the political paternalists who still assert that they know better than we do, how we should live our lives.

Daily Bell: Thanks again for your time.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

Here is a key takeaway from this interview with Richard Ebeling:

In my view, the idea of a “soft landing” is an illusion based on the idea held by central bankers, themselves, that they have the wisdom and ability to know how to “micro-manage” the all the changes and adjustments resulting from their own manipulations of the monetary aggregates. They do not have this wisdom and ability. So hold on for what is most likely to be another rocky road.

This explains clearly why it is impossible for central bankers to “run” a worldwide economy approaching US$100 trillion a year. No one can do it and manipulations simply make it worse. So-called soft landings are only soft in the eye of the beholder. If one has lost one’s home and job, no summaries explaining the merits of a soft landing are going to ring true or alleviate one’s individual misery.

At the end of the day, these sorts of facile observations are merely newsprint declarations. Mainstream media’s torrent of explanations regarding the terrible unemployment that exists in Europe and the equally sluggish economies in Britain and the US are no more useful. In the early 21st century, pronouncements about “upturns” and “recoveries” support an unsupportable system. They are a kind of phantasmagoria.

Richard Ebeling makes another succinct comment toward the end of the interview, quoting from Mises in his book Socialism, as follows:

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle.”

It was Mises’s clear vision that once society has broken the relationship between value and payment, sooner or later people would not know the price of anything. At this point, investment ceases and business becomes furtive and transactional. People cannot plan for the future because they do not understand the reality of the present. Society begins to sink.

Ideas – and elections – have consequences. It is a nice conceit to believe we can stand aside as money is debauched and whole industries like healthcare are divorced from supply and demand. But it is simply that, a conceit – a comforting, egotistical notion that what is happening to other fellows is not happening to you.

Economic illiteracy and the woeful results that stem from it affect everyone. And if you don’t understand how economics works, how money works and who controls the levers of power, you are truly destined to experience the worst that modern society has to offer.

There is a reason that Austrian, free-market economics has experienced such a surge of interest once the Internet helped make it available. That’s because it explains our reality in simple and easy-to-understand terms.

Once you understand the Way the World Really Works, you can finally take action, human action, to protect yourself and your loved ones. Thanks to committed and courageous individuals like Richard Ebeling for their guidance as we travel down an often-treacherous trail toward an illumination that is only reachable if we exercise discipline, prudence and patience. The result will be worth the exertion.

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Thomas DiLorenzo is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland. He is also a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an affiliated scholar of the League of the South Institute, the research arm of the League of the South, and the Abbeville Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech. DiLorenzo has authored at least ten books, including The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (2003), Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution and What It Means for Americans Today (2009), How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present (2005), Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe (2007) and most recently, Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government (2012). Thomas DiLorenzo is a frequent columnist for LewRockwell.com, lectures widely and is a frequent speaker at Mises Institute events.

Daily Bell: Remind our readers about one of your central intellectual passions, which is confronting academic “Lincoln revisionism.” Who was Lincoln really and why have you spent so much of your career trying to return Lincoln’s academic profile to reality?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Lincoln mythology is the ideological cornerstone of American statism. He was in reality the most hated of all American presidents during his lifetime according to an excellent book by historian Larry Tagg entitled The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President. He was so hated in the North that the New York Times editorialized a wish that he would be assassinated. This is perfectly understandable: He illegally suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political critics without due process; shut down over 300 opposition newspapers; committed treason by invading the Southern states (Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason as “only levying war upon the states” or “giving aid and comfort to their enemies,” which of course is exactly what Lincoln did). He enforced military conscription with the murder of hundreds of New York City draft protesters in 1863 and with the mass execution of deserters from his army. He deported a congressional critic (Democratic Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio); confiscated firearms; and issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice when the jurist issued an opinion that only Congress could legally suspend Habeas Corpus. He waged an unnecessary war (all other countries ended slavery peacefully in that century) that resulted in the death of as many as 850,000 Americans according to new research published in the last two years. Standardizing for today’s population, that would be similar to 8.5 million American deaths in a four-year war.

Lincoln was deified by the Republican Party, which monopolized the government for half a century after the war. The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote in his book, The Legacy of the Civil War, that all of this mythology created an ideology of “false virtue” that was (and is) interpreted by the American state to “justify” anything it ever did, no matter how heinous and imperialistic. The truth about Lincoln and his war “must be forgotten,” said Warren, if one is to believe in this “false virtue,” which also goes by the slogan of “American exceptionalism.”

Lincoln was a nationalist and an imperialist. He was the political son of Alexander Hamilton who, as such, advocated a government that would serve the moneyed elite at the expense of the masses. Hence his lifelong advocacy of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and a central bank to fund it all. This was called “mercantilism” in the previous centuries, and was the very system the American colonists fought a revolution over.

Daily Bell: What did you think of the recent Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln? Are defenders of Lincoln getting increasingly desperate?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Yes, the Lincoln cult is getting desperate. Spielberg hired Doris Kearns-Goodwin, a confessed plagiarist, as his advisor on the movie (See my LewRockwell.com article entitled “A Plagiarist’s Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry“). The main theme of the movie is exactly the opposite of historical truth. The main theme is that Lincoln used his legendary political skills to help get the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery through the Congress. But if one reads the most authoritative biography of Lincoln, by Harvard’s David Donald, one learns that not only did Lincoln not lift a finger to help the genuine abolitionists; he literally refused to help them when they went up to him and asked him for his help. Lincoln did use his political skills to get an earlier, proposed Thirteenth Amendment through the House and Senate. It was called the Corwin Amendment, and would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery. Even Doris Kearns-Goodwin writes about it in her book, Team of Rivals, discussing how the amendment, named after an Ohio congressman, was in reality the work of Abraham Lincoln.

Daily Bell: Why should that be so? Is the myth of Lincoln a central one to the larger and continued myth of modern US exceptionalism? Who propagates these myths and who benefits?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Yes, the Lincoln myth is the ideological cornerstone of “American exceptionalism” and has long been invoked by both major political parties to “justify” anything and everything. President Obama quoted and paraphrased Lincoln in a speech before the United Nations last September, and in his second inaugural address, to support his agenda of waging more aggressive wars in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. Specifically, he repeated the “All Men are Created Equal” line from the Gettysburg Address to make the case that it is somehow the duty of Americans to force “freedom” on all men and women everywhere, all around the globe, at gunpoint if need be. This is the murderous, bankrupting, imperialistic game that Lincoln mythology is used to “justify.”

Daily Bell: Put Lincoln in context. Why is continued mythology so important to the current power structure of the Anglosphere?

Thomas DiLorenzo: The state cannot tell the people that it is bankrupting them and sending their sons and daughters to die by the thousands in aggressive and unconstitutional wars so that crony capitalism can be imposed at gunpoint in foreign countries, and so that the military-industrial complex can continue to rake in billions. That might risk a revolution. So instead, they have to use the happy talk of American virtue and American exceptionalism, the “god” of democracy,” etc. And the average American, whom the great H.L. Mencken referred to as part of the “booboisie,” believes it.

Daily Bell: Let’s try to clear up a few more myths. Did Lincoln issue greenbacks in defiance of British “money power”? In other words, was his war waged as an act of rebellion against European colonialism? From our point of view, Lincoln was likely in thrall to the New York banking establishment. How do you see it?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Lincoln spent his entire life in politics, from 1832 until his dying day, as a lobbyist for the American banking industry and the Northern manufacturing corporations that wanted cheaper credit funded by a government-run bank. He spent decades making speeches on behalf of resurrecting the corrupt and destabilizing Bank of the United States, founded originally by his political ancestor, Hamilton. No member of the Whig Party was more in bed with the American banking establishment than Lincoln was, according to University of Virginia historian Michael Holt in his book on the history of the American Whig party. The Whig agenda, which was always Lincoln’s agenda, was described brilliantly by Edgar Lee Masters (Clarence Darrow’s law partner) in his book, Lincoln the Man. The agenda was to champion “that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and keep their adherence to the government.” It advocated “a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone.” The Whig Party “had no platform to announce,” Masters wrote, “because its principles were plunder and nothing else.” Lincoln himself once said that he got ALL of his political ideas from Henry Clay, the icon and longtime leader of the Whig Party.

Daily Bell: Let’s ask you some tough questions that will be of interest to our readers and our critics alike. Charges have been leveled from some (disreputable) quarters that you are somehow conspiring historically with a Jesuit faction to promote historical inaccuracies regarding Lincoln since you are a professor at Loyola. Could you please explain these charges more comprehensively and then use this form to rebut them?

Thomas DiLorenzo: I don’t usually answer “when did you stop beating your wife”-type questions since they always come from people with I.Q.s in the single digits. These are people who do not have the mental capacity to learn real economics, so they blabber on about crazy conspiracy theories. The Jesuits at Loyola actually hate me with a passion since they are, with one or two exceptions, Marxist ideologues and I am a libertarian, i.e., the devil. Read my LewRockwell.com article entitled “Tales from an Academic Looney Bin” if you want to learn of my contempt for the Jesuits who run Loyola University Maryland.

Daily Bell: Thanks for the insights. Now, on to another more serious matter, which has to do with the role of Jefferson Davis as President of the Southern Secession. Let’s preface this by proposing it has been proposed that both the Russian Revolution and Germany’s rise to power were apparently funded at least in part by Wall Street and British “City” money – especially via Swiss banks. Can you comment on this perspective as it may well have a bearing on Civil War funding? Is it true, for instance, that many wars including the Civil War are not exactly what they seem and that what we call Money Power benefits by backing both sides and profiting from the conflict itself?

Thomas DiLorenzo: War is always destructive to a nation’s economy regardless of whether it wins or loses the war. War is the opposite of capitalism. Capitalism is a system of peaceful, mutually-advantageous exchanges at market prices based on the international division of labor. War destroys the international division of labor and diverts resources from peaceful, capitalistic exchange to death and destruction. However, there are always war profiteers – the people who profit from selling and financing the military. One doesn’t need to invent a conspiracy theory about this: War profiteering is war profiteering and has always existed as an essential feature of all wars.

Daily Bell: There are even questions raised about Napoleon Bonaparte and whether Money Power utilized the French general’s bellicosity for their own purposes. Can you comment? Is it possible the US Civil War was also arranged and funded by those in Europe that had an agenda to diminish the United States’s exceptionalism and vitiate its republicanism?

Thomas DiLorenzo: I prefer not to answer anonymous questions like this. Who says this, and what is his or her credibility? Any credentials? Have they written anything I can read to judge their thinking ability? Any crank can say any crazy thing and suggest any weird conspiracy theory on the Internet. Besides, “American exceptionalism” did not become a tool of American imperialism until AFTER the Civil War.

Daily Bell: Money Power is a banking phenomenon and much of the banking power was located in Britain during Lincoln’s time, as today. New York banks had extensive relationships with British banking power. And from what we can tell, Lincoln derived an extensive funding and power base from these same banks. So here is another question that goes to the heart of this funding issue: Why did Britain supposedly back the South? Is it possible that this is a historical ruse? Was the British banking establishment pro-North even though the aristocracy was pro-South? Did it suit British banking interests to perpetuate this confusion?

Thomas DiLorenzo: There is no such thing as “Britain” that backed or did not back the South. There were prominent British individuals like Charles Dickens who sided with the South in their writings, but there were also those with similar stature who backed the North. I recommend the book by Charles Adams entitled Slavery, Secession, and Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865. Since the South continued to trade with England during the war, there were British banks that financed a lot of this trade and would therefore have supported the South for that reason. At the end of the war the British government was scared to death that Sherman would take his army across the Atlantic as an act of revenge for this collaboration.

Daily Bell: Is it possible that the British banking establishment didn’t care which side won the war, as the US would be irreparably weakened no matter who triumphed? Were British bankers expecting this weakening would encompass a loss of freedom and a rise of governmental authoritarianism? It certainly did, didn’t it?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Since bankers are bankers and not journalists and writers, there is no way of knowing their views on this question without a written record. Anyone who claims to know this without any such record is simply blowing smoke and wasting your time. British intellectuals like Lord Acton understood and wrote about how the result of the war would be a US government that would become more tyrannical and imperialistic. To the extent that some British bankers read such literature and tended to agree with Lord Acton, then that would have been their opinion. Nineteenth-century British bankers were not omniscient, Wizard-of-Oz orchestrators of world events any more than you and I are.

Daily Bell: Here is an even tougher question to answer and a thoroughly speculative one. Is it possible that Jefferson Davis also had a relationship to British Money Power? One salient fact stands out: Davis served as President Franklin Pierce’s war secretary and while Pierce was an ardent states’ rights advocate, it was also widely reported that he had relations with a powerful US secret society – the Knights of the Golden Circle. Can you comment on the Knights of the Golden Circle and what their agenda might have been? We’ve written about this issue here: “Thomas James DiLorenzo on Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Authoritarianism and Manipulated History.”

Here’s a brief description from a book on the Knights entitled, The Mysterious and Secret Order of the Knights of the Golden Circle … “Few people know of the Knights of the Golden Circle and even fewer know about the purpose for which it existed. It is probably the greatest untold story today in the history of the United States. … It has been said of them that they were one of the deadliest, wealthiest, most secretive and subversive spy and underground organizations in the history of the world … The group was heavy on ritual, most of which was borrowed from the Masonic Lodge and later from the Knights of Pythias. Some were also members of the Rosicrucians.” To what end was Jefferson Davis involved with the Knights? Was he in a sense set up to fail? Did he willingly participate? Was he a patsy?

Thomas DiLorenzo: I have no idea. How would anyone know anything about this if it was a “secret” society, as you say? Jefferson Davis was a brilliant and highly educated man who spent a long career in national politics and wrote a great book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. It is unimaginable that any American politician since could have performed such an amazingly insightful piece of genuine scholarship. This is not the type of man who would have been easily duped by the local Masonic Lodge.

Daily Bell: Are these fair questions? Jefferson was President of the Southern Secession but he proved an ineffective leader and his policies in many ways sabotaged the South and its quest to secede. Was his incompetence entirely genuine, in your view?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Davis was not a dictator. He had a lot of help losing the war, especially from his generals who insisted on the Napoleonic battlefield tactics they were taught at West Point and which had become defunct because of the advent of more deadly military technology by the middle of the nineteenth century. One of his biggest failures was waiting until the last year of the war to finally do what General Robert E. Lee had been arguing from the beginning – offering the slaves freedom in return for fighting with the Confederate Army in defense of their country.

Daily Bell: A final question. It was Davis who set the war in motion, inexplicably, by declaring formal hostilities, so why didn’t he and his generals fight a guerrilla war that they would have been almost certain to win? General Lee insisted on formal engagements with the North but had neither the resources nor the men to win a war of attrition of this sort. Why didn’t he pursue well-known guerilla tactics that would have produced a victory or at least a stalemate?

Thomas DiLorenzo: No, it was Lincoln who launched an invasion of the Southern states. Davis’s declarations were just words. Giving guerilla fighters like John Singleton Mosby and Nathan Bedford Forrest more resources may well have won the war for the South, but Mosby was kicked out of VMI and Forrest was almost totally uneducated formally. The Confederate military establishment was controlled by West Point graduates who knew little or nothing about guerilla warfare. When asked after the war who his most effective subordinate was, Lee said it was a man named Forrest.

Daily Bell: Certainly the arc of Davis’s career after the war does little to contradict the hypothesis that there was more to Davis’s role than history records. He never served a long jail sentence, visited England later in life and was supported by a wealthy widow, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, who was a primary member and literary representative of Southern aristocracy with its many European connections. This would also seem to show that Davis had deep connections to the British power structure. Is all this merely frivolous supposition?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Yes.

Daily Bell: Okay, let’s turn to your recent book, False Virtue: The Myths that Transformed America From A Republic to an Empire. Can you explain what this is about to our readers and why you wrote it?

Thomas DiLorenzo: That’s something that I’m still working on. I plan on putting into book form the story of how the Lincoln myth has been used for the past 150 years or so to prop up American foreign policy imperialism.

Daily Bell: What are you working on now, if anything?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Besides this, I’m working on a book on the politics and economics of war.

Daily Bell: Do you still believe that secession is in the offing for several or more of “these united States”? Will it come without bloodshed?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Thank God for the former serfs of the Soviet empire that they only had a totalitarian communist like Gorbachev to deal with and not a Lincoln. Peaceful secession is the only way out of the new slavery for the average American, and it will only happen if we have a president who is more like Gorbachev than Lincoln. That is one more reason why the Lincoln myth needs to be destroyed.

Daily Bell: Are hostilities deepening between Fedgov and US states?

Thomas DiLorenzo: The booboisie in America for the time being seems happy to endure whatever additional enslavements the federal government proposes for them. That may change, however, when there is hyperinflation and their healthcare system is destroyed by Obama’s socialized medicine, or if one of the tiny and relatively defenseless countries that the US government is perpetually picking on figures out a way to retaliate in a big way. That just might cause the booboisie to finally ask such questions as: “Do my children really have to be sacrificed and sent to their deaths so that people in Syria can be ruled by a different dictator chosen by the CIA?”

Daily Bell: Isn’t secession a lawful, constitutional right?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Article 7 of the Constitution explains that the document was to be ratified by the “free and independent states,” as they are called in the Declaration of Independence. The union of the founders was voluntary, and several states reserved the right to withdraw from the union in the future if it became destructive of their rights. Since each state has equal rights in the union, this became true for all states. That is why, at the outset of the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of Northern newspapers editorialized in favor of peaceful secession. Most of them quoted Jefferson from the Declaration saying that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when that consent is withdrawn it is the peoples’ duty to abolish that government and form a new one.

Lincoln thus destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with a Soviet-style coerced union held together with the threat of total war waged on the civilian population of any state in the future that attempted to make Jefferson’s argument and act on it. It is telling that on the eve of the Civil War several federal laws were proposed to outlaw secession. This occurred because everyone at the time understood that secession was perfectly legal and constitutional.

Might does NOT make right, so yes, secession is a right that the people of any free society should have.

Daily Bell: Is the Internet helping to create an upsurge of freedom-consciousness among the US electorate?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Yes, without a doubt. That’s why some of the most obnoxious and tyrannical of our politicians, like Obama, Lieberman, McCain and Schumer, seem to be constantly conniving to somehow censor or shut down the internet “for national security reasons.”

Daily Bell: How many real “nations” does the US encompass?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Time will tell. Jefferson believed there were at least seven or eight regions that could be created as independent American nations during his time, and he wrote that he would wish them all well as they would all be, as Americans, “our children.”

Daily Bell: What about Europe? Will it also see a fracturing of the euro and perhaps of the EU itself?

Thomas DiLorenzo: I think we are seeing the collapse of the EU and the Euro along with the European welfare state. We should all pray that it happens a thousand times faster.

Daily Bell: How about China?

Thomas DiLorenzo: China is now more capitalist than the US and its government is less tyrannical than the government in Washington, DC.

Daily Bell: Is the Internet helping to cause these “devolutions”?

Thomas DiLorenzo: When the AFL-CIO conspired with the Catholic Church in Poland to subvert communism they smuggled fax machines into the country so that the anti-communists could plot and communicate. The internet makes all of this infinitely easier to accomplish.

Daily Bell: Is the 21st century more hopeful than the 20th and 19th when it comes to large-scale wars and manipulation of various electorates in the West and elsewhere?

Thomas DiLorenzo: One virtue of the 19th century was that the public school brainwashing bureaucracy was not yet very well developed. It certainly is today, which is why America has become such a nation of statist sheep.

Daily Bell: Is the current system of Fiat Money Power on the way out? If so, what will take its place?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Yes. That’s what all the economic turmoil in Europe is about. I’d like to see a return to a gold standard. This will have to happen if we are to avoid worldwide economic collapse similar to the Great Depression.

Daily Bell: How does the Lincoln mythology play out today in light of all these circumstances?

Thomas DiLorenzo: It is still the ideological cornerstone of American statism, but we are making progress.

Daily Bell: Will the US revert to a freer, more self-sufficient model?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Only if peaceful secession is allowed to occur.

Daily Bell: Is the pre-Civil War US model a template for a more viable society in the future?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Minus slavery, of course. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were far superior to the Constitution that replaced them (and which omitted the world “perpetual”).

Daily Bell: Can we ever go back? Is history linear or cyclical?

Thomas DiLorenzo: I don’t believe in such determinism. We can correct mistakes. We DID deregulate oil and transportation in the 1980s; socialism DID collapse worldwide in the late ’80s/early ’90s and was replaced by more market-oriented regimes.

Daily Bell: Any other comments or predictions?

Thomas DiLorenzo: The Republican Party will continue to become more and more irrelevant and powerless; the Democratic Party establishment will finally strip off their masks and reveal themselves as the totalitarian socialists that they have always been; and the political future will belong to the young Ron Paulians.

Daily Bell: Thanks for your time once again.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

Thomas DiLorenzo got a little irritated with us because we harped on the Jesuit issue (see interview). But we did so because a malicious minority of what we can only call Neo-Nazi “social” and “mutual creditors” have attacked him for being influenced by the Jesuit educational establishment for which he works.

Money is power and those who challenge the status quo are dangerous to the internationalist impulse. Thus, globalists claim DiLorenzo has attacked Lincoln because he wanted to undermine Lincoln’s use of government Greenbacks as effective money.

Money is a complex system. It is not mathematically reducible. Only the free-market itself, the Invisible Hand, can organize money within the context of the complex relationships that exist in a modern society (though admittedly such relationships could and should be simplified).

But according to some, only the state, properly guided by responsible politicians, can provide the money society needs. DiLorenzo has also been attacked by this socialist faction because he named Lincoln for what he was: the father of US Empire.

Before Lincoln, it was common belief that any state could secede from the Union. After Lincoln, it was clear no state could secede without facing military action. That situation continues today.

DiLorenzo is a consequential writer. He has advanced our understanding of who Lincoln really was and where American exceptionalism took a wrong turn. The attacks of his critics notwithstanding, he is an original and courageous historian, and we look forward to reading more of his work.

The Best of Anthony Wile

Daily Bell: Hello, again. What’s new with you? Give us a sense of new projects and publications.

Gerald Celente: What’s new with me is I’m restoring three pre-Revolutionary War buildings in colonial Kingston, New York. Within the last year I bought the 1750s Franz Roggen house, the Academy, and the Dr. Jansen House. The Academy was built in 1774 and the Jansen House in 1763, and it’s on the most historic corner in the United States, the only place where there’s a stone building that pre-dates the Revolutionary War on each corner. The fourth corner has a museum, the 1660s Matthew Person House.

I’m doing this for two reasons. One is that, of course, I want to preserve them – and one of them is in really very, very bad shape – and the other reason is that this is where the first American Revolution had its roots. Kingston was the first capitol of New York State, burned down by the British in 1777 and then rebuilt from the foundations.

Now it’s time for another revolution, this one, of course, not of bombs and bullets or armies but of the mind, the spirit and the heart. It’s time for a revolution and that’s why I’m doing it. So that’s what’s new.

Daily Bell: At the end of this interview, we’ll ask you for five big trends, since you are a famous trend forecaster. But now we want to ask some individual questions … First, when looking over the world do you see bright spots?

Gerald Celente: I think there are always bright spots. Some places are going to do better than others but generally the world is on a downward trend. Just look at the economic data. There’s a slowdown in China. I love the language they use. They do this all the time. This is just out of Bloomberg: “EU lowers forecast as euro area heads for two-year slump.” They’re always “lowering forecasts.” They con the people into believing there’s a recovery and when it doesn’t happen they “lower” their forecast.

So where’s the recovery? The jobs that are being created are low-paying jobs. These are known facts in the States. But they brag about it. ‘Dominos is doing great. They say they can hire 10,000 people right now.’ What? Drivers to drive their old beat-up cars to deliver their franchise pizzas? They say this with a straight face. There is no real recovery and that’s despite dumping in trillions of dollars worth of stimulus.

So what did they do yesterday? Two things. The Fed announced that they are going to continue buying $85 billion in bonds and mortgage-backed securities each month. It’s absurd. How do they get away with this? They’re rigging the market and they’re doing it right in front of you. It’s as if they actually said, “We’re going to rig the market, and here’s how.” And then you see the ECB buying up bonds and lowering interest rates as well. Japan has also announced its own $1.4 trillion stimulus scheme and nations – Australia, South Korea, India and others – are lowing interest rates to stimulate their economies as well.

Daily Bell: It seems like every economy is collapsing except the BRICS. What is your sense of all this?

Gerald Celente: You have to be realistic about the BRICS as well, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. If Europe and the United States don’t buy their products, the Chinese stop producing them. And if the Chinese don’t produce, the Brazilians, the Russians and, of course, the Indians, are not going to be doing much business. Brazil, Russia, South Africa and countries like them are exporters of natural resources. So if China and other industrialized countries aren’t building or manufacturing, they’re not selling. It affects everyone. You also see it happening in Canada. Things are slowing down there, particularly the real estate market. You just don’t have the old level of growth.

But having said that, China’s smart in that they’re committed to building their domestic economy. They have 1.2 billion people. They only have to do business with themselves. And that’s what we see them doing, whereas the stimulus in the West has all gone to the banks, the stimulus in China goes into the infrastructure and building their domestic economy. Totally different, so they’ll do better in the long term.

Daily Bell: Why is the West in such bad shape?

Gerald Celente: Because a lot of stupid people are running it and the corruption is flagrant, and in front of everybody’s eyes. How many more times do they have to say, ‘Insider Trading, High-frequency Trading’ … one scam after another before the public wakes up to it? It’s corruption everywhere, whether it’s the King of Spain or you name the country. Another example is that clown in France who’s the minister of I forget what, supposed to be in charge of making sure that people aren’t scamming the system and taking their money offshore. They found out he has a couple of million offshore in Swiss banks. So it’s corruption, it’s immorality and stupidity. We have psychopaths running the show and everybody’s afraid to call a spade a spade.

They want to start another war. Hey, how about going into Syria? What? Iraq wasn’t good enough for you? You did a great job in Libya. Hey, how about Afghanistan? I’ve got it! Let’s go into Mali. These are sick people. How could any self-respecting adult look up to these political clowns? So you ask me what’s wrong? It’s the people as well as the politicians. After this Boston thing, you look at the polls. More people want surveillance. They applauded the police going door-to-door without warrants, going into people’s homes.

Daily Bell: Given the extent of corruption, is it a matter of human nature?

Gerald Celente: Yes. But fish rot from the head down. That’s why leadership is so important. You lead by example. Look, they just dedicated the George Bush library. Every suck-up president was there saying what a great guy this war criminal was. They’re all war criminals, each one who was president. People forget.

Jimmy Carter – you want to talk about the Taliban? There’s the guy that created it when he ran the proxy war against Russia in Afghanistan. He’s the guy that funded bin Laden. He’s the guy who created the mujahideen. Clinton? How many people did that SOB kill? He did a lovely job in Yugoslavia, didn’t he? He used to bomb Baghdad on a daily basis. Oh, we’ve got that wonderful no-fly zone, 500,000 women, children and the elderly died from the sanctions, and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright said it was “worth the price.” Then there’s Bush, of course. Now there’s “Bombs away” Obama. How about a drone strike here, a troop surge there, an invasion of Libya, or an attack on Syria? So, as I said, this is the example. You lead by example and the people blindly follow, asking no questions of their leaders and Commanders-in-Chief.

Look, if today I was still of the stupid “Bronx and Yonkers state of mind” I was in as a kid growing up there, and someone would say to his buddies, “Let’s do a dirty deal.” And if one of his friends would say, “What’s wrong with you?” he’d say, “No! What’s wrong with you? If it’s OK for Goldman Sachs to do dirty deals, why isn’t it OK for me?” That’s the mentality.

Nothing will change until the people change. This is why you have the current resurgence in religion as a knee-jerk response to socioeconomic and political degeneration. When things get really, really bad some religious leader pops up spouting morality. I’m not talking about the ‘my religion is the best religion’ kind of stuff. I’m just saying when the vacuum is that enormous, something, such as a televangelical fake religion tends to moves in to fill it.

Daily Bell: So by changing the people in charge will we change the system or does the system itself have to be changed?

Gerald Celente: Yes. The system. The whole so-called democratic system is rotten. You don’t reform the Bonannos or the Gambinos. I’m a believer in direct democracy. Let the people vote. People say, “Oh, but that’s mob rule!” What do you think you’ve got now? Or they say, “The people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves.” Well, the people in charge now are too stupid to make decisions for us. It’s a mob. It’s a gang of 535 in the States, 535 congressmen and senators telling 315 million people how to shine their shoes. Who made this crap up? It’s not a representative form of government. That’s only for little school kids to believe in. The politicians represent the most powerful, the richest, and the ones that give them the most money. They call it “campaign contributions.” I call it bribes and payoffs.

Daily Bell: To what extent are the challenges that we currently face spiritual?

Gerald Celente: They are all spiritual in a way. They all have their foundation in spirituality – not in the usual religious sense but in the heart, mind and spirit of individuals. Look. An example: Take the tar sands. They want to push it through because “It’ll create jobs.” Where’s the spiritual element? It may destroy the planet, or a piece of it. How about Fukushima? How about the wars? Those are all moral, actually spiritual, issues. If there’s one single line that captures the whole situation it’s, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” You want to bomb another country? Okay. But when they bomb you back, don’t get uptight about it. It’s payback. You want to destroy the planet to create jobs? Okay. That was a price that had to be paid. It’s the Golden Rule in action.

Daily Bell: Looking at those in Boston who clamor for more protection, it doesn’t feel very hopeful that they’re going to make a big spiritual shift.

Gerald Celente: It doesn’t have to be that big. You’re never going to get everyone. Look at the American Revolution. It began with just a couple of percent supporting it, and then at the height only 25 percent of the people were actively involved, and they had the support of maybe another 20 percent. You will always have masses of “Loyalists.”

Daily Bell: Do you think that shift needs to happen within the US, or it’s got to be global?

Gerald Celente: It’s happening. Look what’s happened in Italy with the Five Star Movement. And by the way, that’s the issue – It’s a movement not a protest.

Of course, it was stalled temporarily but it’s a big movement and that’s where the real change must come from – the young people. For a non-aligned movement to succeed, it has to be free of corporate media entanglements. Look at Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. He wouldn’t go on any TV shows. He did it all on the Internet and made personal campaign stops in scores of cities. But he did nothing with the mainstream media. He stayed out of it. Grillo’s Five Star Movement is a model for movements around the world.

Throughout Italy, and around the world, there are all these educated young people, without jobs facing a futureless future. They’re angry and they have the energy. That’s part of the recipe for how a real movement starts.

Daily Bell: Back to a more strictly financial perspective, is money printing the answer to any of this?

Gerald Celente: You know the answer to that.

Daily Bell: Why are central banks so aggressive about easing when it obviously doesn’t work?

Gerald Celente: Because they have nothing else to do. They have no other way of tackling this and I believe they know it is only a short-term fix. And, possibly, it’s the only thing they know how to do. They don’t want to deal with big issues and the biggest issue is globalization, and it’s not working.

I do trends in the news every day as part of the subscription to The Trends Journal. I was following, of course, the tragedies going on in Bangladesh. Coach and other high-end manufacturers are moving out of China to even cheaper places like Vietnam. And I said, why don’t they just invent a new country?

Build a new country and call it Slavelandia. We’ve got 7 billion people and all they have to do is take all the uneducated, the ones who don’t have a future, and make them go to work in Slavelandia. You don’t even have to feed them. There are so many people, you just work them until they die and then grind them up for fertilizer. Then we could keep corporate profits really high.

Here’s the moral: Don’t buy Coach; don’t buy anything made in countries other than your own if at all possible. Most countries have enough people in them to do business mostly with each other and if they followed that model, they would do just fine. After all, before globalization, that’s mostly the way it used to be, and mostly it worked.

Daily Bell: What of the argument, made by labor organizers recently, that if companies pull out of Bangladesh they only hurt the workers who live there? Same effect from a movement to boycott, they maintain.

Gerald Celente: They have to readjust this kind of narrow thinking. What do they want to do, fight to keep the plantation going?

Great argument! Feed the slaves just enough so they can keep working? Except no one wants to call it a “plantation”; we’ll call it a multinational! Will that make these labor organizers happy? What’s their logic? Do they believe that the slave laborers are incapable of fending for themselves and too ignorant to survive in the world on their own? In essence, their argument that slave labor is better than no labor is both insulting and moronic.

Daily Bell: It sounds like what you’re saying is that the counter to globalization – and that’s one example of it – is smaller communities, self-reliance?

Gerald Celente: Yes. What, we can’t take care of ourselves or each other? We can’t buy each other’s products? We’re too stupid to make them? We’re too ignorant to make shirts or shoes?

It’s only about the bottom line. Look, when was the United States at its height? When we had trade barriers, when we had laws in place like Glass-Steagall for the banking sector, or Robinson-Patman and Sherman Anti-Trust, Clayton Anti-Trust so that the “bigs” couldn’t grab everything. Now they’ve deregulated those laws and statutes that made it something of a level playing field. What kind of future can you have working at Macy’s or Walmart or Target or Staples or Home Depot or Rite Aid or CVS? That’s a life?

Daily Bell: Is part of all this because people can’t see that there is an alternative, that they don’t have the vision?

Gerald Celente: Sure. Vision’s a big thing. Not a lot of people have it. And there is plenty of proof to make that case. For example, there are virtually no university courses in how to identify, track and forecast trends. Colleges are top heavy with history courses but nothing about having a vision of the future.

Daily Bell: People aren’t aware of many examples of this.

Gerald Celente: Exactly, and that’s what I was saying: Fish rot from the head down. There is no vision at the top of government. So if you have no leaders showing the way, how can the people be led into a more civilized and advanced future? Again, leaders are incapable of showing the way in a corrupt system.

But I think, as I said, there are two models to follow: Obviously, Switzerland, with direct democracy, though nobody talks about it. They’re rich, the food’s good, everybody has guns but they don’t shoot each other and they have the highest standard of living in the world. They vote on everything. You want to go to war? When was the last time Switzerland was at war? Around a century and a half ago?

Daily Bell: Is this lack of awareness a function of most people’s focus on mainstream media – if it’s not shown there, if these sorts of examples aren’t offered there, people are not getting them from anywhere else?

Gerald Celente: It’s important – again, what you just said: “most people.” Most people don’t count. It’s not a numbers game. You need a strong core. And I believe the core is there; it’s just not unified. If it was all put together it would be a strong core. You see, once you have the movement going and you have a strong core, those same people who follow mainstream media, they’ll follow along. They’ll drink phosphorescent slurpees if they’re made to think, “Hey, it’s really cool to drink these.” Thus, if they think it is really cool to be part of a new popular movement, they will simply join in to be part of the crowd.

Follow the example of Giuseppe Verdi! A model for people following a popular movement exists. It is known that what drove Verdi’s passion to create some of the greatest music ever written was to unite the Italian people and overthrow their occupiers. If you go back to the 1800s, Hungary had a piece of Italy, Austria had a piece, the Germans, the French, the Spanish. The Neapolitans spoke a different language than the Calabrese … there was no single language in Italy.

Verdi used his music to unify the people and it worked. The model exists. When he died, it is said his funeral was the largest in recorded history.

Daily Bell: So do you see a current or up-and-coming-something similar developing?

Gerald Celente: I don’t see it now. I’m just saying that it can happen. It won’t happen through the political realm or the corporate-ruled entertainment industry.

It has to hit the heart and the soul, not just the mind. It has to resonate at many different levels. The mind has to understand what the heart feels. But first it has to hit the heart and the soul and that’s the model. It’s there. The revolution that unified Italy was, in comparison to most, not a very bloody one.

Daily Bell: Isn’t that why the War on Terror propaganda is so effective, because it goes to the heart and thus bypasses the mind of most?

Gerald Celente: Not entirely. It’s mostly a mind game, arousing primal emotions, and throughout the centuries it has been used effectively. Regimes (democratic, fascist, authoritarian, monarchic, etc.) have always used fear and hysteria to arouse and control the populace.

If you tap into the emotions to arouse fear and hysteria, you can use emotion to instill courage and independence. If you can use it one way you can use it in another way … and that’s what people don’t understand. It doesn’t have to be negative to be effective. But the people who are in power today are sociopaths and psychopaths. All they know is negation and they use it to manipulate the public.

Daily Bell: Why is there so much misinformation about the economy in particular in the mainstream press?

Gerald Celente: Because of who’s running the press. It’s in their best interests. Do they want to say the economy stinks, it will only get worse and you’re better off not going to go out to their crummy chain stores to buy a lot of cheap crap and eat junk food? Look who their advertisers are? With a message like that, they wouldn’t have any.

Daily Bell: What about alternative media?

Gerald Celente: The alternative media is a powerful growing trend. Again, look at the Five Star Movement in Italy. It was all done on alternative media. It totally avoided the mainstream media. In fact, Beppe Grillo and all those running on the Movement’s platform refused to appear on mainstream media.

There’s a story that just came out in The Independent that “Top economist Jeffrey Sachs says Wall Street is full of crooks and hasn’t changed since the financial crash. The IMF advisor also blamed a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system.”

Jeez, no kidding? Wow! Blow me away! Hey, but if Jeffrey Sachs, one of the guys from The White Shoe Boys Club says it, then it must be true.

But when Gerald Celente says it, and has been saying it for years, Celente is just a gloom-and-doomer, he’s a malcontent. But when a club member speaks, the media listens.

Daily Bell: What do you think about the current gold market?

Gerald Celente: It’s being manipulated. Why do I say that? Because when you look at physical demand, you see what’s really happening. There were lines half a mile long waiting to buy gold in Australia, they’re running out of gold jewelry in China and India and premiums are going through the roof on all solid product. Meanwhile it’s being shorted on the paper end by speculators, some of whom may be fronting for central banks and other government interests.

They’re devaluing the currencies in front of our eyes – the Bank of Japan with their stimulus and their bond buying, with the European endless bond buying, record low interest rates, and the same in the US. So it’s an across-the-board devaluation. If the people realized that because they keep printing this crappy money, it’s not worth the paper it’s not printed on they’d all be bailing out of these fiat currencies and buying gold. There’d be a panic.

It is not in the best interests of central banks, Wall Street, or the City of London, so they will do everything they can to not let that happen – or they’ll try to hold down gold prices as best they can.

I’m still a firm believer in gold. It costs about $1200 an ounce to take it out of the ground so it’s not going to go below that. And then people brag about the stock market. Look at the stock market! I say, yeah, what is that, 15,000-something? Yeah. What was it in 2007? Well, 14,000. Six years later and accounting for inflation it’s actually lower. But what was gold at then? Around $740 an ounce. And even now at the price, who got the better deal now? It’s not even close.

They’re manipulating the bond market in front of our eyes. We now know they’ve been manipulating Libor rates – my god! How transparent does it have to get before people see it? A $500 to $700 trillion dollar market rigged through Libor … the people should be screaming for justice, but no justice has been done.

Daily Bell: Well, the Pentagon announced they’d lost $2.7 trillion the day before 9/11 and nobody said anything, so why not up the ante?

Gerald Celente: Exactly. You know our saying. The word “justice” is being misspelled. It should be “just us.” A slap on the wrist for the big-time criminals and punishment to the fullest extent of the law for the rest of the public.

Daily Bell: Why is there such a differentiation between physical gold and paper gold? Is that a manipulation, as well?

Gerald Celente: Well, of course it’s a manipulation. As I said, the paper markets are easily rigged, as we keep finding out. The silver markets are rigged. Recently they did a story in Canada on the rigging of the silver market and this Canadian guy going out to meet with the head of the Security and Exchange Commission. You see this guy in the SEC with his long, white hair sitting in his tiny little office talking with the Canadian who furnished proof of the manipulated silver market maintaining that the SEC resources were too limited to pursue all the offenders.

As I keep saying, the game is rigged. It’s like bringing in an ethics department to keep the mafia honest. That’s what the SEC is equivalent to: an ethics committee preaching honesty and integrity to the Wall Street Gang.

Have you seen one head roll on Wall Street? No. Not one. So yeah, it’s rigged. That’s my conviction. And I’m not a conspiracy theorist because Libor is not a conspiracy and neither is the rigging of the bond market. It’s in front of everybody’s eyes and there’s enough information to show how the silver market is rigged and how the stock markets are rigged. My god, high frequency trading, trading in milliseconds … it’s all gambling. But for the reasons stated, I’m still bullish on gold.

Daily Bell: Will we end up with a neo-state gold standard?

Gerald Celente: Could be. I could see gold being part of a new reserve currency – not a gold standard but part of the new reserve currency in years to come. Look what’s going on with the euro. It’s only 12 years old and the problems facing it seem insurmountable.

Sooner or later, when the bond buying, low interest rate, austerity measure and quantitative easing schemes are no longer options, I envision a new reserve currency with gold as a part of it.

Daily Bell: As that’s happening with the paper, is it possible that central banks are being thoroughly discredited?

Gerald Celente: Again, discredited by whom? When that’s all there is, most people can’t see through it. Not yet. Besides, the people don’t take to the streets until it hits them in their stomachs. And even in depression-wracked countries of Europe (Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece), the will to fight austerity measures that keep robbing the people to pay off the banks, has not reached a revolutionary pitch.

For example, the big news on May Day was that labor unions and other protestors literally stopped business in Greece. Big deal. The next day it was back to business as usual.

Yet, the model for successful peaceful revolution exists.

I call it “The Berlin Wall Model.” Finally, after decades of repression, the people went out to the Wall and into the streets and for days and weeks didn’t go home until the Berlin Wall came down.

But again, even that was only a protest. One government was replaced by another. It was much better than what it had replaced, but still far from fulfilling the ideals and ideas of the Berlin Wall protestors.

It has to more than a protest. There has to be a “movement” with defined goals and objectives.

Daily Bell: Does austerity work?

Gerald Celente: Yeah, it works great. It’s a proven success. It drives the people into poverty and makes the bankers richer. It works perfectly, exactly as planned. The banks made bad bets and the public was forced to pay for them.

The governments essentially robbed money from the people, the people’s standard of living declined, they lost their homes and their jobs. This is called “democracy.”

With no roof over their heads, many have been forced to live out on the streets. They have no future. Governments have cut workers pensions and benefits, raised the retirement age until after you’re dead but the banks have done just fine. They’re thriving and the 1% keeps getting richer. So it worked just the way they intended it to work.

There was an article in yesterday’s Financial Times, a big story about Ireland, and how this Irish woman who’s with the European Parliament, through the Freedom of Information law got the minutes that revealed how hedge funds and bankers met with Irish politicians as the banking crisis unfolded.

As proven by the minutes, the financiers got everything that they wanted. Politicians are no more than wise guys for the money changers. It’s a mafia.

There are two mafias. There’s the military mafia and the money changing mafia. All politicians are “wise guys,” the front men, and they do what they’re told.

By the way, I was the assistant to the secretary of the New York Senate at 23 years old. I was a chief government affairs specialist for the chemical industry in the ’70s in DC. One of my chief writers for the Trends Journal is Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagan.

It’s not like we don’t know what’s going on or haven’t been there. When I was up in Albany it was the worst job I ever had. All day long I was watching grown men and women suck their way up to get to the top, a disgusting spectacle. I didn’t last long. I hated it. That’s all these people are. They’re little boys and little girls who do what they’re told. As I said, we don’t have a representative government. The politicians represent only the most powerful and the ones with the most money.

Daily Bell: Are libertarians correct that what economies around the world need is more freedom and less management?

Gerald Celente: You mean more freedom to build unsafe factories in Bangladesh that collapsed and killed over a thousand workers or fertilizer plants in Texas that blow up and wipe out a town?

No, we need stoplights and stop signs. I’m a believer in regulation when the lack of it leads to unmitigated disaster. I am not in favor of legislation that has the government intruding in private lives.

For example, Glass-Steagall worked perfectly. When it was taken away, look what happened. It reined in rampant bank corruption, speculation and monopolies.

With Robinson-Patman, Sherman Anti-Trust, Clayton Anti-Trust there were no Walmarts when those laws and regulations were in place. They were put in place for a purpose; to prevent the robber barons from robbing everything. Now they’ve all been deregulated and look what happened. We’ve all become corporate slaves to a new class of robber barons.

Daily Bell: Do you see globalization continuing or is there anything slowing it down or stopping it?

Gerald Celente: Nothing in the short term.

Daily Bell: What would you do as an investor today?

Gerald Celente: Exactly what I’m doing. I’m hedging my investments. I buy gold and I’m buying historic properties. That’s for me. I don’t give financial advice and I’m not a speculator. I don’t play markets or anything like that. I’ve been buying gold since 1978. My first buy was at $187.50 an ounce. I also bought it at the highest point ($875) the day it collapsed, on January 20, 1980!

But what’s going on now is very different from back then. Back then there was no Russia; it was the Soviet Union. There was Communist China, not the industrial giant it is today.

Everything east of Berlin was behind the Iron Curtain. China, India, they weren’t buying gold like crazy; they had no money. So it was a very different time. The gold panic was real back then. This is a very different feeling. And again, people around the globe weren’t buying gold as a safe-haven asset as they are today. So it’s very different.

Gold and historic real estate, that’s for me. One goes up, the other goes down. If gold goes down my real estate value goes up. And again, I’m not a real estate speculator; I’m buying antiquities. It’s the “Antiques Road Show” and I’m buying beautiful, 18th century stone buildings in Colonial Kingston, New York.

Daily Bell: Will you speak more to the plight of the US, please? In particular, will Obamacare pull down the economy further?

Gerald Celente: Yes. Obamacare is pulling down the economy further. It’s really hurting businesses. It’s an ill-conceived program and it’s really not Obamacare; it’s Fascistcare. It’s the merger of state and corporate powers. We the people are being forced to buy insurance from private corporations that in turn buy off politicians with campaign contributions.

Daily Bell: Is the EU going to break up? What about the euro?

Gerald Celente: I can see the eurozone breaking up and I can see the euro breaking up in years to come. Yeah, and it keeps returning to the precipice. What’s going to fix the unemployment in France and in Italy? How’s it going to change? What are they going to do? I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. They say it’s the workers’ fault. They are making too much money and have too many benefits. They say we’ve got to compete with the Chinese, Vietnamese, Bangladeshis, etc. That’s their only solution. No, it’s not going to get any better.

Daily Bell: What does the next ten years hold for the US, as it’s becoming increasingly warlike and authoritarian, in our view? Can this be stopped?

Gerald Celente: Of course, it can be stopped. It’s up to the people. But right now with the fear and hysteria being generated by the government – you saw what happened in Boston… If you go to my Gerald Celente YouTube channel, there’s a video called “State of Siege” from April 22nd. You can see where the future is heading.

I did a Trends in the News segment on what happened in Boston and what an affront it was to our Constitutional Rights. And you should see the hate mail that I got … there’s no cure for stupid. Many people willingly submit to government power and a number praised the Boston police and the military for protecting them. But that said, the positive replies I received were a hundred to one in favor of the video.

Daily Bell: It goes back to the propaganda we were talking about, people acting from pure emotion, entirely bypassing the brain because propaganda from the mainstream media totally set in.

Gerald Celente: You’re right. Ask Goebbels. It works perfectly. When people say to me, “If you don’t like it here, leave,” I turn the tables on them and say, “No, no. You’ve got it the wrong way. You leave! You’re the ones who are destroying the principles upon which this country was founded. You don’t like the way the Founding Fathers set it up? You leave. Move to North Korea.”

Daily Bell: What are the next big trends you see, one to five?

Gerald Celente: There is a Renaissance. It’s already happening, there is a food Renaissance going on that cannot be denied. There is a nationwide “buy local” movement, anti-GMO, anti-factory farming, no pesticides or additives … the food trend is clear, the shift is underway. Just turn on the TV. Look at all the popular food and cooking shows. Buy local, grow your own, eat healthy to stay healthy, if you can afford to eat out, try to eat organic, grass fed, hormone free.

At the other extreme, unfortunately, war is another trend. The worse things get, the louder the war drums beat.

But, there are other positive developments, as well. The whole New Millennium Education trend. I wrote about this back in 1996 in my book Trends 2000. What’s being called Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) today, I called Interactive-U, and we’ve been charting its evolution in successiveTrends Journals.

You’re going to start seeing a whole new educational model develop. The one we have now is an Industrial Age model that is both outmoded and by any standard inadequate.

New Millennium Education will be a crucial element in fostering an Era of Enlightenment. You’ll have superstar teachers, the best in the field, teaching literally millions of people at one time. From kindergarten up to the Ph.D., a whole new system of teaching and learning is a major positive trend.

I also believe a big game changer will be in alternative energy. Something far greater than wind, solar, geothermal, bio-fuel. And once it is brought to market, it will have a more profound effect on society than even the dot-com digital revolution.

Not only will the alternative energy trend be a game changer, it will be a game saver. It’s the next big thing and it will change Middle East policy. Does anyone really think that the West’s involvement in the region is to promote freedom and democracy? Once the world is no longer dependent upon Middle East oil, military intervention into their internal affairs will cease abruptly.

Also, a new, clean, infinite energy will boost economic growth worldwide. We’ve written about these positive implications extensively in past and current Trends Journals.

I also believe in the need for a “Verdi Factor.” It is impossible for a true Renaissance to blossom without the recognition and appreciation of the role of art and beauty.

I truly believe that art is the way of finding the true meaning of the human spirit. If you don’t believe me, then you don’t believe in the European Renaissance of the 15th to 18th centuries, or the great civilizations that preceded it. And beauty, to me, is the antidote to fear. That’s why I surround myself with beauty.

What can also kick start the New Millennium Renaissance is the return to a fundamental appreciation of craftsmanship. Art and architecture reveal the soul of any given civilization. History books are almost unnecessary. Walmart, Home Depot, Staples, McDonalds, Trump Tower, the shopping mall, the strip mall and on down to faceless low-income housing development … all bear mute, irrevocable witness to what we of the 21st century have become … and why we must change before we perish beneath an avalanche of ugliness.

Daily Bell: Thanks again for your time.

Gerald Celente: Thank you.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

Gerald Celente has been writing about real social and economic trends for decades. It’s great to speak to him and get his perspectives because you don’t have the feeling that you are dealing with someone who is providing “canned” answers.

Speak to someone on Wall Street about trends and you’ll get the perspective that another part of the business cycle is in the offing. The cycle of capitalism is, of course, the Austrian business cycle in which central banks print too much money, causing first a boom and then a bust.

The current point of the cycle is said to be in the range of recovery. We’re coming out of the Great Recession. Gerald Celente has a much bigger vision than that.

It is not so simple or neat.

The idea being sold by the powers-that-be is that after five long years, the US and even the West is gradually clawing its way out of the downturn. In fact, Celente’s trend analysis is all about a much larger trend that overlays the simplistic vision of boom, bust … recovery.

But Celente’s vision is rightfully one of empire … both its rise and now its decline.

The US empire is the biggest the world has ever known, and though Celente does not verbalize it directly, we understand that the nomenclature “US” is actually a description of a much larger and more shadowy empire that does not reveal its face.

It is an empire of globalism that grinds relentlessly along but at the same time is running into extreme difficulty thanks to what we call the Internet Reformation.

Celente’s trends speak to this difficulty. Whether it is the slow foods movement, a new educational model or the Neo-Renaissance itself – what we call the Internet Reformation in part – is challenging the expansion of empire and its inevitable repression.

This is adult stuff. It has little to with fads or the facile trends that the mainstream media likes to identify. Instead, the trends Celente isolates are the expression of people who are beginning to find their own ways of living despite the attacks they undergo every day by Leviathan.

The trends Celente identifies are part of a narration of this slow, inexorable change. How far it will go, and how fast, are difficult to analyze. But it is occurring.

In a time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary act …

Introduction: Richard Maybury publishes U.S. & World Early Warning Report and was formerly Global Affairs editor of MONEYWORLD. One of the most respected business and economics analysts in America, his articles have appeared in numerous major publications. His Uncle Eric series of books are extremely popular among both the general public and home schoolers, and include Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?, Whatever Happened to Justice?, Evaluating Books: What Would Thomas Jefferson Think of This? and eight other titles. Maybury’s writings have been endorsed by top business leaders, and he is a consultant to numerous investment firms in the US and Europe.

Daily Bell: Good to speak with you again. Let’s jump right in by reminding readers you see the world in part through what is sometimes called the prism of empire. This refers to the belief that the behavior of governments is best understood as the attempt by unfettered politicians and bureaucrats to dominate others. You believe the decline of the federal government’s global empire is the lens through which investors must look at the world – at least partially. How do you define an empire?

Richard Maybury: A collection of governments or countries under the control of a single authority. In 1939, President Roosevelt said of President Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” That does a good job of expressing the spirit of the whole US Empire. The US Empire could be the most powerful force affecting investment markets and practically everything else. Before we go further, I’d like to make a special point. I think the United States of America is a wonderful country and I would not want to live anywhere else. But the country and the government are not the same thing. That’s extremely important. Nothing I say should be taken as a criticism of America or of the principles on which America was founded. But the government, I believe, is the most dangerous enemy. The federal government has gone renegade, and if it is not returned to the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, the country will be destroyed.

Daily Bell: Okay, that’s pretty clear. Please continue.

Richard Maybury: It’s very important for those individuals who did (and are) attending government-controlled schools to not believe everything you were taught in school. The schools are (and have been for some time) owned or controlled by government agencies, and they provide a history that is the background for practically every decision you make in your life, whether you are aware of it or not. This official history is flattering to the government because the government controls its own story. To make wise decisions, each individual must understand what actually happened in the past rather than what we were taught. This generally requires re-education for many of us, which is one of the reasons that I wrote the Uncle Eric books.

One thing I try to do in both the Uncle Eric books and Early Warning Report newsletter is explain the need to look back to at least World War II, and preferably a lot farther.

Daily Bell: Why WWII?

Richard Maybury: In my opinion, that war is still the greatest influence on us – on our careers, businesses and investments. Let’s begin by doing a quick summary of the war. Three-quarters of the Second World War was the Eastern Front battle between Hitler’s German Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Socialists. Americans are taught about Iwo Jima, the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the other parts of the war that Americans were in. But actually, most of the war was fought on the Eastern Front, where Americans weren’t even present.

Let me point out that the largest ally President Roosevelt had during the war was Stalin’s Soviet Socialists. Except for Obama, Franklin Roosevelt was America’s most socialist president. Instead of staying out of the war and letting the German and Soviet barbarians pound each other to dust on the plains of central Europe, Franklin Roosevelt abandoned neutrality and in June 1941 – five months before Pearl Harbor – announced he would back the socialist Stalin. Stalin was the worst known evil in history. In his book about the true nature of old world governments, called Death by Government, historian R.J. Rummel reports the most accurate estimate of Hitler’s murders is 20.9 million, and Stalin’s death toll was 42.7 million. Franklin Roosevelt backed Stalin, so the worst evil in history won the war, Stalin.

Daily Bell: And we’ve been trying to live with the results ever since.

Richard Maybury: Correct. By 1945 it was clear Stalin intended to conquer the world. There was near panic in London and Washington as these governments realized what they’d done by aiding Stalin. Only seven months after the War ended, Churchill announced that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, and a year later Harry Truman proclaimed the Truman Doctrine in which Washington pledged to help anyone who resisted the Soviet Union. That’s the key point – he pledged to help anyone who resisted the Soviet Union.

Daily Bell: So what were the implications of that?

Richard Maybury: Almost every president since Truman has embraced the Truman Doctrine. For a half-century they sent money, troops and weapons to far corners of the globe to help the armed forces of any regime that claimed to be anti-Soviet. Many of these supposedly anti-Soviet governments were crooks and tyrants. They included the Shah of Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, Manuel Noriega in Panama, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Mobutu in the Congo, Chaing Kai-shek in Taiwan, General Park in Korea, President Diem in Vietnam, Suharto and Habibie in Indonesia. The importance is that nearly every thug who promised to be part of Washington’s so-called sphere of influence received military assistance that was in most cases used to brutalize his own people.

Daily Bell: That’s quite a rogue’s gallery. We assume it included crooks and tyrants in the Islamic world, too.

Richard Maybury: I can see where you are headed with that question, and it’s very astute of you. For instance, Washington helped the Shah of Iran for 25 years for no known reason other than the Shah claimed to be anti-Soviet. And for 25 years the Shah of Iran and his secret police terrorized Iranians.

Daily Bell: So you are saying this vast collection of crooks and tyrants in the Mideast and elsewhere became the US Empire.

Richard Maybury: Yes. And I was part of that process. I saw it with my own eyes, which I will get to shortly. It’s a crucial part of history that Americans are not taught in government-controlled schools. The US Empire is a mighty dark and nasty beast. It’s made up of people you don’t want to meet in a dark alley.

Daily Bell: And this empire still exists, and these people make a lot of enemies for America.

Richard Maybury: They certainly do. After the USSR went down, Washington kept the empire going. Look at the thugs that federal officials put in place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and on and on. Those people have enemies, so now their enemies are our enemies.

Daily Bell: We seem to remember you writing elsewhere that the federal government’s foreign policy boils down to poking sharp sticks at rattlesnakes.

Richard Maybury: I’ve been saying that for years, and I see no reason to change it. It’s part of a strategy that power junkies have been using with great success since the days of the Roman Emperors. These people shout, “Rattlesnakes from everywhere are trying to bite us! We can’t be safe unless we conquer the world!”

Daily Bell: Are you saying these rattlesnakes would behave if Washington would stop poking them?

Richard Maybury: No, no, no. There are lots of bad people. You can see bullies in any schoolyard. But don’t provoke them. Leave them alone and arm yourself to the teeth. Be like a porcupine, gentle, quiet, calm, but always ready to put a big hurt on anyone who tries to get rough with you.

Daily Bell: You’ve said, instead of an imperial military – meaning a giant expeditionary force – have a whole nation of minutemen who can protect themselves, their families or their country if there is trouble.

Richard Maybury: Very good. Like the National Guard once was, or the Swiss still are to a large extent. A defensive military instead of an offensive military. What’s wrong with America’s foreign policy is not that we have a military, it’s that we have…

Daily Bell: … the wrong type!

Richard Maybury: Again, I see you’ve caught on to this way of thinking about the government’s behavior. Yes, the US Empire, which grew to maturity in World War II, is a giant machine that makes enemies for America – for you and me. And the economy, the financial markets, the whole country will continue lurching from one disaster to the next because of this. For one thing, it’s monstrously expensive. Unless I’m missing something, and I don’t think I am, the only people who will prosper consistently in this political climate are those whose investments are set up to do well during wartime and currency debasement.

Daily Bell: And that’s a great deal of what you write about in your Early Warning Report newsletter, correct? – ways to cope with and profit from the insanity produced by the US Empire?

Richard Maybury: Yes. My investment model is very simple. Buy things that do well during wartime and currency debasement. As you can imagine, it’s been working wonderfully as a long-term strategy.

Daily Bell: So we’ve heard.

Richard Maybury: Let me go off on a tangent for a moment. I once heard a terrorism expert say that the people the government calls terrorists see every bullet fired at them as made in America. I would add that the so-called terrorists see it that way because the foreign aid sent by Washington to its pet tyrants for more than a half-century does buy those bullets. You can trace this all the way back to the alliance between the socialist Franklin Roosevelt and the socialist Joseph Stalin. Read the bookBlowback by Chalmers Johnson.

Daily Bell: For most people this is eye-opening stuff but there is a lot more to cover in other fields. Give us a quick overview of your activities for the past several years.

Richard Maybury: Mostly I’ve been researching and writing our newsletter, Early Warning Report. That’s my primary job. It’s a newsletter for investors, based on geopolitics and economics. Everyone knows that geopolitics and economics steer the broad movements in the investment markets, but very few writers cover these areas, especially the geopolitics, so we do.

Daily Bell: Your readers have found there is much to be gained by knowing what others don’t.

Richard Maybury: Yes. For readers, it’s a source of prestige as well as profits. I’m sure you at The Daily Bell have found there is no faster way to draw a crowd at a party than to begin explaining the geopolitical facts of life and their ramifications.

Daily Bell: To what do you attribute this difference between you and the other analysts? Lots of them get deeply into economics but why do so few address geopolitics?

Richard Maybury: I don’t know but I expect it has something to do with the Vietnam War, which I managed to miss, mostly, only to end up in other wars.

Daily Bell: Other wars?

Richard Maybury: Washington is always in lots of wars. I’m sure some of your readers do not realize the Vietnam War got the media’s attention because it was just the biggest war that was going on at that time. In the 1960s I received my draft notice and wound up in Central America, in the Air Force’s 605th Special Operations Squadron. Our job was to help prop up some of Washington’s crooks and tyrants that I mentioned earlier. For instance, in training the troops of these thugs, I worked directly with the CIA’s notorious School of the Americas, and even helped train Manuel Noriega, who later became Washington’s pet dictator in Panama.

Daily Bell: Wow. So you saw real politics, up close and personal, while other Americans were back in the States thinking that politics is about speeches and ballots.

Richard Maybury: (Laughing.) I love this. Very well said. I can see the Daily Bell has an excellent grasp of what’s really happening in the world. Politics isn’t so much about ballots as it is about bullets. The typical American doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the US government is really doing in other countries.

Daily Bell: And you are saying that very few other investment analysts have the geopolitical experience you do so perhaps they are not as comfortable writing about how real politics – the genuine muzzle of a gun reality – affects the economy and investment markets.

Richard Maybury: I have no way of knowing what the geopolitical experiences of other investment analysts may or may not be. As far as I can tell, I am the only one who has connected these dots and presented the completed picture to my readers.

Daily Bell: Can you give us an example of covert operations you were involved in?

Richard Maybury: I wish I could paint a complete picture but most of the missions were secret not only to keep Americans from finding out but so the troops were unaware as well. We were told only what we needed to know to do our jobs, and in some cases I didn’t find out till 20 or 30 years later what I had really been doing. At the time of the events, I just saw bits and pieces, and like the young fool I was, I simply trusted that the politicians were risking my life for good causes. I believed what I was taught in school, that the government is good, kind, wise and just, and would never send me to die for purposes that were dishonorable.

Daily Bell: We bet you weren’t the first to feel this way.

Richard Maybury: Right. Everyone should read a book called War is a Racket, by two-star general Smedley Butler. One of the Marine Corps’ top heroes, Butler fought in 121 battles and was awarded two Medals of Honor, as well as a lot of other medals. After he retired, Butler began researching what he had actually been doing. He was appalled, and tried to speak out, but he was mostly ignored. It’s outrageous. Most Americans simply do not want to believe their government has an empire.

Daily Bell: Let’s look at the secrecy issue. Why keep things secret from Americans when the enemy knows what is happening? For instance, in the bombings of Cambodia, the enemy knew the bombs were falling on him, obviously, but Americans didn’t know. What was the purpose of keeping Americans from finding out what the enemy already knew?

Richard Maybury: All over the world, Washington’s enemies know they are being shot at but Americans don’t know. I remember in Central America and South America we were sent on some strange missions that decades later I found were probably in pursuit of Che Guevara. Guevara was a smart guy; he probably noticed the bullets buzzing around him but those missions were secret from the American people.

Daily Bell: So the secrecy was intended to keep Americans from finding out what their government was doing in other countries?

Richard Maybury: That’s my guess, though I have no way to prove it. I’m not a mind-reader. A politician gives a particular order and stamps it top secret but who knows why he’s really doing it. All I can say with great confidence is that Washington does a lot all over the world that increases its power, but the American people know little about it, or about its effects on the economy or the investment markets – or Americans’ safety at home or abroad.

Daily Bell: Let’s move on to another of your projects of recent years, the Uncle Eric books.

Richard Maybury: Good idea. As you can imagine, after my experiences in the Air Force I’ve had a deep and abiding wish for young people to be taught the things that are omitted or whitewashed in the government-controlled schools. It really bothers me when I see a young person marching off to war without the foggiest understanding of what he or she is getting into.

Daily Bell: And this is not just in regard to military matters. There are all sorts of vitally important materials that have been erased from school curricula. It’s in finance, economics, law, history. And your Uncle Eric books are your effort to provide the side of the story that has been omitted from conventional classroom instruction.

Richard Maybury: Yes, I think children are purposely made very naïve, very vulnerable.

Daily Bell: That is certainly a bold accusation. What’s your authority for it?

Richard Maybury: I was a public school teacher for four years, and I was also hired by a major textbook publisher to write an economics textbook for high schools. I know how much government-approved books are censored. By no stretch of the imagination are children getting the knowledge they need to make them savvy about the real world.

Daily Bell: It seems like that’s what your real job is, teaching people about the real world.

Richard Maybury: Good point. Perhaps you are right. I must have some sort of phobia about seeing good people walk into booby traps, and that is what I see government-controlled schools to be, booby traps. They set children up to graduate into life’s realities unprepared.

Daily Bell: And you are trying to prepare them.

Richard Maybury: Yes, I’m very passionate about that. My 11 Uncle Eric books are what I would say to a young person if I were that individual’s uncle. Each book is loaded with questions young people and adults might ask if they discovered their mainstream schools and colleges were slanted to make them vulnerable – to make them believe the way the government wants them to. My Uncle Eric books provide the other side of the story, a model that I believe will better equip them for life – which is why the 11 Uncle Eric books, collectively, are also known as Uncle Eric’s Model of How The World Works.

Daily Bell: So the point of your Uncle Eric books is to help children and adults, including investors, see what the government does not want them to see. But what is the alternative to government-controlled schools?

Richard Maybury: From what I have observed, private schools are better, and home schooling, even better. This isn’t to say all private schooling and home schooling are perfect. In any field, there are always people who will do a bad job. But there is no private school or home school that could possibly do as much damage as government-controlled schools have done.

Daily Bell: Why is that?

Richard Maybury: Just sheer size, for one thing. If a private school or home school wants to try an experiment, and the experiment fails, the failure is confined to that one group of children. And it is short-lived. For example, if the curriculum doesn’t work for a home school student, the parent can change the curriculum within days. If the state or federal government wants to try an experiment – which they do all the time – all the public schools in the state or country have it forced onto them. When I was a child, most of my generation was taught sight-reading instead of phonics, and so millions of children across the country, including future teachers, grew up with poor reading skills. Those children were guinea pigs. And it can take years to adopt new books or change regulations.

Daily Bell: And this applies across the school subjects, including history, economics, finance, you name it.

Richard Maybury: Yes. I think young adults today graduate from high school and college as gullible as I was. They’re brainwashed. For example, if they are taught economics at all, they are usually taught Keynesian economics. Don’t worry, Students, the Federal Reserve and FDIC will keep your money safe. Taxes are collected for your own good. It’s safe to believe government statistics. The purpose of wars is to protect those you love. You got an A on your history test because you were able to name the four greatest presidents and the wonderful things they did for you. The majority voted for this so it must be right. Don’t worry about being unfairly accused; you will always get a fair trial. The politicians and bureaucrats have your best interests at heart. And most importantly, school textbooks tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Daily Bell: Scary. Can you give us another reason you believe private schools and home schools are better?

Richard Maybury: Yes. In eleven words, they don’t have the hidden political agenda that public schools do. Let me point out that if you can’t home school your children full time, you can do it part time. On the Internet you will find lots of home school organizations that can help you. My main point is, do something to counteract what the government is doing to your children.

Daily Bell: Is there some kind of giant conspiracy to brainwash the population?

Richard Maybury: I don’t think so, not at all. It’s just government employees teaching today’s children a view of life that most government employees were taught when they were students. The solution to every problem is more government. What else would we expect a government employee to teach? The whole thing works in a very automatic fashion with no need for anyone to guide it.

Daily Bell: A child who learns it gets good grades and one who doesn’t gets bad grades.

Richard Maybury: Yes. All my adult life I’ve been watching good people suffer and very often miss wonderful opportunities because in the schools and colleges they were taught a picture of the world that just isn’t so. My whole life has been like standing on a big-city street corner and watching what happens to people who were taught that a red light means go.

Daily Bell: Standing on that street corner would tend to make anyone uncomfortable.

Richard Maybury: I’ve come to realize that there’s a pressure inside me that keeps growing all the time because my job requires me to have an ever-deepening understanding of the things the government sent me into 45 years ago. I was unknowingly a part of the building of the empire, and now the empire is collapsing, and I must stay on top of that, to help my subscribers. Writing the Uncle Eric books has been my effort to provide the side of the story that isn’t usually told. The more a person learns what he wasn’t taught in school, the better prepared he is to prosper during these temporary hard times as the empire collapses.

Daily Bell: That’s one reason your Uncle Eric books are on the Daily Bell’s Must Read list. Let’s get more deeply into specifics about the books. Can you give us a bit of an overview of them?

Richard Maybury: As I said, there are 11 books in the series and they’ve been doing very well. Total sales now are almost a half-million, and the secondary readership must be at least another half million, so people like them, and they tell others. Last year alone, over 32,000 Uncle Eric books sold. Just the first three alone (Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career, and Financial Security, Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? and Whatever Happened to Justice?) are tremendous eye-openers to most. I often receive comments such as, now I know why I took a bath in the stock market, and, thanks for helping me get rich. More information about the books is available here.

Daily Bell: We’ve heard you won an important award.

Richard Maybury: Yes. We received a feather in our cap. We won first place in the Mary Pride Practical Homeschooling Reader Award (www.home-school.com) in the Government Category. I think that’s a measure of how helpful people find my alter ego, Uncle Eric. From what I’ve seen, the books have become central in the home school movement and other alternative educational venues. The people who homeschool their children are aware children are being misled by what they’re being taught in conventional schools, and both full time and part time home schoolers use the books to fill in what’s been omitted.

Daily Bell: Can you expand a little about areas of information that are being omitted from government schooling, and give us a few examples of specifics?

Richard Maybury: You’ll find I often refer to events in history because I’m a historical person. I’m aware the world we live in today is the result of what happened in the past. With the schools, it’s so important that people understand that back in the early part of the 20th century the hot new philosophy was socialism. There were people such as John Dewey, who was an educator, who believed that socialism was a wonderful system and it was workable. These socialist leaders wanted everybody in the world to be taught to be socialists, and began changing the schools. So school materials today are very heavily socialist and they deliver subtle socialist messages in much of what the children study.

I’m not saying people such as Dewey were evil or were in league with the devil. I think they were honest teachers who really, truly believed that socialism was a good idea, and they got hold of the schools and used them to essentially turn the whole US population socialist.

Daily Bell: Can you give us one of these subtle socialist messages?

Richard Maybury: Sure. In a lot of schools and colleges, in the teaching of writing, students are forbidden to use the word “I”. Rarely is the student allowed to say, “I believe this,” or “I saw that.” Try to find in any big newspaper or magazine an article written from the viewpoint of “I”. Nearly everything sounds like it was written by a committee. That’s what the writers were taught in school, because it’s what socialists want. To them, the individual is unimportant, even expendable. There is no me, there is just us, we. Private property is evil, because everything is or should be owned by everyone as a group. It’s okay to raise taxes to the sky, because the government is just confiscating what rightfully belongs to us all. That’s the socialist view. English teachers teach it without recognizing what it really is. This is one of the reasons I wrote the Uncle Eric book, Evaluating Books: What Would Thomas Jefferson Think About This? It provides guidelines and indicators to help the reader identify bias in books, media presentations, etc.

Daily Bell: Another example?

Richard Maybury: I’m sure you have noticed that men often have worse handwriting than women. It’s natural to conclude this is because schoolboys are less careful or precise than schoolgirls. But that’s not so. The truth is that the small muscle development of boys lags that of girls by perhaps six months. Socialists teach that everyone should be equal, so all children are taught handwriting at the same time. This all-the-same idea carries through to every subject. Each child has a different mind and body, and is ready to learn a given subject at his or her own time. I might be ready to learn math at age 10, and you might be ready at age 4, but the school wants us to be equal and it teaches us all at the same time. The individual does not count; only the group does. The children absorb that belief even without it being directly taught.

Daily Bell: And that’s why we see so much support for gigantic government programs these days. The population grows up in this socialist environment and has been taught that the answer to every problem is more government. There’s nobody giving the children the other side of the story.

Richard Maybury: Few teachers are aware they are teaching a viewpoint they subtly absorbed as students. I am sure everyone at the Daily Bell and everyone reading this right now can remember as children being assigned to write letters to their congressmen asking the congressmen to fix this problem or that, or punish so-and-so.

Daily Bell: And those children grow up to be investors.

Richard Maybury: Yes, which means even well informed investors are operating without the other side of the story. They think what they were taught in school is true, and they don’t question it. What the Uncle Eric books are designed to do is to give everyone, young and old alike, what is missing, what was actually removed forcibly from the schools a century ago. Based on sales and letters from readers of the Uncle Eric books, I believe my books succeed in presenting the other side of the story. And I have found when teachers learn about the bias in their curriculums, many realize it’s their responsibility, at the very least, to present opposing viewpoints to their students.

Daily Bell: Can you explain how Dewey and his friends were able to have that much influence?

Richard Maybury: As I said, socialism was the hot new philosophy. If you were an intellectual 100 years ago, you would be thrown out of the intellectual club if you still believed in liberty and free markets. Such beliefs meant you were not a modern person. The colleges and high schools were just loaded up with people who believed that socialism was the wave of the future. These people became teachers, and they taught their students, and those students grew up and became teachers, and their students became teachers, and so on until there are probably hundreds of thousands of teachers out there today who have no idea they are socialists.

Daily Bell: Isn’t that covered in your Uncle Eric book called Are You Liberal, Conservative or Confused?

Richard Maybury: Yes, and directly or indirectly in several other of the Uncle Eric books.

Daily Bell: In the minutes leading up to this interview you were mentioning that it’s important for people to ask: Why is a free press a good thing?

Richard Maybury: Yes. What’s so important about it? Well, we don’t want our minds to be in the hands of the government. We want lots of other people giving us information to help us have open minds and to be able to think for ourselves. That’s why a free press is sacred in a free country. So, what’s the point of handing the minds of our children over to the government? If a free press is a good thing, then why not let the children’s minds be free, too? Why let the helpless little ones be programmed by followers of Dewey?

Daily Bell: So that’s one of the things the Uncle Eric books are trying to do – to give the children more open minds and let them think for themselves rather than just swallow the spoon-fed school literature that is censored.

Richard Maybury: Yes! Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career and Financial Security specifically discusses this topic in the chapters on Models, Sorting Data, Evidence, Tautology and others. And I’d like to emphasize the fact that the material children get in school is censored. And don’t take my word for it. Talk with your child’s teachers. Ask if the books are examined line by line, and approved or disapproved, by government committees. Ask if the writers of the history and economics books are given politically influenced guidelines they must follow in order for each sentence to be accepted. And bear in mind these are often the same books, updated, that the teachers were taught from.

Daily Bell: Government committees?

Richard Maybury: Yes, government committees look over all of the textbooks to make sure they are not embarrassing to the government. The committees don’t consciously add lies; they just delete facts that are awkward, so that the child has a very positive, uncritical view of political power.

Daily Bell: Uncritical?

Richard Maybury: Yes, talk with your friends. Most everyone comes out of school with this attitude that political power is wonderful stuff and everyone should have some. Political power is the solution to all our problems.

Daily Bell: Thank you for saying that. We think very few parents are aware of it. At bottom, you’re saying we’ve all been brainwashed.

Richard Maybury: Not all. Some fall through the cracks. But I didn’t fall through till I was in my 20′s. A friend was in his 60′s.

Daily Bell: The Uncle Eric books hasten the process of falling through the cracks.

Richard Maybury: Yes, that’s a good way of looking at them. Before we move on, could I issue a challenge to all history teachers?

Daily Bell: Certainly.

Richard Maybury: If you do not teach your students what the US government has been doing in foreign countries for more than a hundred years, then you are helping set them up to volunteer for missions that they will someday not be proud of. I am the voice of experience. I was one of those soldiers who trusted the government, because my history teachers taught me to, and I hope you will not make the mistake my teachers did. Give the children points of view that are different than the official ones. You can give the official ones, but please also tell them what political power really is and that it’s not a miracle cure-all, it’s poison.

Daily Bell: What do you think about a war with Iran?

Richard Maybury: I think it’s a definite possibility because both governments would benefit from it greatly. It would be another wonderful opportunity for them to acquire more power over their populations. There’s nothing like an international emergency to cause people to just throw up their hands and say, “Do whatever it takes to protect me even if it means putting chains on me!” I think in the United States a war would be another chance for the federal government to burn more of the Constitution. And the Iranian government, too, wants to acquire more power just as much as the US government does. A war would constitute a wonderful partnership between the two.

Daily Bell: Is China a growing military adversary of the US?

Richard Maybury: Absolutely, but I shouldn’t say China. I don’t want to paint all Chinese with the same brush. The Chinese government is a different thing than China. The Chinese government, yes, I think definitely wants to increase its military power, like most other governments, and from the reports I’ve seen they are apparently building up their military forces. The Far East once belonged to the Chinese government and they want it back, and I think they plan to take it.

Daily Bell: You believe they are very likely trying to develop strategies, tactics, and weapons that will make it possible to chase the US Navy out of the Far East?

Richard Maybury: I do, and my guess is they’re going to eventually be able to do it. We don’t know how much resistance Washington will put up. US officials obviously think the federal government has some right to dominate the Far East, and I think US officials will try to hang onto that area for a while. If that leads to a war, I’m sure the Chinese government wouldn’t mind it at all, as long as it doesn’t go nuclear. They would find nuclear radiation inconvenient. But they really do need something to divert their population’s attention away from the growing economic problems. If I were Washington, I’d get my armed forces out of the Far East right now, instantly.

Daily Bell: Instantly? Really?

Richard Maybury: Yes. Think about it. If I’m right that China’s rulers would see a war with the US as a solution, not a problem, then where is the most likely direction events are headed?

Daily Bell: Your paradigm regarding the US as an empire seems to be a valid one. In fact, sometimes it seems like the whole world is exploding. As a specialist in military affairs from an investment standpoint, what’s the trigger for all this fighting?

Richard Maybury: One thing to understand is that people fight wars for numerous reasons and the most prevalent reason is they fight because they always have. There are all sorts of cultures, tribes, clans, and ethnic groups around the world who have hated their neighbors and fought with them for centuries. A good example is the Russians and the Chechens. No matter what the United States does, the Russian government and the Chechens are still going to hate each other, they are still going to want to fight, and there is nothing we can do about it.

When the US goes around the world getting into these fights, all we do is make it worse. The idea that Americans have some special talent for going into a foreign country and cleaning the place up is crazy! No matter what we do the Chechens and the Russians are still going to hate each other.

Daily Bell: These problems won’t get solved unless someone gets steamed enough to shout them from the rooftops. You are one of the few who ever have. So what is the real reason for the generally increasing battle zones in the Middle East and Northern Africa – Mali, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, for instance?

Richard Maybury: A general answer to all those sorts of questions is that if a person is in the federal government, either as a politician or a high level bureaucrat, then that person is clearly a power seeker, and there is no more satisfying use of power than military force. There’s this automatic tendency among people who want to get into the government to want to fight. Power seekers want to use their power. And I think with that observation alone you can explain at least half of any war Washington is in. My three war books, World War I, World War II, and The Thousand Year War in the Mideast, discuss these issues thoroughly.

Daily Bell: Where do we go from here? To generalized war? Is it to some degree an economic war?

Richard Maybury: As for generalized war, I think that’s likely. The government can get away with so many secret activities in other countries now that top officials can steer the population into anything they want. As for the economics, all wars are economic in the sense that the military needs bullets and beans in order to fight, and they’ve got to be able to buy those bullets and beans. Now, a lot of people conclude, economics is causing war. I have never seen a case where that was so. War is the most expensive thing humans do, so economics always argues against war. Any alternative is cheaper.

So in a sense, no war is ever economic because the economics always argues against it. But economics is used as an excuse. Leaders are constantly pointing to various economic factors and calling those “vital interests” and then arguing that the US should go to war over these “vital interests”. What they’re really saying is that your son or daughter’s life is not as valuable as a barrel of oil so they’re willing to expend that life in order to steal the oil. It’s propaganda and completely insane. Again, I’m speaking as someone who was there on the inside.

Daily Bell: Expand on the worst problem the US is suffering from. You believe it is ethics because empires tend to lose their ethics. How can America recover?

Richard Maybury: In my book, Whatever Happened to Justice?, in a few of the other Uncle Eric books and in my newsletter, I often point out that the two fundamental laws that make civilization possible are 1) Do all you have agreed to do and 2) Do not encroach on other persons or their property. The first is the basis of contract law, and the second is the basis of tort law and some criminal law. If you have a population that’s dedicated to these laws, and the laws are widely obeyed, then you can have a very ethical civilization, one that moves forward very quickly.

If, however, you have somebody or some large group of people who are violating those laws, then that civilization can’t operate very well and it begins to decline. We see this all over the world. When legal systems are mutated to be tools of government policy rather than tools for producing a peaceful society, then it all goes to wrack and ruin. And this is repeated over and over again, throughout history.

I come back to that all the time. America has drifted entirely away from those two laws. Most Americans have never heard of them. Those laws were extracted from the British common law, which goes back to the Middle Ages. It used to be that in the schools the children were taught common law. In fact, at the time of the American Revolution, the common law was American history. If two Americans were talking about history they would be talking about common law. Most Americans today don’t have the foggiest idea what common law was, and civilization is in a downhill slide because it can’t go any other direction without those two laws.

Again, I refer to these in the Uncle Eric books and in Early Warning Report quite often. You’ve got to have those two laws or you’re sunk, and the federal government has done a very, very thorough job of erasing our memories of those laws.

Daily Bell: Any other points you wish to make, books or articles you want to mention?

Richard Maybury: I would like your readers to have a look at my newsletter, Early Warning Report. When they phone 1-800-509-5400 or 1-602-870-9329 and mention The Daily Bell, they will get a year subscription (10 issues) and our informative Welcome Package for 44% off the normal subscription price of $300. They’ll receive the important special reports, “Getting Started – Your Strategic Plan” and “Chaostan The Full Story,” information they can’t get anywhere else, all for just $169.00. I encourage them to call today, as the offer won’t last long.

Daily Bell: Richard, this has been most enlightening. Thanks for your time!

Richard Maybury: My pleasure. I always enjoy working with the people at The Daily Bell. You are some of the best informed I have ever met.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

We thank Richard Maybury for his kind words and, more importantly, for the amount of attention he paid to this interview. The Uncle Eric series has obviously been well received and it shows us once again why the State and its enforcers are not fans of home schooling.

Home schooling in the US focuses on freedom and doesn’t teach people the narrative of war that public schools offer. Constantly, in public school, one learns that it is only through war that great changes are made for the better.

This is completely untrue. After the Civil War, the US began to be afflicted with a great deal of corruption because it was impossible for a state to secede. After World War I, the League of Nations was founded and globalism itself was advanced.

After World War II, the IMF, World Bank and the United Nations were all founded and given tremendous power. Children in the US are taught this narrative is hopeful and that trans-national entities are necessary for humankind’s future. But in reality, trans-national corporations and supra-governmental organizations are centralizers of power and create further difficulties through their very bigness.

What the world needs is decentralization of power which would make it less easy for wars to start and for small groups to inflict their agenda on the rest of us.

Richard Maybury understands all of this, and his Uncle Eric books in particular provide lessons about war, peace, politics and economic sanity. Like his newsletter itself, these books offer children a dose of sanity that they will not receive in public school.

If you can’t home-school, at least provide your children with a curriculum that will give them alternative opinions. The overwhelming emphasis of public school these days is promotional, but you can fight back with the truth. Don’t let your children be overwhelmed by lies.

Introduction: Richard Maybury publishes U.S. & World Early Warning Report and was formerly Global Affairs editor of MONEYWORLD. One of the most respected business and economics analysts in America, his articles have appeared in numerous major publications. His Uncle Eric series of books are extremely popular among both the general public and home schoolers, and include Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?, Whatever Happened to Justice?, Evaluating Books: What Would Thomas Jefferson Think of This? and eight other titles. Maybury’s writings have been endorsed by top business leaders, and he is a consultant to numerous investment firms in the US and Europe.

Daily Bell: Good to speak with you again. Let’s jump right in by reminding readers you see the world in part through what is sometimes called the prism of empire. This refers to the belief that the behavior of governments is best understood as the attempt by unfettered politicians and bureaucrats to dominate others. You believe the decline of the federal government’s global empire is the lens through which investors must look at the world – at least partially. How do you define an empire?

Richard Maybury: A collection of governments or countries under the control of a single authority. In 1939, President Roosevelt said of President Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch." That does a good job of expressing the spirit of the whole US Empire. The US Empire could be the most powerful force affecting investment markets and practically everything else. Before we go further, I’d like to make a special point. I think the United States of America is a wonderful country and I would not want to live anywhere else. But the country and the government are not the same thing. That’s extremely important. Nothing I say should be taken as a criticism of America or of the principles on which America was founded. But the government, I believe, is the most dangerous enemy. The federal government has gone renegade, and if it is not returned to the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, the country will be destroyed.

Daily Bell: Okay, that’s pretty clear. Please continue.

Richard Maybury: It’s very important for those individuals who did (and are) attending government-controlled schools to not believe everything you were taught in school. The schools are (and have been for some time) owned or controlled by government agencies, and they provide a history that is the background for practically every decision you make in your life, whether you are aware of it or not. This official history is flattering to the government because the government controls its own story. To make wise decisions, each individual must understand what actually happened in the past rather than what we were taught. This generally requires re-education for many of us, which is one of the reasons that I wrote the Uncle Eric books.

One thing I try to do in both the Uncle Eric books and Early Warning Report newsletter is explain the need to look back to at least World War II, and preferably a lot farther.

Daily Bell: Why WWII?

Richard Maybury: In my opinion, that war is still the greatest influence on us – on our careers, businesses and investments. Let’s begin by doing a quick summary of the war. Three-quarters of the Second World War was the Eastern Front battle between Hitler’s German Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Socialists. Americans are taught about Iwo Jima, the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the other parts of the war that Americans were in. But actually, most of the war was fought on the Eastern Front, where Americans weren’t even present.

Let me point out that the largest ally President Roosevelt had during the war was Stalin’s Soviet Socialists. Except for Obama, Franklin Roosevelt was America’s most socialist president. Instead of staying out of the war and letting the German and Soviet barbarians pound each other to dust on the plains of central Europe, Franklin Roosevelt abandoned neutrality and in June 1941 – five months before Pearl Harbor – announced he would back the socialist Stalin. Stalin was the worst known evil in history. In his book about the true nature of old world governments, called Death by Government, historian R.J. Rummel reports the most accurate estimate of Hitler’s murders is 20.9 million, and Stalin’s death toll was 42.7 million. Franklin Roosevelt backed Stalin, so the worst evil in history won the war, Stalin.

Daily Bell: And we’ve been trying to live with the results ever since.

Richard Maybury: Correct. By 1945 it was clear Stalin intended to conquer the world. There was near panic in London and Washington as these governments realized what they’d done by aiding Stalin. Only seven months after the War ended, Churchill announced that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, and a year later Harry Truman proclaimed the Truman Doctrine in which Washington pledged to help anyone who resisted the Soviet Union. That’s the key point – he pledged to help anyone who resisted the Soviet Union.

Daily Bell: So what were the implications of that?

Richard Maybury: Almost every president since Truman has embraced the Truman Doctrine. For a half-century they sent money, troops and weapons to far corners of the globe to help the armed forces of any regime that claimed to be anti-Soviet. Many of these supposedly anti-Soviet governments were crooks and tyrants. They included the Shah of Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, Manuel Noriega in Panama, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Mobutu in the Congo, Chaing Kai-shek in Taiwan, General Park in Korea, President Diem in Vietnam, Suharto and Habibie in Indonesia. The importance is that nearly every thug who promised to be part of Washington’s so-called sphere of influence received military assistance that was in most cases used to brutalize his own people.

Daily Bell: That’s quite a rogue’s gallery. We assume it included crooks and tyrants in the Islamic world, too.

Richard Maybury: I can see where you are headed with that question, and it’s very astute of you. For instance, Washington helped the Shah of Iran for 25 years for no known reason other than the Shah claimed to be anti-Soviet. And for 25 years the Shah of Iran and his secret police terrorized Iranians.

Daily Bell: So you are saying this vast collection of crooks and tyrants in the Mideast and elsewhere became the US Empire.

Richard Maybury: Yes. And I was part of that process. I saw it with my own eyes, which I will get to shortly. It’s a crucial part of history that Americans are not taught in government-controlled schools. The US Empire is a mighty dark and nasty beast. It’s made up of people you don’t want to meet in a dark alley.

Daily Bell: And this empire still exists, and these people make a lot of enemies for America.

Richard Maybury: They certainly do. After the USSR went down, Washington kept the empire going. Look at the thugs that federal officials put in place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and on and on. Those people have enemies, so now their enemies are our enemies.

Daily Bell: We seem to remember you writing elsewhere that the federal government’s foreign policy boils down to poking sharp sticks at rattlesnakes.

Richard Maybury: I’ve been saying that for years, and I see no reason to change it. It’s part of a strategy that power junkies have been using with great success since the days of the Roman Emperors. These people shout, "Rattlesnakes from everywhere are trying to bite us! We can’t be safe unless we conquer the world!"

Daily Bell: Are you saying these rattlesnakes would behave if Washington would stop poking them?

Richard Maybury: No, no, no. There are lots of bad people. You can see bullies in any schoolyard. But don’t provoke them. Leave them alone and arm yourself to the teeth. Be like a porcupine, gentle, quiet, calm, but always ready to put a big hurt on anyone who tries to get rough with you.

Daily Bell: You’ve said, instead of an imperial military – meaning a giant expeditionary force – have a whole nation of minutemen who can protect themselves, their families or their country if there is trouble.

Richard Maybury: Very good. Like the National Guard once was, or the Swiss still are to a large extent. A defensive military instead of an offensive military. What’s wrong with America’s foreign policy is not that we have a military, it’s that we have…

Daily Bell: … the wrong type!

Richard Maybury: Again, I see you’ve caught on to this way of thinking about the government’s behavior. Yes, the US Empire, which grew to maturity in World War II, is a giant machine that makes enemies for America – for you and me. And the economy, the financial markets, the whole country will continue lurching from one disaster to the next because of this. For one thing, it’s monstrously expensive. Unless I’m missing something, and I don’t think I am, the only people who will prosper consistently in this political climate are those whose investments are set up to do well during wartime and currency debasement.

Daily Bell: And that’s a great deal of what you write about in your Early Warning Report newsletter, correct? – ways to cope with and profit from the insanity produced by the US Empire?

Richard Maybury: Yes. My investment model is very simple. Buy things that do well during wartime and currency debasement. As you can imagine, it’s been working wonderfully as a long-term strategy.

Daily Bell: So we’ve heard.

Richard Maybury: Let me go off on a tangent for a moment. I once heard a terrorism expert say that the people the government calls terrorists see every bullet fired at them as made in America. I would add that the so-called terrorists see it that way because the foreign aid sent by Washington to its pet tyrants for more than a half-century does buy those bullets. You can trace this all the way back to the alliance between the socialist Franklin Roosevelt and the socialist Joseph Stalin. Read the book Blowback by Chalmers Johnson.

Daily Bell: For most people this is eye-opening stuff but there is a lot more to cover in other fields. Give us a quick overview of your activities for the past several years.

Richard Maybury: Mostly I’ve been researching and writing our newsletter, Early Warning Report. That’s my primary job. It’s a newsletter for investors, based on geopolitics and economics. Everyone knows that geopolitics and economics steer the broad movements in the investment markets, but very few writers cover these areas, especially the geopolitics, so we do.

Daily Bell: Your readers have found there is much to be gained by knowing what others don’t.

Richard Maybury: Yes. For readers, it’s a source of prestige as well as profits. I’m sure you at The Daily Bell have found there is no faster way to draw a crowd at a party than to begin explaining the geopolitical facts of life and their ramifications.

Daily Bell: To what do you attribute this difference between you and the other analysts? Lots of them get deeply into economics but why do so few address geopolitics?

Richard Maybury: I don’t know but I expect it has something to do with the Vietnam War, which I managed to miss, mostly, only to end up in other wars.

Daily Bell: Other wars?

Richard Maybury: Washington is always in lots of wars. I’m sure some of your readers do not realize the Vietnam War got the media’s attention because it was just the biggest war that was going on at that time. In the 1960s I received my draft notice and wound up in Central America, in the Air Force’s 605th Special Operations Squadron. Our job was to help prop up some of Washington’s crooks and tyrants that I mentioned earlier. For instance, in training the troops of these thugs, I worked directly with the CIA’s notorious School of the Americas, and even helped train Manuel Noriega, who later became Washington’s pet dictator in Panama.

Daily Bell: Wow. So you saw real politics, up close and personal, while other Americans were back in the States thinking that politics is about speeches and ballots.

Richard Maybury: (Laughing.) I love this. Very well said. I can see the Daily Bell has an excellent grasp of what’s really happening in the world. Politics isn’t so much about ballots as it is about bullets. The typical American doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the US government is really doing in other countries.

Daily Bell: And you are saying that very few other investment analysts have the geopolitical experience you do so perhaps they are not as comfortable writing about how real politics – the genuine muzzle of a gun reality – affects the economy and investment markets.

Richard Maybury: I have no way of knowing what the geopolitical experiences of other investment analysts may or may not be. As far as I can tell, I am the only one who has connected these dots and presented the completed picture to my readers.

Daily Bell: Can you give us an example of covert operations you were involved in?

Richard Maybury: I wish I could paint a complete picture but most of the missions were secret not only to keep Americans from finding out but so the troops were unaware as well. We were told only what we needed to know to do our jobs, and in some cases I didn’t find out till 20 or 30 years later what I had really been doing. At the time of the events, I just saw bits and pieces, and like the young fool I was, I simply trusted that the politicians were risking my life for good causes. I believed what I was taught in school, that the government is good, kind, wise and just, and would never send me to die for purposes that were dishonorable.

Daily Bell: We bet you weren’t the first to feel this way.

Richard Maybury: Right. Everyone should read a book called War is a Racket, by two-star general Smedley Butler. One of the Marine Corps’ top heroes, Butler fought in 121 battles and was awarded two Medals of Honor, as well as a lot of other medals. After he retired, Butler began researching what he had actually been doing. He was appalled, and tried to speak out, but he was mostly ignored. It’s outrageous. Most Americans simply do not want to believe their government has an empire.

Daily Bell: Let’s look at the secrecy issue. Why keep things secret from Americans when the enemy knows what is happening? For instance, in the bombings of Cambodia, the enemy knew the bombs were falling on him, obviously, but Americans didn’t know. What was the purpose of keeping Americans from finding out what the enemy already knew?

Richard Maybury: All over the world, Washington’s enemies know they are being shot at but Americans don’t know. I remember in Central America and South America we were sent on some strange missions that decades later I found were probably in pursuit of Che Guevara. Guevara was a smart guy; he probably noticed the bullets buzzing around him but those missions were secret from the American people.

Daily Bell: So the secrecy was intended to keep Americans from finding out what their government was doing in other countries?

Richard Maybury: That’s my guess, though I have no way to prove it. I’m not a mind-reader. A politician gives a particular order and stamps it top secret but who knows why he’s really doing it. All I can say with great confidence is that Washington does a lot all over the world that increases its power, but the American people know little about it, or about its effects on the economy or the investment markets – or Americans’ safety at home or abroad.

Daily Bell: Let’s move on to another of your projects of recent years, the Uncle Eric books.

Richard Maybury: Good idea. As you can imagine, after my experiences in the Air Force I’ve had a deep and abiding wish for young people to be taught the things that are omitted or whitewashed in the government-controlled schools. It really bothers me when I see a young person marching off to war without the foggiest understanding of what he or she is getting into.

Daily Bell: And this is not just in regard to military matters. There are all sorts of vitally important materials that have been erased from school curricula. It’s in finance, economics, law, history. And your Uncle Eric books are your effort to provide the side of the story that has been omitted from conventional classroom instruction.

Richard Maybury: Yes, I think children are purposely made very naïve, very vulnerable.

Daily Bell: That is certainly a bold accusation. What’s your authority for it?

Richard Maybury: I was a public school teacher for four years, and I was also hired by a major textbook publisher to write an economics textbook for high schools. I know how much government-approved books are censored. By no stretch of the imagination are children getting the knowledge they need to make them savvy about the real world.

Daily Bell: It seems like that’s what your real job is, teaching people about the real world.

Richard Maybury: Good point. Perhaps you are right. I must have some sort of phobia about seeing good people walk into booby traps, and that is what I see government-controlled schools to be, booby traps. They set children up to graduate into life’s realities unprepared.

Daily Bell: And you are trying to prepare them.

Richard Maybury: Yes, I’m very passionate about that. My 11 Uncle Eric books are what I would say to a young person if I were that individual’s uncle. Each book is loaded with questions young people and adults might ask if they discovered their mainstream schools and colleges were slanted to make them vulnerable – to make them believe the way the government wants them to. My Uncle Eric books provide the other side of the story, a model that I believe will better equip them for life – which is why the 11 Uncle Eric books, collectively, are also known as Uncle Eric’s Model of How The World Works.

Daily Bell: So the point of your Uncle Eric books is to help children and adults, including investors, see what the government does not want them to see. But what is the alternative to government-controlled schools?

Richard Maybury: From what I have observed, private schools are better, and home schooling, even better. This isn’t to say all private schooling and home schooling are perfect. In any field, there are always people who will do a bad job. But there is no private school or home school that could possibly do as much damage as government-controlled schools have done.

Daily Bell: Why is that?

Richard Maybury: Just sheer size, for one thing. If a private school or home school wants to try an experiment, and the experiment fails, the failure is confined to that one group of children. And it is short-lived. For example, if the curriculum doesn’t work for a home school student, the parent can change the curriculum within days. If the state or federal government wants to try an experiment – which they do all the time – all the public schools in the state or country have it forced onto them. When I was a child, most of my generation was taught sight-reading instead of phonics, and so millions of children across the country, including future teachers, grew up with poor reading skills. Those children were guinea pigs. And it can take years to adopt new books or change regulations.

Daily Bell: And this applies across the school subjects, including history, economics, finance, you name it.

Richard Maybury: Yes. I think young adults today graduate from high school and college as gullible as I was. They’re brainwashed. For example, if they are taught economics at all, they are usually taught Keynesian economics. Don’t worry, Students, the Federal Reserve and FDIC will keep your money safe. Taxes are collected for your own good. It’s safe to believe government statistics. The purpose of wars is to protect those you love. You got an A on your history test because you were able to name the four greatest presidents and the wonderful things they did for you. The majority voted for this so it must be right. Don’t worry about being unfairly accused; you will always get a fair trial. The politicians and bureaucrats have your best interests at heart. And most importantly, school textbooks tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Daily Bell: Scary. Can you give us another reason you believe private schools and home schools are better?

Richard Maybury: Yes. In eleven words, they don’t have the hidden political agenda that public schools do. Let me point out that if you can’t home school your children full time, you can do it part time. On the Internet you will find lots of home school organizations that can help you. My main point is, do something to counteract what the government is doing to your children.

Daily Bell: Is there some kind of giant conspiracy to brainwash the population?

Richard Maybury: I don’t think so, not at all. It’s just government employees teaching today’s children a view of life that most government employees were taught when they were students. The solution to every problem is more government. What else would we expect a government employee to teach? The whole thing works in a very automatic fashion with no need for anyone to guide it.

Daily Bell: A child who learns it gets good grades and one who doesn’t gets bad grades.

Richard Maybury: Yes. All my adult life I’ve been watching good people suffer and very often miss wonderful opportunities because in the schools and colleges they were taught a picture of the world that just isn’t so. My whole life has been like standing on a big-city street corner and watching what happens to people who were taught that a red light means go.

Daily Bell: Standing on that street corner would tend to make anyone uncomfortable.

Richard Maybury: I’ve come to realize that there’s a pressure inside me that keeps growing all the time because my job requires me to have an ever-deepening understanding of the things the government sent me into 45 years ago. I was unknowingly a part of the building of the empire, and now the empire is collapsing, and I must stay on top of that, to help my subscribers. Writing the Uncle Eric books has been my effort to provide the side of the story that isn’t usually told. The more a person learns what he wasn’t taught in school, the better prepared he is to prosper during these temporary hard times as the empire collapses.

Daily Bell: That’s one reason your Uncle Eric books are on the Daily Bell’s Must Read list. Let’s get more deeply into specifics about the books. Can you give us a bit of an overview of them?

Richard Maybury: As I said, there are 11 books in the series and they’ve been doing very well. Total sales now are almost a half-million, and the secondary readership must be at least another half million, so people like them, and they tell others. Last year alone, over 32,000 Uncle Eric books sold. Just the first three alone (Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career, and Financial Security, Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? and Whatever Happened to Justice?) are tremendous eye-openers to most. I often receive comments such as, now I know why I took a bath in the stock market, and, thanks for helping me get rich. More information about the books is available here.

Daily Bell: We’ve heard you won an important award.

Richard Maybury: Yes. We received a feather in our cap. We won first place in the Mary Pride Practical Homeschooling Reader Award (www.home-school.com) in the Government Category. I think that’s a measure of how helpful people find my alter ego, Uncle Eric. From what I’ve seen, the books have become central in the home school movement and other alternative educational venues. The people who homeschool their children are aware children are being misled by what they’re being taught in conventional schools, and both full time and part time home schoolers use the books to fill in what’s been omitted.

Daily Bell: Can you expand a little about areas of information that are being omitted from government schooling, and give us a few examples of specifics?

Richard Maybury: You’ll find I often refer to events in history because I’m a historical person. I’m aware the world we live in today is the result of what happened in the past. With the schools, it’s so important that people understand that back in the early part of the 20th century the hot new philosophy was socialism. There were people such as John Dewey, who was an educator, who believed that socialism was a wonderful system and it was workable. These socialist leaders wanted everybody in the world to be taught to be socialists, and began changing the schools. So school materials today are very heavily socialist and they deliver subtle socialist messages in much of what the children study.

I’m not saying people such as Dewey were evil or were in league with the devil. I think they were honest teachers who really, truly believed that socialism was a good idea, and they got hold of the schools and used them to essentially turn the whole US population socialist.

Daily Bell: Can you give us one of these subtle socialist messages?

Richard Maybury: Sure. In a lot of schools and colleges, in the teaching of writing, students are forbidden to use the word "I". Rarely is the student allowed to say, "I believe this," or "I saw that." Try to find in any big newspaper or magazine an article written from the viewpoint of "I". Nearly everything sounds like it was written by a committee. That’s what the writers were taught in school, because it’s what socialists want. To them, the individual is unimportant, even expendable. There is no me, there is just us, we. Private property is evil, because everything is or should be owned by everyone as a group. It’s okay to raise taxes to the sky, because the government is just confiscating what rightfully belongs to us all. That’s the socialist view. English teachers teach it without recognizing what it really is. This is one of the reasons I wrote the Uncle Eric book, Evaluating Books: What Would Thomas Jefferson Think About This? It provides guidelines and indicators to help the reader identify bias in books, media presentations, etc.

Daily Bell: Another example?

Richard Maybury: I’m sure you have noticed that men often have worse handwriting than women. It’s natural to conclude this is because schoolboys are less careful or precise than schoolgirls. But that’s not so. The truth is that the small muscle development of boys lags that of girls by perhaps six months. Socialists teach that everyone should be equal, so all children are taught handwriting at the same time. This all-the-same idea carries through to every subject. Each child has a different mind and body, and is ready to learn a given subject at his or her own time. I might be ready to learn math at age 10, and you might be ready at age 4, but the school wants us to be equal and it teaches us all at the same time. The individual does not count; only the group does. The children absorb that belief even without it being directly taught.

Daily Bell: And that’s why we see so much support for gigantic government programs these days. The population grows up in this socialist environment and has been taught that the answer to every problem is more government. There’s nobody giving the children the other side of the story.

Richard Maybury: Few teachers are aware they are teaching a viewpoint they subtly absorbed as students. I am sure everyone at the Daily Bell and everyone reading this right now can remember as children being assigned to write letters to their congressmen asking the congressmen to fix this problem or that, or punish so-and-so.

Daily Bell: And those children grow up to be investors.

Richard Maybury: Yes, which means even well informed investors are operating without the other side of the story. They think what they were taught in school is true, and they don’t question it. What the Uncle Eric books are designed to do is to give everyone, young and old alike, what is missing, what was actually removed forcibly from the schools a century ago. Based on sales and letters from readers of the Uncle Eric books, I believe my books succeed in presenting the other side of the story. And I have found when teachers learn about the bias in their curriculums, many realize it’s their responsibility, at the very least, to present opposing viewpoints to their students.

Daily Bell: Can you explain how Dewey and his friends were able to have that much influence?

Richard Maybury: As I said, socialism was the hot new philosophy. If you were an intellectual 100 years ago, you would be thrown out of the intellectual club if you still believed in liberty and free markets. Such beliefs meant you were not a modern person. The colleges and high schools were just loaded up with people who believed that socialism was the wave of the future. These people became teachers, and they taught their students, and those students grew up and became teachers, and their students became teachers, and so on until there are probably hundreds of thousands of teachers out there today who have no idea they are socialists.

Daily Bell: Isn’t that covered in your Uncle Eric book called Are You Liberal, Conservative or Confused?

Richard Maybury: Yes, and directly or indirectly in several other of the Uncle Eric books.

Daily Bell: In the minutes leading up to this interview you were mentioning that it’s important for people to ask: Why is a free press a good thing?

Richard Maybury: Yes. What’s so important about it? Well, we don’t want our minds to be in the hands of the government. We want lots of other people giving us information to help us have open minds and to be able to think for ourselves. That’s why a free press is sacred in a free country. So, what’s the point of handing the minds of our children over to the government? If a free press is a good thing, then why not let the children’s minds be free, too? Why let the helpless little ones be programmed by followers of Dewey?

Daily Bell: So that’s one of the things the Uncle Eric books are trying to do – to give the children more open minds and let them think for themselves rather than just swallow the spoon-fed school literature that is censored.

Richard Maybury: Yes! Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career and Financial Security specifically discusses this topic in the chapters on Models, Sorting Data, Evidence, Tautology and others. And I’d like to emphasize the fact that the material children get in school is censored. And don’t take my word for it. Talk with your child’s teachers. Ask if the books are examined line by line, and approved or disapproved, by government committees. Ask if the writers of the history and economics books are given politically influenced guidelines they must follow in order for each sentence to be accepted. And bear in mind these are often the same books, updated, that the teachers were taught from.

Daily Bell: Government committees?

Richard Maybury: Yes, government committees look over all of the textbooks to make sure they are not embarrassing to the government. The committees don’t consciously add lies; they just delete facts that are awkward, so that the child has a very positive, uncritical view of political power.

Daily Bell: Uncritical?

Richard Maybury: Yes, talk with your friends. Most everyone comes out of school with this attitude that political power is wonderful stuff and everyone should have some. Political power is the solution to all our problems.

Daily Bell: Thank you for saying that. We think very few parents are aware of it. At bottom, you’re saying we’ve all been brainwashed.

Richard Maybury: Not all. Some fall through the cracks. But I didn’t fall through till I was in my 20′s. A friend was in his 60′s.

Daily Bell: The Uncle Eric books hasten the process of falling through the cracks.

Richard Maybury: Yes, that’s a good way of looking at them. Before we move on, could I issue a challenge to all history teachers?

Daily Bell: Certainly.

Richard Maybury: If you do not teach your students what the US government has been doing in foreign countries for more than a hundred years, then you are helping set them up to volunteer for missions that they will someday not be proud of. I am the voice of experience. I was one of those soldiers who trusted the government, because my history teachers taught me to, and I hope you will not make the mistake my teachers did. Give the children points of view that are different than the official ones. You can give the official ones, but please also tell them what political power really is and that it’s not a miracle cure-all, it’s poison.

Daily Bell: What do you think about a war with Iran?

Richard Maybury: I think it’s a definite possibility because both governments would benefit from it greatly. It would be another wonderful opportunity for them to acquire more power over their populations. There’s nothing like an international emergency to cause people to just throw up their hands and say, "Do whatever it takes to protect me even if it means putting chains on me!" I think in the United States a war would be another chance for the federal government to burn more of the Constitution. And the Iranian government, too, wants to acquire more power just as much as the US government does. A war would constitute a wonderful partnership between the two.

Daily Bell: Is China a growing military adversary of the US?

Richard Maybury: Absolutely, but I shouldn’t say China. I don’t want to paint all Chinese with the same brush. The Chinese government is a different thing than China. The Chinese government, yes, I think definitely wants to increase its military power, like most other governments, and from the reports I’ve seen they are apparently building up their military forces. The Far East once belonged to the Chinese government and they want it back, and I think they plan to take it.

Daily Bell: You believe they are very likely trying to develop strategies, tactics, and weapons that will make it possible to chase the US Navy out of the Far East?

Richard Maybury: I do, and my guess is they’re going to eventually be able to do it. We don’t know how much resistance Washington will put up. US officials obviously think the federal government has some right to dominate the Far East, and I think US officials will try to hang onto that area for a while. If that leads to a war, I’m sure the Chinese government wouldn’t mind it at all, as long as it doesn’t go nuclear. They would find nuclear radiation inconvenient. But they really do need something to divert their population’s attention away from the growing economic problems. If I were Washington, I’d get my armed forces out of the Far East right now, instantly.

Daily Bell: Instantly? Really?

Richard Maybury: Yes. Think about it. If I’m right that China’s rulers would see a war with the US as a solution, not a problem, then where is the most likely direction events are headed?

Daily Bell: Your paradigm regarding the US as an empire seems to be a valid one. In fact, sometimes it seems like the whole world is exploding. As a specialist in military affairs from an investment standpoint, what’s the trigger for all this fighting?

Richard Maybury: One thing to understand is that people fight wars for numerous reasons and the most prevalent reason is they fight because they always have. There are all sorts of cultures, tribes, clans, and ethnic groups around the world who have hated their neighbors and fought with them for centuries. A good example is the Russians and the Chechens. No matter what the United States does, the Russian government and the Chechens are still going to hate each other, they are still going to want to fight, and there is nothing we can do about it.

When the US goes around the world getting into these fights, all we do is make it worse. The idea that Americans have some special talent for going into a foreign country and cleaning the place up is crazy! No matter what we do the Chechens and the Russians are still going to hate each other.

Daily Bell: These problems won’t get solved unless someone gets steamed enough to shout them from the rooftops. You are one of the few who ever have. So what is the real reason for the generally increasing battle zones in the Middle East and Northern Africa – Mali, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, for instance?

Richard Maybury: A general answer to all those sorts of questions is that if a person is in the federal government, either as a politician or a high level bureaucrat, then that person is clearly a power seeker, and there is no more satisfying use of power than military force. There’s this automatic tendency among people who want to get into the government to want to fight. Power seekers want to use their power. And I think with that observation alone you can explain at least half of any war Washington is in. My three war books, World War I, World War II, and The Thousand Year War in the Mideast, discuss these issues thoroughly.

Daily Bell: Where do we go from here? To generalized war? Is it to some degree an economic war?

Richard Maybury: As for generalized war, I think that’s likely. The government can get away with so many secret activities in other countries now that top officials can steer the population into anything they want. As for the economics, all wars are economic in the sense that the military needs bullets and beans in order to fight, and they’ve got to be able to buy those bullets and beans. Now, a lot of people conclude, economics is causing war. I have never seen a case where that was so. War is the most expensive thing humans do, so economics always argues against war. Any alternative is cheaper.

So in a sense, no war is ever economic because the economics always argues against it. But economics is used as an excuse. Leaders are constantly pointing to various economic factors and calling those "vital interests" and then arguing that the US should go to war over these "vital interests". What they’re really saying is that your son or daughter’s life is not as valuable as a barrel of oil so they’re willing to expend that life in order to steal the oil. It’s propaganda and completely insane. Again, I’m speaking as someone who was there on the inside.

Daily Bell: Expand on the worst problem the US is suffering from. You believe it is ethics because empires tend to lose their ethics. How can America recover?

Richard Maybury: In my book, Whatever Happened to Justice?, in a few of the other Uncle Eric books and in my newsletter, I often point out that the two fundamental laws that make civilization possible are 1) Do all you have agreed to do and 2) Do not encroach on other persons or their property. The first is the basis of contract law, and the second is the basis of tort law and some criminal law. If you have a population that’s dedicated to these laws, and the laws are widely obeyed, then you can have a very ethical civilization, one that moves forward very quickly.

If, however, you have somebody or some large group of people who are violating those laws, then that civilization can’t operate very well and it begins to decline. We see this all over the world. When legal systems are mutated to be tools of government policy rather than tools for producing a peaceful society, then it all goes to wrack and ruin. And this is repeated over and over again, throughout history.

I come back to that all the time. America has drifted entirely away from those two laws. Most Americans have never heard of them. Those laws were extracted from the British common law, which goes back to the Middle Ages. It used to be that in the schools the children were taught common law. In fact, at the time of the American Revolution, the common law was American history. If two Americans were talking about history they would be talking about common law. Most Americans today don’t have the foggiest idea what common law was, and civilization is in a downhill slide because it can’t go any other direction without those two laws.

Again, I refer to these in the Uncle Eric books and in Early Warning Report quite often. You’ve got to have those two laws or you’re sunk, and the federal government has done a very, very thorough job of erasing our memories of those laws.

Daily Bell: Any other points you wish to make, books or articles you want to mention?

Richard Maybury: I would like your readers to have a look at my newsletter, Early Warning Report. When they phone 1-800-509-5400 or 1-602-870-9329 and mention The Daily Bell, they will get a year subscription (10 issues) and our informative Welcome Package for 44% off the normal subscription price of $300. They’ll receive the important special reports, "Getting Started – Your Strategic Plan" and "Chaostan The Full Story," information they can’t get anywhere else, all for just $169.00. I encourage them to call today, as the offer won’t last long.

Daily Bell: Richard, this has been most enlightening. Thanks for your time!

Richard Maybury: My pleasure. I always enjoy working with the people at The Daily Bell. You are some of the best informed I have ever met.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

We thank Richard Maybury for his kind words and, more importantly, for the amount of attention he paid to this interview. The Uncle Eric series has obviously been well received and it shows us once again why the State and its enforcers are not fans of home schooling.

Home schooling in the US focuses on freedom and doesn’t teach people the narrative of war that public schools offer. Constantly, in public school, one learns that it is only through war that great changes are made for the better.

This is completely untrue. After the Civil War, the US began to be afflicted with a great deal of corruption because it was impossible for a state to secede. After World War I, the League of Nations was founded and globalism itself was advanced.

After World War II, the IMF, World Bank and the United Nations were all founded and given tremendous power. Children in the US are taught this narrative is hopeful and that trans-national entities are necessary for humankind’s future. But in reality, trans-national corporations and supra-governmental organizations are centralizers of power and create further difficulties through their very bigness.

What the world needs is decentralization of power which would make it less easy for wars to start and for small groups to inflict their agenda on the rest of us.

Richard Maybury understands all of this, and his Uncle Eric books in particular provide lessons about war, peace, politics and economic sanity. Like his newsletter itself, these books offer children a dose of sanity that they will not receive in public school.

If you can’t home-school, at least provide your children with a curriculum that will give them alternative opinions. The overwhelming emphasis of public school these days is promotional, but you can fight back with the truth. Don’t let your children be overwhelmed by lies.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Robert Wenzel worked on Wall Street before founding his widely read libertarian Economic Policy Journal. A free-market economic compendium, EPJ presents Wenzel’s wry and witty comments on a daily basis, along with guest columnists as well. He is well known for his forecast in real time of the Great Recession and his accurate early 2005 warning about the developing housing bubble, and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and many other media outlets. He has also received critical acclaim across the political spectrum, from Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to Ron Paul. Wenzel has featured such guests as Jesse Ventura, Oliver Stone and Jim Rogers on his weekly internet radio broadcast, "The Robert Wenzel Show." He also writes the EPJ Daily Alert. His book, The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve, is due out in April 2013. Wenzel still consults to Wall Street clients and others, but intends to free up more time soon for "serious writing." Currently, he still consults to Wall Street clients and others, but intends to free up more time for "serious writing."

Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself and how you became a libertarian.

Robert Wenzel: Well, like most still today, I was introduced to libertarianism outside of my formal education. But I was introduced at a very early age, in the early 1970s. It was through a book written by the libertarian Harry Browne, called How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation. I don’t remember exactly how old I was but probably 14 or 15. It was certainly before I was old enough to drive. I remember having to get my father to drive me to libertarian and hard money events. We lived, at the time, outside of Boston. I recall attending a libertarian event at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge where Robert Nozick spoke. Another time my father drove me into Boston so I could hear Gary North speak.

There was no Mises Institute at the time so I just sent off to publishers for the books that were listed in the bibliography section of Browne’s book. It was pretty hardcore stuff. The first book I read was Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money?, then The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises, followed by Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and then Human Action by Mises. There was no messing around back then; you pretty much had to mainline.

By the way, Browne’s book was edited by the great libertarian entrepreneur Lew Rockwell, so I consider Lew something of my intellectual godfather. He has always been putting product out there that I have considered an important part of my intellectual growth. First the Browne book, then the newsletters from the Mises Institute, then the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, then mises.org and lewrockwell.com.

Daily Bell: Tell us how the Economic Policy Journal came to be.

Robert Wenzel: I have always been torn between a career on Wall Street and an intellectual life. For a while I tossed around the idea of doing graduate work in economics. In addition to absorbing Austrian economics, I read a lot on mainstream stuff. I went so far as taking the graduate economic placement test, or whatever it was called. I scored something like in the in the 95th or 97th percentile. I remember the test booklet named the three professors who were responsible for the questions in the book. One was from the University of Chicago, one from UCLA and the third, I think, from the University of Pennsylvania. To this day I contend that I not only knew the answers to the questions but also knew which professors asked which questions.

But, ultimately, I decided to head to Wall Street. My thinking was that if I was to go the academic route I would have to spend most of the time studying crazed mainstream Keynesian economics and equilibrium analysis that had very little to do with understanding the real world and that this would mean I would have to study real economics – that is, Austrian economics – on the side. So my reasoning went, if I am going to have to study real economics on the side, I might as well make some money at my day job, rather than waste time studying the mainstream economic nonsense – the thought being that I would catch up with my economic writing at a later date.

EconomicPolicyJournal.com is my first step in that direction. Via EPJ, I am having a lot of fun blasting away at a lot of the nonsense out there. And it’s helped increase my profile substantially. My next step is to do some serious writing. I am still doing consulting work so I can only spend part time on the serious work, but it is coming.

Daily Bell: What are the main points you are trying to get across?

Robert Wenzel: I’m just trying to point out the problems with mainstream economic thinking, and go beyond that by pointing out how our liberties are being slowly taken away from of us by government. I should add that I am not very optimistic that things are going to head in the right direction any time soon. I just like blasting away at these guys.

Daily Bell: How do you choose your stories?

Robert Wenzel: There is so much nonsense it’s not difficult to find stories to write about or comment on. I do consider myself something of an economic deejay at EPJ, though. I like to mix it up between deeper thought pieces, short quick posts, jabs at major headline economists, jabs at internal libertarian stuff. I like to keep it moving.

Daily Bell: Has libertarianism and Austrian free-market thinking advanced in the past ten years as a result of the Internet?

Robert Wenzel: Very much so. The two most important things that have happened to the libertarian movement over the last ten years are the Internet and Ron Paul. I am regularly amazed at how many people I talk to who have only learned about libertarianism in the last three or four years, because of Ron Paul. Then, of course, there is the Internet, which is an end run around mainstream control of news and information.

The number is still relatively small, compared to the population at large, but it is now in the millions as far as those who are taking it upon themselves to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics. Not that long ago, say the 1970s, the entire libertarian movement could have fit in Murray Rothbard’s living room, and probably did.

Daily Bell: What are the forces arrayed against it?

Robert Wenzel: Big government and those aligned with big government. By those aligned with big government, I mean, especially, the mainstream educational system and mainstream media. Big government has captured these sectors. Those in big government are aware that they need to control these sectors to influence the masses. The Internet chops away at this influence.

Daily Bell: Are they organized – created by a group of people … a banking elite … or are they simply the outcome of governmental inertia?

Robert Wenzel: Yes, when you come down to analyzing what influences big government, it is crony capitalists, banksters and such. And I would also include crony leftists and, of course, the military-industrial complex. They all want to control government for their own personal gain. But they can only get away with it if the general public is hoodwinked by the propaganda of why government is doing what it is doing – and so we are back to mainstream education and news that is controlled by government.

Daily Bell: What are some of the main areas of concern for you today?

Robert Wenzel: All methods by which the government interferes with the general public are bad but I think gun control is a major concern, as is the requirement to register guns. The right to carry arms wasn’t put in the Constitution so that people could go on weekend duck-hunting trips. It was put there so that the common man would have a means to battle totalitarian government. If you study Mao, Hitler and Stalin, you can easily see how they used gun controls to their advantage. Gun registration is one step away from gun control for a totalitarian dictator. Heaven forbid, but if a totalitarian ever finds himself in control of the United States, I don’t want him to know anything about me, especially what kind of guns I have and how many guns I have.

Another major concern is government interference with the Internet. As I have already mentioned, the Internet is an end run around government controlled education and news. If the government could figure out a way, they would certainly grab control of the Internet. Fortunately, they haven’t been able to but their "concerns" about cyber threats are worrisome. We do know that they use and create crises to gain control. Let’s hope the Internet stays technologically ahead of any control plans they are most assuredly contemplating.

Another worrisome point is how even local police are being militarized. It scares me. If you look into how these police departments are affording SWAT equipment etc. you see it’s being funded at the federal level. There needs to be more work, more exposes on exactly what the federal government is funding and why, in regard to local police equipment and training. The more militarized the police become, the easier it will be to flip them into command and control operators when a national "crisis" emerges. At that point, it will be too late for us. We will then learn, on a first-hand basis, what it means to live in a dictatorship.

Daily Bell: Give us some specific reactions to the following environmental issues:

Climate change …

Robert Wenzel: I have no idea how the climate is changing and neither do almost of all those who have strong positions on climate change. I assume to some degree climate has always changed. That said, the climate is a very complex system. I haven’t yet come across one person in the general public who has a strong opinion on climate change that can even explain to me how fog forms in San Francisco and that’s a fairly easy thing to understand. They are all frauds in my book.

As for the so-called experts, I have listened to many on both sides and caught many, on both sides, making basic methodological errors and other errors that a non-expert such as myself can spot. My guess is there are probably five people in the world who have a truly sound grasp of how climate works, but I have no idea who those five people are. You would have to be a scholar spending years reading up on the subject to find them and know they are the ones. They are probably as little known to the general public as Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Chi-Yuen Wu are in the field of economics.

Daily Bell: Wind power …

Robert Wenzel: A lot of hot air spouted to create profit opportunities for crony capitalists.

Daily Bell: Carbon sinks and recycling …

Robert Wenzel: The entire promotion of concern about carbon sinks is a result of big government, specifically the Kyoto Protocol. It’s another crony scam. I am quite content in believing that if we ever reach a private property society and we need carbon sinks to be managed differently, private property societies will come up with solutions. I say let’s move to a private property society first. Failure to do that is a much greater danger to humanity than the way carbon sinks are managed.

Daily Bell: Should responsible corporations seek to lower their carbon footprint?

Robert Wenzel: There shouldn’t be "responsible" corporations, only corporations seeking profits within the bounds of the law. If I ran a major corporation, I would be as concerned about a carbon footprint as I would a dog’s footprints in the snow.

Look, there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there who use the complexity that is part of some sciences to scare the public about carbon emissions, dangerous flu bugs etc. It’s noteworthy that top scientists, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and F.A. Hayek, all spent time commenting about complexity. They all said there are many things that are very complex and difficult to understand easily, if at all. Unless a serious scientist can explain a logical progression as to any of these threats, and I haven’t seen it done, it is absurd to act on the shouts and screams of people who are warning about these threats that they themselves are unlikely to understand to any significant degree. I see them as no different than a lunatic screaming on a corner about the planet Pluto crashing into the Earth in a week. Yeah, maybe he is a genius who understands something the rest of us don’t, but most likely, he is just a lunatic.

Daily Bell: Should corporations exist at all in the modern sense?

Robert Wenzel: Corporations are just groups of people getting together for business ends. In modern day, government has gotten in the middle to register these corporations, but governments get in the middle of lots of things, from licensing fishermen to licensing barbers. I am all for fishermen, barbers and corporations, just not governments getting in the middle of their operations.

Daily Bell: Is modern Western civilization the creation of monopoly central banking?

Robert Wenzel: No, not at all. Monopoly central banking has an important influence on modern Western civilization but I wouldn’t say it is the creation of it. Relatively free markets and free people have been responsible for most, if not all, the advancement in the standard of living in Western civilization.

Daily Bell: Would it look different without such monetary stimulation?

Robert Wenzel: Yes, without central bank money printing things would look much different. There would be no business cycles. It would be much easier to invest, without having to worry about price inflation and general market collapses. Prices would be in a general down trend the way only cellphones, flat screen televisions and personal computer prices fall now. Generally falling prices and the lack of business cycles would create much more incentive for people to save. More capital would mean a higher standard of living. It would be a wonderful environment in which to live.

Daily Bell: What do you think of bitcoin?

Robert Wenzel: Bitcoins have some use value for anonymous transactions and also as a method for quick, safe transactions. But it is not money at this time. Anyone using bitcoins in a transaction is converting bitcoin values in their head to dollars. Thus, a bitcoin is closer to a digital American Express travelers check (with a fluctuating value), then a stand-alone currency.

If people ever stop the calculation from bitcoins into dollars and just start thinking in terms of bitcoin buying power, then it would become money.

This is not impossible. If there is ever a major crackdown on the economy and, say, price controls and major black market activity develops, bitcoins could become an alternative currency.

Thus, I am not saying bitcoins won’t become money, but they are not now. And I don’t see it occurring in the short term at all. In the long term, there is a slim chance. More likely, bitcoin could become a popular method to facilitate safe, secure transactions, rather than become a money.

Daily Bell: What is money?

Robert Wenzel: Money is a medium of exchange. It is the most liquid commodity. You accept it in payment because you know everyone else will be willing to take it from you for goods and services you want.

Daily Bell: Where will money be in the next 10 or 20 years?

Robert Wenzel: If the dollar still circulates as money, it will be much devalued, thanks to Federal Reserve money printing. If the Fed does serious damage to the value of the dollar, gold and silver may emerge as money for everyday transactions.

Daily Bell: Will the world turn back to a gold standard?

Robert Wenzel: It could. More and more central banks don’t trust the dollar. Even Germany is pulling its gold out of the United States. If countries start demanding gold, we could ultimately end up back on a gold standard

Daily Bell: Is it possible that IMF SDRs could be the next world currency?

Robert Wenzel: Global banksters would love that because it would mean they would still control printing of the money supply, but they would have to muscle a lot of governments that are getting pressure from their citizens to go toward gold. It’s a drama being played out on one level behind the scenes by banksters, at another level by people in the streets.

Daily Bell: Give us some reaction to the IMF and World Bank. What do you think of them and what they do?

Robert Wenzel: They are the enforcers that make sure global banks get paid. They will squeeze every penny they think they can get away with from the citizens of any country, to get banksters paid. They are totally evil organizations.

Daily Bell: How about the United Nations? It seems less relevant but we have noticed it is more militarized of late and participating in more wars.

Robert Wenzel: The UN is the puppet of the United States. The US uses it as cover for its wars and empire building. The sooner the UN is disbanded the better.

Daily Bell: And speaking of wars – what is going on in Northern Africa?

Robert Wenzel: The US is conducting numerous operations in North Africa under various covers. According to a recent report, President Obama, behind closed doors, gave his counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, carte blanche to run operations in North Africa and the Middle East, provided he didn’t do anything that would end up becoming an exposé in The New York Times and embarrassing the administration. This stuff will continue. Brennan has been rewarded by Obama for carrying out the secret wars by being nominated to head the CIA.

Daily Bell: What about Syria and Libya – why the wars there?

Robert Wenzel: In Libya, it was about oil. In Syria, it’s about pipelines that run through Syria. Syria’s geographic location on the old caravan route between Turkey and Arabia – or as it used to be known in the days of old, between Constantinople and the Hijaz – still holds the same strategic importance today as it did in the days of the caravan trains. It’s all about the transportation, currently, hard goods, gas and oil.

Then, of course, there is Syria in relation to Israel. Most of these interventions have more than one reason, but oil is usually at the top of the list.

Daily Bell: Are these resource wars – or wars for Western control?

Robert Wenzel: Resources first. But this desire for resources means we want control because of the resources.

Daily Bell: Is Africa being consolidated by the West for purposes of creating an African union?

Robert Wenzel: They are trying but these things are very tough to pull off. You might see a union of some African nations but it won’t be like the EU. You are still going to see battles between AU members. It won’t be a peaceful union.

Daily Bell: Is world government in the offing?

Robert Wenzel: The crony globalist would like to see it but, again, it’s very difficult to pull off. The world is very complex. As Humphrey Bogart said to a German officer in the movie "Casablanca," "Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade."

The US can’t even hold down Iraq and Afghanistan. The overseas adventures are keeping the US government, to a significant degree, occupied as far as money, equipment and personnel. I am not for US military being deployed anywhere but from a very personal perspective – and the Afghans would certainly have a different view – I would much rather see US government enforcers hunkered down in Afghanistan than wearing a slightly different uniform harassing Americans in Times Square.

Daily Bell: Where does China fit into all this? Is the Chinese miracle going to continue or was it due to a central banking money bubble?

Robert Wenzel: China growth to a significant degree is a myth. It’s the Chinese government building poor quality apartments and office buildings that stand empty but are recorded on the books as super growth. At the same time, there are pockets of free-market activity. So it’s a mixed bag. The two biggest problems are the degree to which those in the Chinese government have a central planning mentality and the degree to which the People’s Bank of China prints new money.

Daily Bell: Will China have a hard landing?

Robert Wenzel: Yes, I am afraid so. What happens from there will be dependent on how the government reacts. If it attempts to prop up the crashing phony facade, we may end up with lost decades. The best thing that could happen is for free-market proponents to gain influence; then the country could develop a more stable boom and a century of prosperity could be in the cards.

I am nowhere near an expert on the internal workings of Chinese politics so I won’t even guess how things might turn out long term. But from a short-term economic perspective, we are likely looking at a hard landing – maybe the worst of all worlds, a serious stagflation.

Daily Bell: What about Europe? Is the euro doomed?

Robert Wenzel: Europe is doomed because of the insane regulations, which make it nearly impossible for new businesses to start or old businesses to hire new people. On top of that everybody quite simply wants to be on the dole with others paying the tab. Ludwig von Mises warned about this. He called it the exhaustion of the reserve fund. Governments just run out of money they can squeeze out of the productive sector.

Unless eurozone countries free up commerce and stop handouts that remove incentive for people to be productive, eurozone countries are going to look like Third World basket cases.

Daily Bell: Where do you stand on austerity? Is it necessary for, say, Greece?

Robert Wenzel: Austerity is a bankster plot to squeeze as much as they can out of every citizen of every broke country to shore up government debt held by the banksters. Greece should forget austerity, declare bankruptcy and let the banksters eat the losses. Let Blankfein sell his new summer house if he needs to. Greece should then drastically cut taxes, eliminate all regulations, end payouts to those on the dole. You would have a Greek economic miracle that would rival the German economic miracle.

Daily Bell: What about the US? Does the US need a stiff dose of austerity?

Robert Wenzel: My advice for the US would be the same. Stiff those holding Treasury debt. They are the monsters that have been financing US military interventions around the world. They should be taught that there can be great losses by financing such adventures. It would be great for the peace movement. I would also recommend cutting taxes for everyone, as a modest start, by 90%. I would cut government spending by 95%.

Daily Bell: Are you hopeful about the US’s future?

Robert Wenzel: No. There are no indications that anyone in government is serious about cutting government down to size. Which means natural forces will take it down. Interest rates will soar. And if the Fed tries to print even more money than it is now doing to keep rates lower, we will see more price inflation and ultimately rates climb even higher. We could experience a tiger by the tail situation: Higher interest rates followed by higher price inflation followed by higher interest rates and so on.

Daily Bell: Is the US in a depression or a recession?

Robert Wenzel: We are coming out of the Great Recession as a result of Bernanke money printing but it is a manipulated new boom that will eventually result in much higher price inflation and an even worse recession, maybe both.

Daily Bell: Was the re-election of Obama a good thing? Was he re-elected or was the voting rigged?

Robert Wenzel: Romney would have been just as bad. As California Governor Jerry Brown once put it when he ran for president, the presidential election is a Gong Show for the rich. The crony capitalists have their claws into anyone who gets close to the presidency.

Obama is especially bad when it comes to domestic issues. He really has no understanding of basic economics and doesn’t care. He’s a crony Marxist. Which means he’ll launch his social planning schemes but there will also be someone in the backroom pocketing big time money.

Daily Bell: Is the US an empire?

Robert Wenzel: A declining one.

Daily Bell: Can it be sustained?

Robert Wenzel: No. We are already starting to pull back in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under Obama, the drone strikes will continue and there will be special-ops and black-ops activities but you can’t control countries this way. The US is going to be like the guy in the Allstate commercials. It will be creating mayhem everywhere but that’s about it.

Daily Bell: What will happen to the US in the next few years?

Robert Wenzel: There will be much higher price inflation and much higher interest rates. Potential civil unrest and the quality of healthcare is going to collapse.

Daily Bell: What should people do?

Robert Wenzel: Stay healthy. Buy gold, silver and a gun.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

This will be brief because Robert Wenzel doesn’t leave us a lot to comment on. That’s because we pretty much agree on a lot of fronts.

One place we might have a tiny disagreement involves why Western powers recently invaded Libya and Syria (and other Middle East and Northern African countries). Now, Wenzel – as we do – doesn’t believe for a moment that these are internal affairs. The West has attacked Africa once more using a variety of pretexts.

But we think one such pretext is the idea of resource control. Money Power uses resource scarcity as a way to justify any one of another of actions – mostly war.

Resources were the putative reasons to invade Africa and other countries during Colonial times. But in our view, these are wars for control. Or – as in the present era – for the re-establishment of control. Resources are entirely a secondary issue.

From what we can tell, the forces of globalism are moving fast. One can almost see the slotting of increased internationalism.

The West has been brought down, the BRICs are rising. Africa is being repacified. Something is going on. Wenzel, in his writing and in this interview, understands these events, and his analysis is always informative. His summation, we thought, was especially apt:

"Stay healthy. Buy gold, silver and a gun."

Sorta sums it up …

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Dr. Vieira holds four degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) and J.D. (Harvard Law School). For over 36 years he has been a practicing attorney, specializing in cases that raise issues of constitutional law. He has presented numerous cases of import before the Supreme Court and written numerous monographs and articles in scholarly journals. His latest scholarly work is The Sword and Sovereignty (2012). Previous works includeConstitutional “Homeland Security” (2007), a proposal to begin the revitalization of the constitutional Militia of the several states; Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (2d rev. ed. 2002), a comprehensive study of American monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective; and How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary (2004), an analysis of the problems of irresponsible “judicial supremacy” and how to deal with them. With well known libertarian trader Victor Sperandeo, he is also the co-author (under a nom de plume) of the political novelCRA$HMAKER: A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered “crash” of the Federal Reserve System, and the political revolution it causes.

Daily Bell: Thanks for sitting down with us again. Let’s jump right in with a discussion of your new book, The Sword and Sovereignty. Give us a synopsis, please. Where can people buy it?

Edwin Vieira: The Sword and Sovereignty is available at Amazon.com. It is a study of the actual constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” in the Second Amendment in its inextricable relation to “the Militia of the several States,” as opposed to the historically inaccurate and legally indefensible so-called “individual right to keep and bear arms” on which almost all contemporary advocates of the Second Amendment fixate. I describe “the individual right to keep and bear arms” as legally indefensible because fundamentally it is a right in name only, inasmuch as it lacks an effective remedy if an highly organized and armed tyranny sets out to suppress it, whereas the true “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” exercised in the context of “well regulated Militia” is the Constitution’s own preferred remedy against usurpation and tyranny in their every aspect. Even though the Second Amendment is very much the subject of contemporary political debate, I seem to be one of the very few commentators saying as much – which, in these days of rampant legal and political confusion, misinformation and disinformation, is probably very convincing evidence that I am correct.

In any event, The Sword and Sovereignty breaks down into four parts: First, an analysis of the correct manner of interpreting the Constitution. Second, an application of the rules of constitutional interpretation to the question of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” in relation to “the Militia of the several States,” elucidating the basic principles of the Militia through a thoroughgoing analysis of the pre-constitutional Militia statutes of the Colonies and independent States. Third, an application of the principles of the Militia, and especially of the duty (as well as the right) of all eligible Americans to be armed, to present-day problems of what is called “homeland security.” And fourth, a warning that, should these principles not be applied in the very near future – immediately, if not sooner, as I like to put it – America will slip under the control of a national para-militarized police-state apparatus (which anyone with even the least insight should recognize is taking place at an ever-accelerating pace even as he reads these words). The book is heavily freighted with footnotes and endnotes identifying primary sources, so no one has to take my poor word alone for its premises and conclusions.

Daily Bell: What’s the response been?

Edwin Vieira: The Sword and Sovereignty was first made available in mid-December of 2012. It had to be put out on a CD in PDF format because there was insufficient interest shown among potential readers to justify producing a quality hardbound printed version (although that may become an option in the future). In light of the popularity of the subject matter of the book – the Second Amendment and related constitutional issues – that depth of disinterest really surprised me. But now, with all of the brouhaha over new, draconian “gun-control” legislation in the States as well as in Congress, the very slow sale of, and dearth of commentary about, the CD is more than surprising. It is shocking, even appalling. Especially so when more and more commentators, bloggers, and others on the Internet are recognizing, and correctly so, that the ultimate purpose of the Second Amendment is not to protect hunters or target shooters, or even to enable individuals to protect themselves against common criminals but instead to enable common Americans to resist the political crimes of usurpation and tyranny. Which, I believe, the historical record proves beyond peradventure cannot be accomplished through the exercise of an “individual right to keep and bear arms,” but rather demands collective action through “the Militia of the several States.”

Daily Bell: What was the most interesting thing you discovered while researching the book?

Edwin Vieira: The extent and depth of the evidence for the construction of the Second Amendment and the Militia Clauses of the original Constitution, which The Sword and Sovereignty lays out. Over the years, I have studied many aspects of pre-constitutional legal history; but as to no other matter is the historical record as complete, consistent and compelling as it is with respect to the Militia. The evidence supports the conclusions in the book beyond a reasonable doubt, which is far more than can be said about such matters taken as “legal gospel” today as the reach of the Supreme Court’s power of “judicial review” or of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.

Daily Bell: What are some of the fundamental conclusions?

Edwin Vieira: There are far too many to compile here. The five most consequential for the average man’s understanding of the present-day issue of “gun control” are that: (i) The maintenance of freedom depends inextricably upon the American people’s collective participation in “well regulated Militia,” not upon individual action; (ii) “A well regulated Militia” is composed of nearly all of the eligible adult residents in a State, who are required by law to serve; (iii) Every member of such a Militia (other than conscientious objectors) must be armed with one or more firearms, ammunition and accoutrements suitable for Militia service, all of which must always be maintained in his personal possession; (iv) Because two of the most important responsibilities of the Militia are to repel invasions by foreign countries and to put down domestic usurpation and tyranny by rogue public officials, every armed member of the Militia must be equipped with a firearm suitable for those specific purposes – which means a firearm equivalent to, if not better than, the firearms contemporary regular armed forces bear: that is, not just a semi-automatic, magazine-fed rifle in 5.56 x 45 (.223) or 7.62 x 39 caliber, but a fully automatic or burst-fire rifle, preferable in a caliber more effective than the latter calibers, such as 6.5 x 38 Grendel (which can be made to work reliably on an AR-15 or M-16 platform); and (v) because “the Militia of the several States” are State governmental institutions, no contemporary form of “gun control” can be applied to them or their members by either Congress or the States’ legislatures. Rather, it is the duty of Congress and the States’ legislatures to see that all members of the Militia are properly armed, not to any degree disarmed. That is, as to the Militia and their members (which includes essentially all adult Americans), all forms of contemporary “gun control,” including those of the Feinstein and Cuomo patterns (to name two of the more infamous poster-children for “gun control”), are absolutely unconstitutional.

Daily Bell: From your perspective, a free people is an armed people?

Edwin Vieira: It has nothing whatsoever to do with my personal “perspective,” or my “opinion,” or my “view.” The Constitution tells us, in no uncertain terms, that a “well regulated Militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State.” This is a declaration of law and historical fact – as well as an admonition – set out in the supreme law of the land, and therefore from a strictly legal perspective to be accepted and acted upon. It is also a first principle or axiom of American political philosophy. Had I a different “perspective,” “opinion,” or “view,” I should to that extent be an opponent of the Constitution. And if I were in a position to attempt to impose that different, anti-constitutional “perspective,” “opinion,” or “view” on the American people by enacting legislation and enforcing it against them through the threats and assaults of jack-booted, uniformed, para-militarized thugs, then I should be, as well, a traitor (in the strict sense in which the Constitution defines “Treason” in Article III, Section 3, Clause 1).

Daily Bell: How can people with guns hold off the tanks (or “non-lethal” weapons) of a repressive government?

Edwin Vieira: This is a complex question because it incorporates so many implicit, unexamined and likely false assumptions. It probably is true that, even though many in overall number, individuals acting only in isolation, without coordination or even a common plan, cannot hold off rogue armed forces or even police agencies that are armed only with small arms, let alone tanks and other heavy weaponry. But the desired goal is not necessarily to win an all-out, once-and-for-all nationwide firefight but instead to deter usurpation and tyranny at their onset and grind their perpetrators down even if they are initially successful.

If Militia exist which could effectively resist aspiring usurpers and tyrants to any degree for any length of time, the usurpers and tyrants will be compelled to think twice about attempting to repress the people. Indeed, under such circumstances, the regular armed forces and police may themselves fracture: some supporting the rogue regime, others supporting the people. And, in the long run, the armed forces and police that remain on the side of the usurpers and tyrants may prove unable to suppress the people, their supposedly superior weaponry notwithstanding.

Look at Afghanistan. In more than ten years, the armed forces of the United States and their puppet “coalition partners” have been unable to defeat a rag-tag people’s army of cave-dwellers and primitive tribesmen armed with weaponry less effective than was used in World War I (no tanks, no planes, no heavy artillery, no poison gas and so on), in a land-locked country which receives no significant outside assistance.

Now, there are some 300 million people in the United States. Assume that 150 million are adults and that of these some 50 million, spread throughout a landmass than spans North America, would actively sympathize with and even personally participate in a resistance-movement. And remember that of these 50 million, most are already fairly well armed. The difficulty of suppressing this level of opposition, particularly when the resistance-fighters could directly attack the logistical support of the usurpers’ and tyrants’ puppet forces, would make Afghanistan look like a cakewalk.

Daily Bell: Do people need to form their own militias?

Edwin Vieira: If you mean do individuals need to form private militia, on their own, then the constitutional answer is an unequivocal NO. The constitutional Militia, “the Militia of the several States” incorporated in the original Constitution and the “well regulated Militia” to which the Second Amendment refers, are State governmental institutions or establishments. This is what imbues them with legal – indeed, constitutional – authority, which no private militia can possibly claim. Think about it: If the people on the south side of Main Street in Smalltown USA form their own private militia, and the people on the north side of Main Street form theirs, which one of them, perforce of its mere existence, can claim even a semblance of legal authority over the other, or over anyone else for that matter? Or are both of them – and any other armed groups that happen to coalesce in that area – of equal legal authority, so that no generally applicable system of law can be applied in that territory? In which case, one might conclude, there can be no legal authority there at all, just a multiplicity of Freikorps settling their inevitable differences by main force. Not a very pretty picture.

Daily Bell: What’s your take on the current gun control controversy?

Edwin Vieira: The present controversy – at least as it is being mis-argued in the media, both mainstream and alternative – can basically be characterized as two huge gas-bags colliding head-on, but with no real harm possibly done by or to either because neither articulates the issue actually at stake.

If the problem is viewed from the constitutionally true perspective of the Militia, then “gun control” of the familiar contemporary variety must be seen as legally impossible and politically perverse. Any form of “gun control” is illegitimate, on its face, if its intent or effect is to any degree to disarm the Militia because the Second Amendment declares that “[a] well regulated Militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State,” any attack upon which is precluded (and therefore unreasonable) as a matter of law. And the original Constitution incorporates the Militia as integral components of its federal structure, with which neither the General Government nor the States may dispense. That is the end of the matter. Any other supposed merits or demerits of a particular “gun-control” proposal are simply irrelevant. If it undermines the Militia – as all contemporary “gun-control” schemes do, and are objectively intended to do – then such a scheme is out of bounds, absolutely and irretrievably. Period.

On the other hand, if the problem is viewed from the constitutionally false perspective of “the individual right to keep and bear arms,” then “gun control” becomes a matter of what can be deemed “reasonable” in relation to something other than the maintenance of the Militia and “the security of a free State.” Something, perhaps, with highly emotional appeal, such as guaranteeing the supposed “safety” of children from irresponsible, criminal, or insane individuals who somehow get their hands on guns. If “gun control” is aimed only at curtailing some vague “individual right” entirely separate from the Militia and the maintenance of “a free State” (which is inextricably tied to the Militia, not to any “individual right”), then why is it not perfectly “reasonable” to prohibit the possession of some sorts – indeed, many or even most sorts – of firearms, by some or even many sorts of putatively “dangerous” people, as long as individuals not within the prohibited classes are left with a few firearms with which arguably they can defend themselves as individuals against adventitious attacks by common criminals?

Why, the Feinsteins and Cuomos of this benighted country may ask with some semblance of cogency, does anyone “need” a supposedly dangeroussemi-automatic rifle if he is not a member of an official institution with the responsibility to repel invasions (such as the Army) – which, according to the dogma of “the individual right to keep and bear arms,” most individuals are not? Conversely, if one is a member of such an institution – as most adult Americans are (or should be) with respect to the Militia – then the question the Feinsteins and the Cuomos pose lacks not simply cogency but even logic and legitimacy. It becomes a question which might be asked appropriately in North Korea but never here in America.

Daily Bell: What’s the most critical problem facing America right now? Previously you claimed it was authoritarianism and a growing police state.

Edwin Vieira: Claimed?! I have “claimed” nothing. As a political and legal scientist, I have observed and reported on my observations, which is an entirely different matter. Moreover, anyone who cannot and does not make the selfsame observations needs to have his political eyes examined.

America’s national para-military police state is not simply “growing”; it has grown to fantastic proportions. Why else do you imagine that I am devoting the last years of my life to promoting the revitalization of the Militia? Nostalgia for the by-gone Colonial era? When the Executive Department of the General Government declares, as it has today, that nameless, faceless bureaucrats can order the assassinations of Americans, anywhere in the world, on the basis of the mere suspicion that the targets are somehow allied with “terrorists” or other “enemies,” and no other department of the General Government or the States at any level of the federal system challenges that declaration, then America has degenerated into a politically putrescent state beyond mere “authoritarianism.” This condition constitutes a species of legal nihilism with which, heretofore, only monsters such as Caligula and Hitler were associated. For if one’s life can be stripped from him under such circumstances, what other rights does he retain? None, as all rights inevitably depend upon the right to life itself. And if such an individual – indeed, every American – retains no rights, because the theory of “official assassinations” embraces essentially anyone and everyone who might be denounced from within the bowels of the bureaucracy as an “enemy combatant,” then what limits exist to rogue public officials’ powers? None. This is totalitarianism with a vengeance.

Daily Bell: We mentioned directed history the last time we spoke, and you indicated that in your view a “paper-money oligarchy” was at least one group organizing this kind of history. These are basically banking families and their enablers based in Britain and Europe with military and intelligence arms (along with other such families) in Israel and the US. Why are they busy in Africa creating wars? Is it because their credit scheme is in the final stages of Ponzi self-destruction, as you indicated? Has that advanced in the past two years?

Edwin Vieira: What I might describe as “intermediate Ponzi banking pyramids,” based upon national or regional central banks – namely, the Federal Reserve System and the European Central Bank – are shaking themselves to pieces, as all such Ponzi schemes eventually must. As a result, “the paper-money oligarchy” will now try to salvage the basic system by elevating it to a global level with some sort of world central bank, perhaps based upon the IMF. This may prove difficult if not impossible to accomplish if the Chinese, for example, cannot be cajoled or coerced into joining or at least acquiescing in such an operation. At present, that does not seem likely. The Chinese appear to be staking out a position based upon competition with, rather than complicity in, any new global paper-money-and-credit scam run by the “Western” elites. So those elites are taking defensive measures to shore up their position, based upon their realization that the purpose of all paper-money-and-credit schemes is not simply to manipulate paper “obligations,” “claims,” and misnamed “assets,” but instead to redistribute real wealth from the unsuspecting members of society at large to the manipulators and their cronies and clients.

Ultimately, real wealth consists of human labor and natural resources. Africa is awash in critical natural resources; and the potential for enserfing its native populations as docile workers under puppet “governments” controlled by the “Western” elites makes those resources even more valuable. So the military conflicts in Africa now being billed as parts of “the war on terrorism” are actually parts of a “war of terrorism” intended to destabilize the region, introduce “Western” neo-colonialism and thus preempt the Chinese from obtaining an economic or political foothold in the area.

Daily Bell: We spoke about dominant social themes and how they are used by this power elite. What have you noticed about their fear-based promotions? Are they more powerful than ever or are they losing their power to convince?

Edwin Vieira: A little of both. We observe with the present orchestrated hysteria over “gun control” – all of which is based upon promoting irrational fear of and loathing for firearms amongst the general populace – that, although many Americans are being swayed by the elitists’ propaganda and agitation, perhaps even more Americans are not: The more the elitists scream for radical “gun control,” the more common Americans listen to the real subliminal message in these rants, and the more firearms and ammunition they amass.

On the other side, though, the elitists have successfully imparted a subtle twist to their propaganda and agitation: At first, “the party line” was simply that Americans must fear “terrorists” from abroad, and therefore must surrender some of their freedoms to a nascent national para-military police-state apparatus. To this was soon added the supposed necessity for Americans to fear “domestic terrorists” (such as their fellow countrymen who support the Constitution, advocate the restoration of sound money and possess firearms), coupled with the necessity for Americans to surrender even more of their freedoms to a burgeoning police state. Most recently, the theme has shifted to the utterly discordant note that Americans must fear their own “government” most of all but can do nothing about its ever-more-abusive inroads into their remaining freedoms because, with all of the political, economic, and military power at its disposal, “the government” cannot be effectively opposed, no matter what excesses it may commit.

This at least has the advantage of bringing the discussion into concordance with the true meaning of words, inasmuch as the very first definition of “terrorism” in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (the standard reference for American English) as well as in The Oxford English Dictionary (the standard reference for English generally) is none other than “government by intimidation.” But it also points up the psychotic nature of the “national debate” being foisted upon us: namely, that (at least according to the elitists and their touts) Americans’ only defense against “terrorism” is to acquiesce in the worst sort of “terrorism.” If this is not the best argument for revitalizing “the Militia of the several States,” immediately if not sooner, then what is?

Daily Bell: What is a nation? Are they necessary?

Edwin Vieira: These are typical of open-ended questions the complete answers to which would require volumes. Suffice it to say here that nations must have been sufficient, if not absolutely necessary, for some historical purposes of general significance, or they would never have arisen let alone assumed such importance throughout the world. Today, if they did not already exist, they should be created for the specific purpose of opposing globalism.

True, throughout history many nations have been guilty of all sorts of crimes and other wrongdoing. But because of the multiplicity of nations, various “alliances” and “balances of power” among them have tended to deter, defend against, or mitigate many of the worst potentials and consequences of nationalistic hubris, aggression, imperialism and kindred disorders. Under a globalist regime, conversely, such “alliances” and “balances of power” will, by hypothesis, be impossible. For that reason, a globalist regime will usher in the possibility – and, I should suspect from the plans and pronouncements of contemporary globalists themselves, the likelihood – of the most horrific tyranny from which mankind has ever suffered.

There being no other effective defensive measures that can be interposed against globalism in time to interfere with its proponents’ schedule, nations and national sovereignty are necessary. That is especially true with respect to Americans, in particular. For our Declaration of Independence announced that Americans have “assume[d] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” The last time I looked, the Declaration of Independence had not been rescinded.

Daily Bell: Is it possible the Colonial period was merely a prelude to globalism? In other words, that nations had to be created before globalism could occur? Too paranoid?

Edwin Vieira: I should think such a conclusion would go far beyond paranoia. Do you mean to suggest that globalism is a consciously elaborated project, going back literally centuries, in which one intermediate stage has been the creation of independent nations for the very purpose of destroying those nations at some indeterminate time in the future? If so, who are this project’s original architects? And how have they recruited followers true to the cause over the centuries? What is the evidence for such speculations? Are we to give credence and credit to (say) the musings of such as Francis Bacon, who proposed the establishment of “an universal republic” several hundred years ago?

To be sure, the contemporary globalist movement can attempt to take advantage of the existence of nations, which provides possibly ready-made building-blocks for the construction of some globalist edifice – as, for instance, by incorporation of individual nations into a multi-national organization such as the United Nations which can serve as a predecessor to the final globalist structure. This, however, is as likely to be historical happenstance – nations are available for such use, so why not use them – as it is to be the result of some long-range plan the origins of which are obscured in the mists of time.

Nations, moreover, are obviously two-edged swords in this duel for political power between themselves and the globalists. True enough, nations could conceivably be finagled into becoming stepping-stones to globalism, by coopting them in international organizations, then transmogrifying those organizations into supra-national organizations, then simply eliminating the nations as independent sovereignties, then wiping out international borders and their political, economic, and legal significance entirely – especially if traitorous political leaders could be coopted, bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise convinced or coerced to connive or cooperate with the globalist steering-committee. But the various nations’ peoples, and even some of their political leaders, also might balk at being dragooned into a globalist regime that reduces them to pawns on the elitists’ political chessboard; and they might then assert national sovereignty – and the legal, political, economic and especially military power that goes with it – in forcible opposition to globalism.

Daily Bell: The power elite uses false flags to promote global control. Is one of their goals gun control?

Edwin Vieira: Always. As Mao Tse-tung correctly observed. “[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The Second Amendment makes the same point but with a special political and ethical gloss: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” In America, the guns are supposed to reside in We the People’s hands, in order that “a free State” – not “a police state” – may be maintained. So, for Americans in particular to be brought under the globalists’ control – a boot stamping on a human face forever, as Orwell described the situation in his novel 1984 – they must first be disarmed, as other peoples subjected to oppression throughout history have been disarmed.

“False flags” – in the sense of shocking events, sometimes manufactured, sometime perhaps spontaneous – have become the preferred vehicles today for stampeding the populace into “gun control” of one variety or another. It is almost as if the political actors were working off the same dog-eared B-movie script in scene after scene. Which, thankfully, is why these “false flags” are becoming increasingly less credible, and the American people increasingly less credulous.

Daily Bell: Was Barack Obama re-elected legitimately or was there a lot of voter fraud?

Edwin Vieira: Doubtlessly voter fraud was pervasive in the last election, as it has been in many others, to the disgrace of this country. More to the point, however, is whether Barack Obama was even constitutionally eligible to stand for election or re-election in the first place. Did his putative father’s British citizenship (as a resident of Kenya) disqualify Obama as a matter of law, even if in fact he was born within the United States? Did he become an Indonesian citizen when he was relocated there as a child; and, if so, did he as an adult ever reassert his supposed American birth-citizenship when he returned to the United States? As an adult in the United States did he seek educational benefits on the basis that he was a foreign student?

Why are these and related questions not being asked, let alone answered, either in Congress or in the courts? How is it that you and I must submit to a comprehensive background check before we can purchase a single firearm, but this fellow, whose origins, peregrinations and other personal details are purposefully being sequestered from public scrutiny at very great expense in attorneys’ fees, can have his finger on the proverbial “nuclear trigger” and thereby threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and no one in public office seems to be concerned?

Daily Bell: What was your feeling regarding Ron Paul’s campaign? Were you surprised at the way it ended?

Edwin Vieira: I was hardly surprised at the manner in which the Republican Party big-shots systematically stabbed Ron Paul in the back. I was disappointed, though, that after such shoddy treatment Dr. Paul did not bolt from the Republican Party and run for the Presidency on a “fusion ticket” composed of the Constitution Party, the Libertarian Party and other splinter-parties that might have created the foundation for a true second party in this country, as well as consigned the Republican Party to the dustbin of history once and for all. Such a “fusion ticket” might not have won the 2012 election, just as the original Republican Party did not win the first Presidential election it contested in 1856. But, once formed, “the fusion ticket” could have become a formidable force in 2016 and thereafter. Now, the necessary work has to be begun all over again.

Daily Bell: Will there be a successful states’ rights movement – or even secession?

Edwin Vieira: I believe that “secession” – the assertion by a State of a right to remove herself from the Constitution’s federal system on her own recognizance – is unconstitutional. I have a long series of articles on this subject posted in my archive at Newswithviews.com. And even if such a form of “secession” were not unconstitutional, or some other arguably legal form of “secession” were tried, the exercise would be futile at the present time because no State is prepared to deal with the primary consequences of “secession.” How, for example, could a State successfully “secede” economically if she remained tied to the Federal Reserve System’s phony regime of paper currency and unlimited bank credit? Obviously, as a precondition to “secession” a State would have to adopt an alternative currency entirely independent of the Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury Department. Has that been done anywhere? No.

Moreover, how could a State expect to “secede” politically if rogue agents of the General Government could enter her territory at will and attempt to enforce that government’s statutes, regulations and executive orders on her citizens? Obviously, as a precondition to “secession” a State would have to revitalize her Militia, in order to be able to interpose against such assaults on her own sovereignty and on her people’s lives, liberties, and property. But has that been done anywhere? Again, no. So in the absence of these necessary preliminary steps (and many others, too), talk of “secession” is plainly little more than the expulsion of hot air.

The assertion of the States’ special constitutional status within the federal system – what is often described as “States’ rights” – is another matter, though. Many opportunities for asserting the States’ special status now exist. The problem, of course, is that the General Government’s courts are ready, willing and able to attempt to nullify these assertions of federalism by invoking an overly expansive misconstruction of the Constitution’s “supremacy clause” (Article VI, Clause 2). So if the States are serious about protecting and promoting their rights and the rights of their people, at some point in the near future they will have to reject the notion that the General Government’s courts, or any department of that government, or all of them acting in unison, are the final arbiters of what the Constitution means. Indeed, this should be obvious. The General Government is merely the agent of the people, not the people’s master. The people are the principal. On what theory of agency is the principal required to accept the agent’s unilateral, self-serving and possibly corrupt determination of what the agent’s powers are, thereby effectively subordinating the principal to the agent? To be sure, this is the twisted formula usurpers and tyrants invariably employ in drawing all powers to themselves, at the expense of the people. But to contend that it is a principle, precept, or permissible interpretation of the Constitution is at best a nice piece of effrontery to which no American should give credence, if not a rotten piece of political treachery, which every American should condemn and oppose.

Daily Bell: You were a bit doubtful of the Internet’s effect last time we spoke, saying it was full of misinformation. What’s your take on that now?

Edwin Vieira: As far as I can tell, that particular problem has become worse. Today, the Internet is inundated not only with misinformation posted by the ignorant and the insouciant but also with carefully crafted disinformation posted by professional trolls and agents provocateurs. That does not mean that useful information is not to be found but only that one must use a very great deal of discernment in uncovering it, particularly if the subject is politically “controversial” (that is, runs against the grain of the elitists’ party line). The great value of the Internet remains, however, that unlike books, which are costly and time-consuming to print and then may not be immediately accessible to the people who need to read them, the Internet allows for the almost instant posting and retrieval of information. So I remain cautiously optimistic.

Daily Bell: What’s going on with Afghanistan? It doesn’t appear that the war is going well for the elites.

Edwin Vieira: Except, of course, with respect to the reintroduction of the cultivation of and trade in opiates, which seems to be a smashing success. As I pointed out earlier in this interview, however, the quagmire in Afghanistan does give the lie to the elitists’ claim that rebellious peoples will always be helpless in the face of the modern technology, which contemporary armed forces can deploy against them.

Daily Bell: Any news on the martial law front as regards the US? Does Obama have it in mind? Would law enforcement cooperate?

Edwin Vieira: I doubt that Obama, personally, has anything in mind with respect to “martial law” (or any other subject you might mention). His handlers, however, doubtlessly are considering the invocation of some variety of “martial law” if the banking and financial systems collapse, with subsequent economic stringencies, social dislocations and civil unrest and disobedience spreading throughout America. And they are not reluctant to have their mouthpieces suggest in various fora the possibility or even likelihood of “martial law,” doubtlessly in order to condition common Americans into acquiescing in its inevitability. A chapter in The Sword and Sovereignty deals in great detail with the question of “martial law” in all of its ramifications. The bottom line is that the type of “martial law” commonly presented as a political possibility in America is actually a constitutional impossibility, and would be a practical impossibility were “the Militia of the several States” revitalized.

Would “law enforcement” cooperate in the imposition of such unconstitutional “martial law”? Surely some would, simply to continue to receive their paychecks. And the extent of “police brutality” throughout this country, documented in often terrifying videos on the Internet, evidences the existence of all too many “law enforcement officers” who are ready, willing and able to oppress their countrymen with almost lunatic outbursts of violence that result in unpunished official homicides (or, as the vernacular has it, “death by cop”). “Martial law” would provide these psychopaths with the opportunity to vent their animalistic rage on a very wide scale. Here, too, as The Sword and Sovereignty explains, the solution to the problem would be revitalization of the Militia.

Daily Bell: What do you think of Chief Justice Roberts’s decision regarding Obamacare?

Edwin Vieira: Very little that is fit to print. It is an abomination, if I may be allowed a juxtaposition of letters in order to make a play on words. Roberts held that the so-called “individual mandate” in “Obamacare” – the supposed requirement for Americans to purchase health insurance which they do not want, or be penalized for their refusals – could not be sustained under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause or its Necessary and Proper Clause. Fine. That means that no substantive constitutional power exists that can rationalize that provision in “Obamacare.” But then he opined that, notwithstanding the absence of any such substantive power, “the individual mandate” can be enforced as a “tax.” What is the result of this aberrant reasoning? Namely, that Congress may, through the imposition of a “tax,” coerce Americans into behaving in any manner whatsoever, even though it admittedly enjoys no particular power to require such behavior. Furthermore, as we know, taxes are often enforced not only by the confiscation of money or other property but also by imprisonment. So the bottom line is that Congress can provide for the imprisonment of any and every American who refuses to obey any Congressional command to behave in a certain manner, even though Congress has no independent power whatsoever to require such behavior!

Obviously, this is far worse than the constitutionally crackpot notion that Congress can “regulate commerce” by coercing Americans to engage in “commerce” against their wills; for at least some forms of personal behavior do not constitute “commerce” (or even, to use the judiciary’s gibberish, “affect commerce”) by anyone’s definition, and therefore could never be subject to such a ludicrous misconstruction of Congressional power. Roberts’s “tax” theory, in contrast, embraces every conceivable form of behavior known to man, all of which can be compelled by the imposition of some “tax,” and in the final analysis by imprisonment. Thus, appealing to just one clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1), Roberts has concocted a rationalization for a complete totalitarian state! Even Alexander Hamilton, the most consistent and candid centralizer among the Founding Fathers, would have repudiated this theory in no uncertain terms. Even Stalin, I suspect, would have been surprised (albeit pleasantly) to discover that the power to tax, by itself alone, could be so employed. If this is not a perfect illustration of the utter imbecility of “judicial supremacy” – the notion that decisions of the Supreme Court control the meaning of the Constitution – nothing could be.

Daily Bell: Is the central banking system beginning to fail? Will it self-destruct? Is a global currency going to be established in the near future? Will it feature a commodity like gold?

Edwin Vieira: Yes, the present central banking system is in the process of catastrophic failure. And this is a matter of self-destruction because the problem derives from the inherent unworkability of fiat currency and fractional reserves, not simply from the incompetence of the particular individuals appointed to manage the system from time to time. Which is why the Money Power intends to introduce a new currency in the near future, just as in America the Money Power supplanted State bank notes with National Bank Notes in the 1860s, folded the National Banking System into the Federal Reserve System in 1913, then reneged on redemption of Federal Reserve Notes in gold in 1933 (domestically) and 1971 (internationally).

The formula has always been the same: As the paper-money and bank-credit scam implodes at a lower level, give the scheme a new lease on life by translating it to a higher level. But, in each case, the translation has required the promise – albeit one made to be broken – that the new currency will somehow be more stable than the one it replaces. So in a world increasingly disenchanted with and suspicious of irredeemable paper currencies, expect the new global currency to have some sort of gold veneer applied to it, so as to inspire unwarranted confidence amongst those uneducated in the long-term twists and turns of monetary and banking fraud.

I doubt, however, that the new scheme will allow for actual redemption of the new paper currency in gold for individuals (as did the Federal Reserve System prior to 1933) or even for central banks (as did the Federal Reserve System between 1933 and 1971), for the very last thing the Money Power wants is for individuals to recognize that gold itself is money, that paper currency is not really money at all but only an oft-repudiated promise by the bankers to pay gold and that the only true monetary security for any individual demands that he should always enjoy the legal right and should always exercise the physical ability to hold his own gold in his own hands whenever he so desires. Nonetheless, the integration of gold into the new system will gull many proponents of sound money into supporting the scheme. “See,” they will crow, “the bankers have been forced to return to a ‘gold standard’. We have won!” And that approbation will enable the bankers to impose upon the entire world another century or so of monetary manipulations, redistributions of wealth, Ponzi pyramids and associated financial frauds and other chicanery. Every time I hear some purported champion of sound money call for returning the Federal Reserve System to a “gold standard,” or for adopting a supra-national paper currency linked to a “gold standard,” I wonder how it is that one hundred years of sorry experience with the Federal Reserve System has taught these people absolutely nothing.

Daily Bell: What can one do on an individual level to combat the elite matrix that has been built around is?

Edwin Vieira: For starters, never passively accept that people in “authority” actually have the “authority” they claim. Never take at face value anything people in “authority” may say. Always investigate the nature of their “authority,” verify or falsify the purported bases for their “authority” and try to predict the likely untoward consequences of their exercises of “authority.” Hold all of their assertions and applications of “authority” up against the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and carefully gauge whatever disparities become apparent – and there will be many of them, you can be sure.

Daily Bell: Finally, are you more or less worried because of Obama’s re-election?

Edwin Vieira: I can supply no really satisfying answer to that question. On the one hand, that Obama received a majority of the votes could evidence a profound and dangerous split in the electorate between (i) the remnants of the population that still embrace semi-traditional American political values and (ii) an emergent, aggressive “social-democratic” bloc (that is, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism with a temporary human face). On the other hand, that Obama was running against Romney tends to dilute that concern because an approximately fifty-fifty split between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee can be interpreted to signify no more than that the electorate was basically indifferent to the candidates, insufficiently aware of the issues, inclined to vote more in line with evanescent media “spin” than with permanent ideological convictions and above all, inured to the political status quo.

Yet one’s hopes cannot be overly sanguine when one considers the likelihood (indeed, arguably the certainty) of a major national economic catastrophe breaking out within the next two or three years, and the already demonstrated propensity of Obama’s handlers to cause him to employ extra-legal devices, from sweeping executive orders to “official assassinations,” as a matter of course in “crisis” situations. Moreover, that Obama cannot seek re-election and therefore personally has nothing more to gain or lose politically, can only exacerbate the situation.

As the Chinese are wont to say, the next few years will be “interesting times,” indeed.

Daily Bell: Congratulations on your new book. Thanks!

Daily Bell After Thoughts

We’ve been doing this for 20 years or more and never have we run into this level of constitutional literacy – an understanding of REAL history married to growing anger as this remarkable litany of responses progresses.

Fortunately, we believe we have the kind of audience that shall appreciate what we’d characterize as a kind of tour de force.

Like someone launching a huge ship, we can do no more than hang back open-mouthed as Dr. Vierra takes to the sea with waves breaking timidly around him. This is a surprising spectacle. He makes the ramblings of supposed “constitutional scholars” such as Barack Obama look like the disconnected babble of infants.

Journalism is like yesterday’s newspapers, useful only unto the day. It is forgotten by tomorrow, as we all shall be. But perhaps Dr. Vierra shall not be forgotten. He is REALLY bearing witness to America’s decent into fascism and horror.

What is going in the US will not end well – or not for many – for the perpetrators are motivated by humankind’s worst characteristics: both greed and fear. They are greedy for the spoils of power but scared their actions shall be revealed.

And, of course, what we call the Internet Reformation is recording every aspect of their behavior.

Dr. Vierra and a few others like him are its scribes.

This bloody globalist episode will pass one day and a New Time will arrive. People will turn to Dr. Vierra among others to understand what went wrong and how and why.

We have listened to Dr. Vierra and thus have the melancholy privilege of knowing in advance.

Introduction: Dr. Vieira holds four degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) and J.D. (Harvard Law School). For over 36 years he has been a practicing attorney, specializing in cases that raise issues of constitutional law. He has presented numerous cases of import before the Supreme Court and written numerous monographs and articles in scholarly journals. His latest scholarly work is The Sword and Sovereignty (2012). Previous works include Constitutional "Homeland Security" (2007), a proposal to begin the revitalization of the constitutional Militia of the several states; Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (2d rev. ed. 2002), a comprehensive study of American monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective; and How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary (2004), an analysis of the problems of irresponsible "judicial supremacy" and how to deal with them. With well known libertarian trader Victor Sperandeo, he is also the co-author (under a nom de plume) of the political novel CRA$HMAKER: A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered "crash" of the Federal Reserve System, and the political revolution it causes.

Daily Bell: Thanks for sitting down with us again. Let’s jump right in with a discussion of your new book, The Sword and Sovereignty. Give us a synopsis, please. Where can people buy it?

Edwin Vieira: The Sword and Sovereignty is available at Amazon.com. It is a study of the actual constitutional "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" in the Second Amendment in its inextricable relation to "the Militia of the several States," as opposed to the historically inaccurate and legally indefensible so-called "individual right to keep and bear arms" on which almost all contemporary advocates of the Second Amendment fixate. I describe "the individual right to keep and bear arms" as legally indefensible because fundamentally it is a right in name only, inasmuch as it lacks an effective remedy if an highly organized and armed tyranny sets out to suppress it, whereas the true "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" exercised in the context of "well regulated Militia" is the Constitution’s own preferred remedy against usurpation and tyranny in their every aspect. Even though the Second Amendment is very much the subject of contemporary political debate, I seem to be one of the very few commentators saying as much — which, in these days of rampant legal and political confusion, misinformation and disinformation, is probably very convincing evidence that I am correct.

In any event, The Sword and Sovereignty breaks down into four parts: First, an analysis of the correct manner of interpreting the Constitution. Second, an application of the rules of constitutional interpretation to the question of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" in relation to "the Militia of the several States," elucidating the basic principles of the Militia through a thoroughgoing analysis of the pre-constitutional Militia statutes of the Colonies and independent States. Third, an application of the principles of the Militia, and especially of the duty (as well as the right) of all eligible Americans to be armed, to present-day problems of what is called "homeland security." And fourth, a warning that, should these principles not be applied in the very near future — immediately, if not sooner, as I like to put it — America will slip under the control of a national para-militarized police-state apparatus (which anyone with even the least insight should recognize is taking place at an ever-accelerating pace even as he reads these words). The book is heavily freighted with footnotes and endnotes identifying primary sources, so no one has to take my poor word alone for its premises and conclusions.

Daily Bell: What’s the response been?

Edwin Vieira: The Sword and Sovereignty was first made available in mid-December of 2012. It had to be put out on a CD in PDF format because there was insufficient interest shown among potential readers to justify producing a quality hardbound printed version (although that may become an option in the future). In light of the popularity of the subject matter of the book — the Second Amendment and related constitutional issues — that depth of disinterest really surprised me. But now, with all of the brouhaha over new, draconian "gun-control" legislation in the States as well as in Congress, the very slow sale of, and dearth of commentary about, the CD is more than surprising. It is shocking, even appalling. Especially so when more and more commentators, bloggers, and others on the Internet are recognizing, and correctly so, that the ultimate purpose of the Second Amendment is not to protect hunters or target shooters, or even to enable individuals to protect themselves against common criminals but instead to enable common Americans to resist the political crimes of usurpation and tyranny. Which, I believe, the historical record proves beyond peradventure cannot be accomplished through the exercise of an "individual right to keep and bear arms," but rather demands collective action through "the Militia of the several States."

Daily Bell: What was the most interesting thing you discovered while researching the book?

Edwin Vieira: The extent and depth of the evidence for the construction of the Second Amendment and the Militia Clauses of the original Constitution, which The Sword and Sovereignty lays out. Over the years, I have studied many aspects of pre-constitutional legal history; but as to no other matter is the historical record as complete, consistent and compelling as it is with respect to the Militia. The evidence supports the conclusions in the book beyond a reasonable doubt, which is far more than can be said about such matters taken as "legal gospel" today as the reach of the Supreme Court’s power of "judicial review" or of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.

Daily Bell: What are some of the fundamental conclusions?

Edwin Vieira: There are far too many to compile here. The five most consequential for the average man’s understanding of the present-day issue of "gun control" are that: (i) The maintenance of freedom depends inextricably upon the American people’s collective participation in "well regulated Militia," not upon individual action; (ii) "A well regulated Militia" is composed of nearly all of the eligible adult residents in a State, who are required by law to serve; (iii) Every member of such a Militia (other than conscientious objectors) must be armed with one or more firearms, ammunition and accoutrements suitable for Militia service, all of which must always be maintained in his personal possession; (iv) Because two of the most important responsibilities of the Militia are to repel invasions by foreign countries and to put down domestic usurpation and tyranny by rogue public officials, every armed member of the Militia must be equipped with a firearm suitable for those specific purposes — which means a firearm equivalent to, if not better than, the firearms contemporary regular armed forces bear: that is, not just a semi-automatic, magazine-fed rifle in 5.56 x 45 (.223) or 7.62 x 39 caliber, but a fully automatic or burst-fire rifle, preferable in a caliber more effective than the latter calibers, such as 6.5 x 38 Grendel (which can be made to work reliably on an AR-15 or M-16 platform); and (v) because "the Militia of the several States" are State governmental institutions, no contemporary form of "gun control" can be applied to them or their members by either Congress or the States’ legislatures. Rather, it is the duty of Congress and the States’ legislatures to see that all members of the Militia are properly armed, not to any degree disarmed. That is, as to the Militia and their members (which includes essentially all adult Americans), all forms of contemporary "gun control," including those of the Feinstein and Cuomo patterns (to name two of the more infamous poster-children for "gun control"), are absolutely unconstitutional.

Daily Bell: From your perspective, a free people is an armed people?

Edwin Vieira: It has nothing whatsoever to do with my personal "perspective," or my "opinion," or my "view." The Constitution tells us, in no uncertain terms, that a "well regulated Militia" is "necessary to the security of a free State." This is a declaration of law and historical fact — as well as an admonition — set out in the supreme law of the land, and therefore from a strictly legal perspective to be accepted and acted upon. It is also a first principle or axiom of American political philosophy. Had I a different "perspective," "opinion," or "view," I should to that extent be an opponent of the Constitution. And if I were in a position to attempt to impose that different, anti-constitutional "perspective," "opinion," or "view" on the American people by enacting legislation and enforcing it against them through the threats and assaults of jack-booted, uniformed, para-militarized thugs, then I should be, as well, a traitor (in the strict sense in which the Constitution defines "Treason" in Article III, Section 3, Clause 1).

Daily Bell: How can people with guns hold off the tanks (or "non-lethal" weapons) of a repressive government?

Edwin Vieira: This is a complex question because it incorporates so many implicit, unexamined and likely false assumptions. It probably is true that, even though many in overall number, individuals acting only in isolation, without coordination or even a common plan, cannot hold off rogue armed forces or even police agencies that are armed only with small arms, let alone tanks and other heavy weaponry. But the desired goal is not necessarily to win an all-out, once-and-for-all nationwide firefight but instead to deter usurpation and tyranny at their onset and grind their perpetrators down even if they are initially successful.

If Militia exist which could effectively resist aspiring usurpers and tyrants to any degree for any length of time, the usurpers and tyrants will be compelled to think twice about attempting to repress the people. Indeed, under such circumstances, the regular armed forces and police may themselves fracture: some supporting the rogue regime, others supporting the people. And, in the long run, the armed forces and police that remain on the side of the usurpers and tyrants may prove unable to suppress the people, their supposedly superior weaponry notwithstanding.

Look at Afghanistan. In more than ten years, the armed forces of the United States and their puppet "coalition partners" have been unable to defeat a rag-tag people’s army of cave-dwellers and primitive tribesmen armed with weaponry less effective than was used in World War I (no tanks, no planes, no heavy artillery, no poison gas and so on), in a land-locked country which receives no significant outside assistance.

Now, there are some 300 million people in the United States. Assume that 150 million are adults and that of these some 50 million, spread throughout a landmass than spans North America, would actively sympathize with and even personally participate in a resistance-movement. And remember that of these 50 million, most are already fairly well armed. The difficulty of suppressing this level of opposition, particularly when the resistance-fighters could directly attack the logistical support of the usurpers’ and tyrants’ puppet forces, would make Afghanistan look like a cakewalk.

Daily Bell: Do people need to form their own militias?

Edwin Vieira: If you mean do individuals need to form private militia, on their own, then the constitutional answer is an unequivocal NO. The constitutional Militia, "the Militia of the several States" incorporated in the original Constitution and the "well regulated Militia" to which the Second Amendment refers, are State governmental institutions or establishments. This is what imbues them with legal — indeed, constitutional — authority, which no private militia can possibly claim. Think about it: If the people on the south side of Main Street in Smalltown USA form their own private militia, and the people on the north side of Main Street form theirs, which one of them, perforce of its mere existence, can claim even a semblance of legal authority over the other, or over anyone else for that matter? Or are both of them — and any other armed groups that happen to coalesce in that area — of equal legal authority, so that no generally applicable system of law can be applied in that territory? In which case, one might conclude, there can be no legal authority there at all, just a multiplicity of Freikorps settling their inevitable differences by main force. Not a very pretty picture.

Daily Bell: What’s your take on the current gun control controversy?

Edwin Vieira: The present controversy — at least as it is being mis-argued in the media, both mainstream and alternative — can basically be characterized as two huge gas-bags colliding head-on, but with no real harm possibly done by or to either because neither articulates the issue actually at stake.

If the problem is viewed from the constitutionally true perspective of the Militia, then "gun control" of the familiar contemporary variety must be seen as legally impossible and politically perverse. Any form of "gun control" is illegitimate, on its face, if its intent or effect is to any degree to disarm the Militia because the Second Amendment declares that "[a] well regulated Militia" is "necessary to the security of a free State," any attack upon which is precluded (and therefore unreasonable) as a matter of law. And the original Constitution incorporates the Militia as integral components of its federal structure, with which neither the General Government nor the States may dispense. That is the end of the matter. Any other supposed merits or demerits of a particular "gun-control" proposal are simply irrelevant. If it undermines the Militia — as all contemporary "gun-control" schemes do, and are objectively intended to do — then such a scheme is out of bounds, absolutely and irretrievably. Period.

On the other hand, if the problem is viewed from the constitutionally false perspective of "the individual right to keep and bear arms," then "gun control" becomes a matter of what can be deemed "reasonable" in relation to something other than the maintenance of the Militia and "the security of a free State." Something, perhaps, with highly emotional appeal, such as guaranteeing the supposed "safety" of children from irresponsible, criminal, or insane individuals who somehow get their hands on guns. If "gun control" is aimed only at curtailing some vague "individual right" entirely separate from the Militia and the maintenance of "a free State" (which is inextricably tied to the Militia, not to any "individual right"), then why is it not perfectly "reasonable" to prohibit the possession of some sorts — indeed, many or even most sorts — of firearms, by some or even many sorts of putatively "dangerous" people, as long as individuals not within the prohibited classes are left with a few firearms with which arguably they can defend themselves as individuals against adventitious attacks by common criminals?

Why, the Feinsteins and Cuomos of this benighted country may ask with some semblance of cogency, does anyone "need" a supposedly dangerous semi-automatic rifle if he is not a member of an official institution with the responsibility to repel invasions (such as the Army) — which, according to the dogma of "the individual right to keep and bear arms," most individuals are not? Conversely, if one is a member of such an institution — as most adult Americans are (or should be) with respect to the Militia — then the question the Feinsteins and the Cuomos pose lacks not simply cogency but even logic and legitimacy. It becomes a question which might be asked appropriately in North Korea but never here in America.

Daily Bell: What’s the most critical problem facing America right now? Previously you claimed it was authoritarianism and a growing police state.

Edwin Vieira: Claimed?! I have "claimed" nothing. As a political and legal scientist, I have observed and reported on my observations, which is an entirely different matter. Moreover, anyone who cannot and does not make the selfsame observations needs to have his political eyes examined.

America’s national para-military police state is not simply "growing"; it has grown to fantastic proportions. Why else do you imagine that I am devoting the last years of my life to promoting the revitalization of the Militia? Nostalgia for the by-gone Colonial era? When the Executive Department of the General Government declares, as it has today, that nameless, faceless bureaucrats can order the assassinations of Americans, anywhere in the world, on the basis of the mere suspicion that the targets are somehow allied with "terrorists" or other "enemies," and no other department of the General Government or the States at any level of the federal system challenges that declaration, then America has degenerated into a politically putrescent state beyond mere "authoritarianism." This condition constitutes a species of legal nihilism with which, heretofore, only monsters such as Caligula and Hitler were associated. For if one’s life can be stripped from him under such circumstances, what other rights does he retain? None, as all rights inevitably depend upon the right to life itself. And if such an individual — indeed, every American — retains no rights, because the theory of "official assassinations" embraces essentially anyone and everyone who might be denounced from within the bowels of the bureaucracy as an "enemy combatant," then what limits exist to rogue public officials’ powers? None. This is totalitarianism with a vengeance.

Daily Bell: We mentioned directed history the last time we spoke, and you indicated that in your view a "paper-money oligarchy" was at least one group organizing this kind of history. These are basically banking families and their enablers based in Britain and Europe with military and intelligence arms (along with other such families) in Israel and the US. Why are they busy in Africa creating wars? Is it because their credit scheme is in the final stages of Ponzi self-destruction, as you indicated? Has that advanced in the past two years?

Edwin Vieira: What I might describe as "intermediate Ponzi banking pyramids," based upon national or regional central banks — namely, the Federal Reserve System and the European Central Bank — are shaking themselves to pieces, as all such Ponzi schemes eventually must. As a result, "the paper-money oligarchy" will now try to salvage the basic system by elevating it to a global level with some sort of world central bank, perhaps based upon the IMF. This may prove difficult if not impossible to accomplish if the Chinese, for example, cannot be cajoled or coerced into joining or at least acquiescing in such an operation. At present, that does not seem likely. The Chinese appear to be staking out a position based upon competition with, rather than complicity in, any new global paper-money-and-credit scam run by the "Western" elites. So those elites are taking defensive measures to shore up their position, based upon their realization that the purpose of all paper-money-and-credit schemes is not simply to manipulate paper "obligations," "claims," and misnamed "assets," but instead to redistribute real wealth from the unsuspecting members of society at large to the manipulators and their cronies and clients.

Ultimately, real wealth consists of human labor and natural resources. Africa is awash in critical natural resources; and the potential for enserfing its native populations as docile workers under puppet "governments" controlled by the "Western" elites makes those resources even more valuable. So the military conflicts in Africa now being billed as parts of "the war on terrorism" are actually parts of a "war of terrorism" intended to destabilize the region, introduce "Western" neo-colonialism and thus preempt the Chinese from obtaining an economic or political foothold in the area.

Daily Bell: We spoke about dominant social themes and how they are used by this power elite. What have you noticed about their fear-based promotions? Are they more powerful than ever or are they losing their power to convince?

Edwin Vieira: A little of both. We observe with the present orchestrated hysteria over "gun control" — all of which is based upon promoting irrational fear of and loathing for firearms amongst the general populace — that, although many Americans are being swayed by the elitists’ propaganda and agitation, perhaps even more Americans are not: The more the elitists scream for radical "gun control," the more common Americans listen to the real subliminal message in these rants, and the more firearms and ammunition they amass.

On the other side, though, the elitists have successfully imparted a subtle twist to their propaganda and agitation: At first, "the party line" was simply that Americans must fear "terrorists" from abroad, and therefore must surrender some of their freedoms to a nascent national para-military police-state apparatus. To this was soon added the supposed necessity for Americans to fear "domestic terrorists" (such as their fellow countrymen who support the Constitution, advocate the restoration of sound money and possess firearms), coupled with the necessity for Americans to surrender even more of their freedoms to a burgeoning police state. Most recently, the theme has shifted to the utterly discordant note that Americans must fear their own "government" most of all but can do nothing about its ever-more-abusive inroads into their remaining freedoms because, with all of the political, economic, and military power at its disposal, "the government" cannot be effectively opposed, no matter what excesses it may commit.

This at least has the advantage of bringing the discussion into concordance with the true meaning of words, inasmuch as the very first definition of "terrorism" in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (the standard reference for American English) as well as in The Oxford English Dictionary (the standard reference for English generally) is none other than "government by intimidation." But it also points up the psychotic nature of the "national debate" being foisted upon us: namely, that (at least according to the elitists and their touts) Americans’ only defense against "terrorism" is to acquiesce in the worst sort of "terrorism." If this is not the best argument for revitalizing "the Militia of the several States," immediately if not sooner, then what is?

Daily Bell: What is a nation? Are they necessary?

Edwin Vieira: These are typical of open-ended questions the complete answers to which would require volumes. Suffice it to say here that nations must have been sufficient, if not absolutely necessary, for some historical purposes of general significance, or they would never have arisen let alone assumed such importance throughout the world. Today, if they did not already exist, they should be created for the specific purpose of opposing globalism.

True, throughout history many nations have been guilty of all sorts of crimes and other wrongdoing. But because of the multiplicity of nations, various "alliances" and "balances of power" among them have tended to deter, defend against, or mitigate many of the worst potentials and consequences of nationalistic hubris, aggression, imperialism and kindred disorders. Under a globalist regime, conversely, such "alliances" and "balances of power" will, by hypothesis, be impossible. For that reason, a globalist regime will usher in the possibility — and, I should suspect from the plans and pronouncements of contemporary globalists themselves, the likelihood — of the most horrific tyranny from which mankind has ever suffered.

There being no other effective defensive measures that can be interposed against globalism in time to interfere with its proponents’ schedule, nations and national sovereignty are necessary. That is especially true with respect to Americans, in particular. For our Declaration of Independence announced that Americans have "assume[d] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them." The last time I looked, the Declaration of Independence had not been rescinded.

Daily Bell: Is it possible the Colonial period was merely a prelude to globalism? In other words, that nations had to be created before globalism could occur? Too paranoid?

Edwin Vieira: I should think such a conclusion would go far beyond paranoia. Do you mean to suggest that globalism is a consciously elaborated project, going back literally centuries, in which one intermediate stage has been the creation of independent nations for the very purpose of destroying those nations at some indeterminate time in the future? If so, who are this project’s original architects? And how have they recruited followers true to the cause over the centuries? What is the evidence for such speculations? Are we to give credence and credit to (say) the musings of such as Francis Bacon, who proposed the establishment of "an universal republic" several hundred years ago?

To be sure, the contemporary globalist movement can attempt to take advantage of the existence of nations, which provides possibly ready-made building-blocks for the construction of some globalist edifice — as, for instance, by incorporation of individual nations into a multi-national organization such as the United Nations which can serve as a predecessor to the final globalist structure. This, however, is as likely to be historical happenstance — nations are available for such use, so why not use them — as it is to be the result of some long-range plan the origins of which are obscured in the mists of time.

Nations, moreover, are obviously two-edged swords in this duel for political power between themselves and the globalists. True enough, nations could conceivably be finagled into becoming stepping-stones to globalism, by coopting them in international organizations, then transmogrifying those organizations into supra-national organizations, then simply eliminating the nations as independent sovereignties, then wiping out international borders and their political, economic, and legal significance entirely — especially if traitorous political leaders could be coopted, bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise convinced or coerced to connive or cooperate with the globalist steering-committee. But the various nations’ peoples, and even some of their political leaders, also might balk at being dragooned into a globalist regime that reduces them to pawns on the elitists’ political chessboard; and they might then assert national sovereignty — and the legal, political, economic and especially military power that goes with it — in forcible opposition to globalism.

Daily Bell: The power elite uses false flags to promote global control. Is one of their goals gun control?

Edwin Vieira: Always. As Mao Tse-tung correctly observed. "[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun." The Second Amendment makes the same point but with a special political and ethical gloss: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." In America, the guns are supposed to reside in We the People’s hands, in order that "a free State" — not "a police state" — may be maintained. So, for Americans in particular to be brought under the globalists’ control — a boot stamping on a human face forever, as Orwell described the situation in his novel 1984 — they must first be disarmed, as other peoples subjected to oppression throughout history have been disarmed.

"False flags" — in the sense of shocking events, sometimes manufactured, sometime perhaps spontaneous — have become the preferred vehicles today for stampeding the populace into "gun control" of one variety or another. It is almost as if the political actors were working off the same dog-eared B-movie script in scene after scene. Which, thankfully, is why these "false flags" are becoming increasingly less credible, and the American people increasingly less credulous.

Daily Bell: Was Barack Obama re-elected legitimately or was there a lot of voter fraud?

Edwin Vieira: Doubtlessly voter fraud was pervasive in the last election, as it has been in many others, to the disgrace of this country. More to the point, however, is whether Barack Obama was even constitutionally eligible to stand for election or re-election in the first place. Did his putative father’s British citizenship (as a resident of Kenya) disqualify Obama as a matter of law, even if in fact he was born within the United States? Did he become an Indonesian citizen when he was relocated there as a child; and, if so, did he as an adult ever reassert his supposed American birth-citizenship when he returned to the United States? As an adult in the United States did he seek educational benefits on the basis that he was a foreign student?

Why are these and related questions not being asked, let alone answered, either in Congress or in the courts? How is it that you and I must submit to a comprehensive background check before we can purchase a single firearm, but this fellow, whose origins, peregrinations and other personal details are purposefully being sequestered from public scrutiny at very great expense in attorneys’ fees, can have his finger on the proverbial "nuclear trigger" and thereby threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and no one in public office seems to be concerned?

Daily Bell: What was your feeling regarding Ron Paul’s campaign? Were you surprised at the way it ended?

Edwin Vieira: I was hardly surprised at the manner in which the Republican Party big-shots systematically stabbed Ron Paul in the back. I was disappointed, though, that after such shoddy treatment Dr. Paul did not bolt from the Republican Party and run for the Presidency on a "fusion ticket" composed of the Constitution Party, the Libertarian Party and other splinter-parties that might have created the foundation for a true second party in this country, as well as consigned the Republican Party to the dustbin of history once and for all. Such a "fusion ticket" might not have won the 2012 election, just as the original Republican Party did not win the first Presidential election it contested in 1856. But, once formed, "the fusion ticket" could have become a formidable force in 2016 and thereafter. Now, the necessary work has to be begun all over again.

Daily Bell: Will there be a successful states’ rights movement — or even secession?

Edwin Vieira: I believe that "secession" — the assertion by a State of a right to remove herself from the Constitution’s federal system on her own recognizance — is unconstitutional. I have a long series of articles on this subject posted in my archive at Newswithviews.com. And even if such a form of "secession" were not unconstitutional, or some other arguably legal form of "secession" were tried, the exercise would be futile at the present time because no State is prepared to deal with the primary consequences of "secession." How, for example, could a State successfully "secede" economically if she remained tied to the Federal Reserve System’s phony regime of paper currency and unlimited bank credit? Obviously, as a precondition to "secession" a State would have to adopt an alternative currency entirely independent of the Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury Department. Has that been done anywhere? No.

Moreover, how could a State expect to "secede" politically if rogue agents of the General Government could enter her territory at will and attempt to enforce that government’s statutes, regulations and executive orders on her citizens? Obviously, as a precondition to "secession" a State would have to revitalize her Militia, in order to be able to interpose against such assaults on her own sovereignty and on her people’s lives, liberties, and property. But has that been done anywhere? Again, no. So in the absence of these necessary preliminary steps (and many others, too), talk of "secession" is plainly little more than the expulsion of hot air.

The assertion of the States’ special constitutional status within the federal system — what is often described as "States’ rights" — is another matter, though. Many opportunities for asserting the States’ special status now exist. The problem, of course, is that the General Government’s courts are ready, willing and able to attempt to nullify these assertions of federalism by invoking an overly expansive misconstruction of the Constitution’s "supremacy clause" (Article VI, Clause 2). So if the States are serious about protecting and promoting their rights and the rights of their people, at some point in the near future they will have to reject the notion that the General Government’s courts, or any department of that government, or all of them acting in unison, are the final arbiters of what the Constitution means. Indeed, this should be obvious. The General Government is merely the agent of the people, not the people’s master. The people are the principal. On what theory of agency is the principal required to accept the agent’s unilateral, self-serving and possibly corrupt determination of what the agent’s powers are, thereby effectively subordinating the principal to the agent? To be sure, this is the twisted formula usurpers and tyrants invariably employ in drawing all powers to themselves, at the expense of the people. But to contend that it is a principle, precept, or permissible interpretation of the Constitution is at best a nice piece of effrontery to which no American should give credence, if not a rotten piece of political treachery, which every American should condemn and oppose.

Daily Bell: You were a bit doubtful of the Internet’s effect last time we spoke, saying it was full of misinformation. What’s your take on that now?

Edwin Vieira: As far as I can tell, that particular problem has become worse. Today, the Internet is inundated not only with misinformation posted by the ignorant and the insouciant but also with carefully crafted disinformation posted by professional trolls and agents provocateurs. That does not mean that useful information is not to be found but only that one must use a very great deal of discernment in uncovering it, particularly if the subject is politically "controversial" (that is, runs against the grain of the elitists’ party line). The great value of the Internet remains, however, that unlike books, which are costly and time-consuming to print and then may not be immediately accessible to the people who need to read them, the Internet allows for the almost instant posting and retrieval of information. So I remain cautiously optimistic.

Daily Bell: What’s going on with Afghanistan? It doesn’t appear that the war is going well for the elites.

Edwin Vieira: Except, of course, with respect to the reintroduction of the cultivation of and trade in opiates, which seems to be a smashing success. As I pointed out earlier in this interview, however, the quagmire in Afghanistan does give the lie to the elitists’ claim that rebellious peoples will always be helpless in the face of the modern technology, which contemporary armed forces can deploy against them.

Daily Bell: Any news on the martial law front as regards the US? Does Obama have it in mind? Would law enforcement cooperate?

Edwin Vieira: I doubt that Obama, personally, has anything in mind with respect to "martial law" (or any other subject you might mention). His handlers, however, doubtlessly are considering the invocation of some variety of "martial law" if the banking and financial systems collapse, with subsequent economic stringencies, social dislocations and civil unrest and disobedience spreading throughout America. And they are not reluctant to have their mouthpieces suggest in various fora the possibility or even likelihood of "martial law," doubtlessly in order to condition common Americans into acquiescing in its inevitability. A chapter in The Sword and Sovereignty deals in great detail with the question of "martial law" in all of its ramifications. The bottom line is that the type of "martial law" commonly presented as a political possibility in America is actually a constitutional impossibility, and would be a practical impossibility were "the Militia of the several States" revitalized.

Would "law enforcement" cooperate in the imposition of such unconstitutional "martial law"? Surely some would, simply to continue to receive their paychecks. And the extent of "police brutality" throughout this country, documented in often terrifying videos on the Internet, evidences the existence of all too many "law enforcement officers" who are ready, willing and able to oppress their countrymen with almost lunatic outbursts of violence that result in unpunished official homicides (or, as the vernacular has it, "death by cop"). "Martial law" would provide these psychopaths with the opportunity to vent their animalistic rage on a very wide scale. Here, too, as The Sword and Sovereignty explains, the solution to the problem would be revitalization of the Militia.

Daily Bell: What do you think of Chief Justice Roberts’s decision regarding Obamacare?

Edwin Vieira: Very little that is fit to print. It is an abomination, if I may be allowed a juxtaposition of letters in order to make a play on words. Roberts held that the so-called "individual mandate" in "Obamacare" — the supposed requirement for Americans to purchase health insurance which they do not want, or be penalized for their refusals — could not be sustained under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause or its Necessary and Proper Clause. Fine. That means that no substantive constitutional power exists that can rationalize that provision in "Obamacare." But then he opined that, notwithstanding the absence of any such substantive power, "the individual mandate" can be enforced as a "tax." What is the result of this aberrant reasoning? Namely, that Congress may, through the imposition of a "tax," coerce Americans into behaving in any manner whatsoever, even though it admittedly enjoys no particular power to require such behavior. Furthermore, as we know, taxes are often enforced not only by the confiscation of money or other property but also by imprisonment. So the bottom line is that Congress can provide for the imprisonment of any and every American who refuses to obey any Congressional command to behave in a certain manner, even though Congress has no independent power whatsoever to require such behavior!

Obviously, this is far worse than the constitutionally crackpot notion that Congress can "regulate commerce" by coercing Americans to engage in "commerce" against their wills; for at least some forms of personal behavior do not constitute "commerce" (or even, to use the judiciary’s gibberish, "affect commerce") by anyone’s definition, and therefore could never be subject to such a ludicrous misconstruction of Congressional power. Roberts’s "tax" theory, in contrast, embraces every conceivable form of behavior known to man, all of which can be compelled by the imposition of some "tax," and in the final analysis by imprisonment. Thus, appealing to just one clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1), Roberts has concocted a rationalization for a complete totalitarian state! Even Alexander Hamilton, the most consistent and candid centralizer among the Founding Fathers, would have repudiated this theory in no uncertain terms. Even Stalin, I suspect, would have been surprised (albeit pleasantly) to discover that the power to tax, by itself alone, could be so employed. If this is not a perfect illustration of the utter imbecility of "judicial supremacy" — the notion that decisions of the Supreme Court control the meaning of the Constitution — nothing could be.

Daily Bell: Is the central banking system beginning to fail? Will it self-destruct? Is a global currency going to be established in the near future? Will it feature a commodity like gold?

Edwin Vieira: Yes, the present central banking system is in the process of catastrophic failure. And this is a matter of self-destruction because the problem derives from the inherent unworkability of fiat currency and fractional reserves, not simply from the incompetence of the particular individuals appointed to manage the system from time to time. Which is why the Money Power intends to introduce a new currency in the near future, just as in America the Money Power supplanted State bank notes with National Bank Notes in the 1860s, folded the National Banking System into the Federal Reserve System in 1913, then reneged on redemption of Federal Reserve Notes in gold in 1933 (domestically) and 1971 (internationally).

The formula has always been the same: As the paper-money and bank-credit scam implodes at a lower level, give the scheme a new lease on life by translating it to a higher level. But, in each case, the translation has required the promise — albeit one made to be broken — that the new currency will somehow be more stable than the one it replaces. So in a world increasingly disenchanted with and suspicious of irredeemable paper currencies, expect the new global currency to have some sort of gold veneer applied to it, so as to inspire unwarranted confidence amongst those uneducated in the long-term twists and turns of monetary and banking fraud.

I doubt, however, that the new scheme will allow for actual redemption of the new paper currency in gold for individuals (as did the Federal Reserve System prior to 1933) or even for central banks (as did the Federal Reserve System between 1933 and 1971), for the very last thing the Money Power wants is for individuals to recognize that gold itself is money, that paper currency is not really money at all but only an oft-repudiated promise by the bankers to pay gold and that the only true monetary security for any individual demands that he should always enjoy the legal right and should always exercise the physical ability to hold his own gold in his own hands whenever he so desires. Nonetheless, the integration of gold into the new system will gull many proponents of sound money into supporting the scheme. "See," they will crow, "the bankers have been forced to return to a ‘gold standard’. We have won!" And that approbation will enable the bankers to impose upon the entire world another century or so of monetary manipulations, redistributions of wealth, Ponzi pyramids and associated financial frauds and other chicanery. Every time I hear some purported champion of sound money call for returning the Federal Reserve System to a "gold standard," or for adopting a supra-national paper currency linked to a "gold standard," I wonder how it is that one hundred years of sorry experience with the Federal Reserve System has taught these people absolutely nothing.

Daily Bell: What can one do on an individual level to combat the elite matrix that has been built around is?

Edwin Vieira: For starters, never passively accept that people in "authority" actually have the "authority" they claim. Never take at face value anything people in "authority" may say. Always investigate the nature of their "authority," verify or falsify the purported bases for their "authority" and try to predict the likely untoward consequences of their exercises of "authority." Hold all of their assertions and applications of "authority" up against the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and carefully gauge whatever disparities become apparent — and there will be many of them, you can be sure.

Daily Bell: Finally, are you more or less worried because of Obama’s re-election?

Edwin Vieira: I can supply no really satisfying answer to that question. On the one hand, that Obama received a majority of the votes could evidence a profound and dangerous split in the electorate between (i) the remnants of the population that still embrace semi-traditional American political values and (ii) an emergent, aggressive "social-democratic" bloc (that is, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism with a temporary human face). On the other hand, that Obama was running against Romney tends to dilute that concern because an approximately fifty-fifty split between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee can be interpreted to signify no more than that the electorate was basically indifferent to the candidates, insufficiently aware of the issues, inclined to vote more in line with evanescent media "spin" than with permanent ideological convictions and above all, inured to the political status quo.

Yet one’s hopes cannot be overly sanguine when one considers the likelihood (indeed, arguably the certainty) of a major national economic catastrophe breaking out within the next two or three years, and the already demonstrated propensity of Obama’s handlers to cause him to employ extra-legal devices, from sweeping executive orders to "official assassinations," as a matter of course in "crisis" situations. Moreover, that Obama cannot seek re-election and therefore personally has nothing more to gain or lose politically, can only exacerbate the situation.

As the Chinese are wont to say, the next few years will be "interesting times," indeed.

Daily Bell: Congratulations on your new book. Thanks!

Daily Bell After Thoughts

We’ve been doing this for 20 years or more and never have we run into this level of constitutional literacy – an understanding of REAL history married to growing anger as this remarkable litany of responses progresses.

Fortunately, we believe we have the kind of audience that shall appreciate what we’d characterize as a kind of tour de force.

Like someone launching a huge ship, we can do no more than hang back open-mouthed as Dr. Vierra takes to the sea with waves breaking timidly around him. This is a surprising spectacle. He makes the ramblings of supposed "constitutional scholars" such as Barack Obama look like the disconnected babble of infants.

Journalism is like yesterday’s newspapers, useful only unto the day. It is forgotten by tomorrow, as we all shall be. But perhaps Dr. Vierra shall not be forgotten. He is REALLY bearing witness to America’s decent into fascism and horror.

What is going in the US will not end well – or not for many – for the perpetrators are motivated by humankind’s worst characteristics: both greed and fear. They are greedy for the spoils of power but scared their actions shall be revealed.

And, of course, what we call the Internet Reformation is recording every aspect of their behavior.

Dr. Vierra and a few others like him are its scribes.

This bloody globalist episode will pass one day and a New Time will arrive. People will turn to Dr. Vierra among others to understand what went wrong and how and why.

We have listened to Dr. Vierra and thus have the melancholy privilege of knowing in advance.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Peter Schiff is CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc. and Euro Pacific Precious Metals, LLC. He is an internationally recognized economist specializing in the foreign equity, currency and gold markets. Mr. Schiff frequently delivers lectures at major economic and investment conferences, and is quoted often in the print media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Barron’s, BusinessWeek, Time, and Fortune. His broadcast credits include regular guest appearances on CNBC, FOX Business, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel, as well as hosting a daily radio show, The Peter Schiff Show. Mr. Schiff is also the author of several bestselling books, including: Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit from the Economic Collapse and the illustrated parable, How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes. His latest bestseller, The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy – How to Save Yourself and Your Country, was released in May 2012.

Daily Bell: Peter, thanks for sitting down again with us again. Please introduce yourself and your firm for those who don’t know you.

Peter Schiff: My name is Peter Schiff. I have several companies; the largest one is Euro Pacific Capital and also in the US I have Euro Pacific Precious Metals.

Daily Bell: Talk about your father, who is now in jail as a tax protestor. How is he doing?

Peter Schiff: He’s hanging in there. He’s 84. He turns 85 next month. I think he’s a political prisoner. He’s in jail not because he really violated the law but because he represented a threat to the government’s illegal collection of income taxes. So I think it’s very unfortunate that my father is in jail and I think it says a lot about the character of our country when we can have a political prisoner.

Daily Bell: You ran for office, but it didn’t work out. Are you finished with politics? What do you think of the political system?

Peter Schiff: I ran for office once. I was in the primary for the US Senate. I ran in a pretty blue state, Connecticut, so even if I had won the primary it would have been a difficult challenge to win the general election. The person who beat me, Linda McMahon, lost. In fact, she lost twice. She spent about $100 million and still couldn’t win the election.

I have no idea whether or not I’ll try it again and whether or not I’ll try it again in Connecticut or maybe I’ll try from another state. I certainly might move out of Connecticut. They’re raising taxes here in Connecticut so one day I might live in a more tax-friendly state. And also, those states might tend to have a greater chance of electing somebody like me. But you never know; you never say never. I have no immediate plans to run for anything.

Daily Bell: Bring us up to date about Euro Pacific Capital Inc. [a broker/dealer based in Westport, Connecticut] and its ongoing success.

Peter Schiff: Euro Pacific Capital is a brokerage firm. We work with mainly American investors and help them diversify globally, invest in foreign stocks and bonds. We also work with US opportunities as well. But I think the biggest threat that most Americans face is a collapse in the value of the dollar and so I think to mitigate the loss of purchasing power that will result from that you really need to look abroad and concentrate in countries that have currencies that will hold more of their value, where the governments are not pursuing policies that are as destructive as the ones that we’re pursuing here. I think universally, though, politicians in all countries are doing foolish things. We don’t have a monopoly on stupidity here in America but we’ve certainly raised it to a higher level than most countries. So I think Americans have to protect themselves. We also deal with commodities and precious metals, things of that nature.

Daily Bell: Tell us about The Peter Schiff Show.

Peter Schiff: It’s a radio show that I do, on the Internet at schiffradio.com. It’s also syndicated nationally. We’re on maybe 50 or 60 stations right now, mostly smaller markets but we’re starting to get some traction at getting some bigger markets to carry the show. Hopefully, we’ll have more and more stations picking it up as the year progresses.

I’m hoping to make a much bigger impact. Right now it’s pretty much preaching to the choir. I think the people who listen to the show are primarily people who follow me anyway and who appreciate listening to me everyday to get my take on what’s going on but I’m hoping to broaden my reach. That’s the whole purpose for the show, to try to get this message to a wider audience. And as more stations pick up the show, hopefully we’ll be able to accomplish that.

We do it live from 10:00 a.m. to noon Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. Of course, you don’t have to listen live. It’s great if you do because you can call in but you can also listen to the show later. We repeat it; there’s a loop that continuously runs each day so if you don’t listen live you can certainly listen to the rebroadcast.

Daily Bell: Are you still bearish on the dollar and bullish on investment in tangible assets?

Peter Schiff: Oh, very much so. Everything that’s happening just makes me even more confident that my bearish forecast is correct. For example, the House just voted to suspend the debt ceiling, which makes it easier for the government to create dollars, and the more dollars they print, the less they’re going to be worth. And I think now that we have cleared the way for much bigger deficits in the future. We’re going to have a lot more money printing when the Fed monetizes them. And so the dollar’s days are numbered. How many days are in that number? That I don’t know but I do know that you want to prepare for its demise and that’s what I’m helping people do.

Daily Bell: Tells us about Euro Pacific Precious Metals.

Peter Schiff: That’s my precious metals company. I sell individual investors gold and silver for physical delivery. We sell bullion bars and coins. We don’t sell numismatics. I think a lot of Americans have been fooled by some of my competitors into buying rare coins rather than just gold and silver. Most people who want to buy gold and silver are looking for an inflation hedge and they call up a gold firm looking to buy Maple Leafs or things like that but they end up being sold a rare coin, a collectible coin, on the guise that it would be a better investment.

But it’s not a better investment. It’s just a much bigger commission for the broker who sells it. The markups are horrific. In many cases they exceed 50 percent – 60, 70 percent markups are commonplace, meaning that if you want to buy $6,000 worth of gold you’ve got to send a check for $10,000 and $4,000 of it is commission. And what has to happen is the price of gold has to really double before you can even sell your coins and get your original investment back.

So we don’t do that at my firm and that’s the reason I set it up. Too many people were being conned by salesmen into buying these overpriced collectibles and being talked out of legitimate gold investment. We only sell legitimate investments. The markups are very small; they average maybe about 2% above our cost and so you don’t need a doubling in the price of gold to break even. You just need a small movement in the price of gold. And, of course, I’m expecting a much larger movement in the price of gold, which is the reason I have and keep owning it in the first place.

In fact, I’ve got a special report people might want to download. I put it up for free on the Internet. Just go to goldscams.com and in my special report that you can download I go over all the scams, the popular cons that are being used by a lot of the gold companies to fleece their clients out of their money. So if you read that you’ll know what to be on the lookout for.

Daily Bell: Are physical metals a good buy? Which is better right now, gold or silver?

Peter Schiff: I think they’re both good. I think you’re seeing pullbacks already in both. I think if I’m correct on what I think is going to happen the price of silver, percentage-wise, will probably go up more than the price of gold. But recognize that if I’m wrong then silver prices will probably go down more than gold prices. So you get more risk upside in silver but you probably also have more downside. That’s generally the way it works in the investment world; the more gain if you’re right; the more you can lose if you’re wrong.

I think Americans should have both. I think it makes sense for people to have both gold and silver as an alternative to dollars or other fiat currencies. The dollar isn’t the only flawed fiat currency. I think we just have a larger flaw than most. But I think everybody needs to be worried, no matter where they live. Central banks everywhere are printing too much money. Interest rates are too low everywhere. There’s too much inflation and people need to protect themselves. Gold and silver represent an excellent way to do that.

Daily Bell: Is silver money or just gold, historically speaking?

Peter Schiff: Well, both. In the United States the Founding Fathers put us on a bimetallic standard. If you look at the Constitution, both gold and silver were established as money in the United States and gold and silver circulated as money in this country for most of its history. We went off the gold standard in 1971 and we basically took silver out of our coins in 1964, 1965. So we pretty much followed the Constitution for most of our history but we abandoned it, of course, eventually, and that’s the reason for our downfall. We are no longer operating under the rules that our Founding Fathers set up. We became a wealthy nation, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, because the Constitution limited the size of government, and we had sound money.

Well, we destroyed the Constitution. Now we have fiat money, we have a massive government that gets bigger and bigger and bigger, we have the exact opposite type of nation that the Founding Fathers created for us and now we’re having the opposite result. We’re now broke. We’re now the world’s biggest debtor nation, we’re hemorrhaging red ink, our standard of living is falling and it’s about to collapse.

Daily Bell: Does one need to be careful when buying gold and silver generally?

Peter Schiff: Yes. First of all, you want to make sure that you’re actually getting gold and silver. You don’t want to have something else. So you want to deal with a reputable dealer and you want to buy products that you can trust from a dealer that you can trust like Euro Pacific Precious Metals. If you buy a recognizable coin or bar from a reliable mint or issuer then you can be confident that you own real gold and silver and not just some other kind of base metal that’s just coated with the gold or silver.

But you want to not buy numismatics unless you want to collect coins. You can be a coin collector just like you can be a stamp collector or a baseball card collector, any kind of memorabilia. People collect art. But it’s different than being an investor in gold and silver because a rare coin is valuable because of its rarity, not because it’s made of gold or silver. People want it because it’s rare. Just like if you want to invest in paper you don’t buy a rare baseball card because it’s made of paper. The paper has got nothing to do with the value of the card. You can buy a rare gold coin and you can pay $20,000 for it, $50,000, even though it might only have $1,500 worth of gold. The gold is immaterial to the value of the coin. Just like a char is made out of wood but it doesn’t mean you’re investing in wood and lumber when you buy a chair. You’re buying a chair. So if you want to be a coin collector that’s one thing but it’s difficult to make money and the spreads are very wide. The difference that you pay between the bid and the ask.

But I think if we have a real collapse in the US economy with lots of inflation I would expect rare coins to lose value relatively. People who own coin collections might have to sell their coins because they lost money someplace else. And so I think if you really feel that there’s going to be a lot of inflation and a weak economy you don’t want to start a coin collection; you want to own just gold and silver. So you want to buy coins that are made of gold and silver where the price you pay closely approximates the value of the gold and silver in the coin.

If you buy a one ounce gold coin and gold’s $1600 an ounce, if you’re paying $1640, $1650 you’re getting your money’s worth. If you pay $5,000, $10,000 to get a one ounce gold coin the price that you’re paying has very little to do with the value of the gold that’s in the coin. But the reason the gold and silver dealers try to talk people out of buying a bullion coin as opposed to a rare coin is the markups in the bullion coins are 1%, 2%, 3% tops whereas their markup is 50%, 60%, 70%, 100% when they sell you the so-called rare coins.

And I even say "so-called rare" because most of the coins that are being marketed as rare aren’t rare at all. They’re actually quite common and in reality they have very little numismatic value. They’re just marking these things up so enormously. So even if you want to buy legitimate rare coins, the last place you want to buy them is from a lot of these firms that are advertising on TV because even what they’re selling isn’t rare at all. And if you are a collector the last thing you would want to buy is a circulated French rooster or a British sovereign. Those are no more rare than junk silver coins – quarters and dimes – that you can buy for pretty much their melt value.

So you want to realize that the salesman has a big interest in switching you over into one of these coins and they try to tell you that, "Well, the reason to buy it is because if the government ever confiscates gold or silver they’re not going to confiscate these coins," and I just think that’s a bunch of BS. I don’t know if the government is ever going to confiscate gold and silver but if they do they’re going to confiscate everything, including those coins.

Daily Bell: What about commemoratives?

Peter Schiff: This is also kind of like a scam because these commemoratives aren’t rare at all. The mint issues them like hotcakes. What makes something rare is its scarcity. If you buy a coin that was minted 100 years ago and it wasn’t minted as a collectible, it was minted as an actual coin but a few people maybe set them aside and never used them so now maybe there’s five or ten of them left in the world, then those are legitimately rare and some collector will pay a lot of money to possess something that hardly anybody else has. But all these proof sets that are being made today will never be rare and so they don’t really have any value other than to somebody who doesn’t know any better and buys them.

But the thing is, if you buy a freshly minted coin it’s in proof condition even if it’s not a proof set. There’s really no difference between a brand new, just minted coin and one that’s in a little plastic box that says "proof set." It’s the same thing yet you pay a huge markup for it when you buy it but if you try to sell it you’re not going to get any more money than any other silver coin. So you don’t want to buy anything that’s marketed as being a proof, a collectible. All you’re going to do is overpay for it and make somebody’s day – the salesman, the firm that he works for, they’re going to make a bunch of money at your expense.

You want to buy as much gold and silver as you can for the money. You want to pay the lowest premium you can over the melt value of the coin and that’s what we do at Euro Pacific. We always make sure that we’re selling bullion bars and coins that enable people to maximize the amount of money going into metal and minimize the amount of money going into my pocket when it comes to a sales commission.

Daily Bell: Is it time to buy precious metals stocks? Will it ever be?

Peter Schiff: I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve been buying gold and silver stocks for about 12 years for myself and there have been rallies, there have been pullbacks. Recently we’ve had a pretty substantial pullback from the highs. I think there’s lots of opportunity in the mining stocks, particularly if I’m correct on what I think is going to happen to the price of gold and silver.

One of the interesting things about the move that we’ve had so far, even though gold has gone from $300 an ounce to $1600 and silver’s gone from $4 an ounce to $30. You would think that these gold and silver companies are just minting money right now and they’re making a fortune but they’re not because the cost of mining has also gone up by roughly the same percentage. It’s no more profitable to mine gold at $1600 an ounce than it was to mine it at $400 because of the cost. What’s ironic about it is that inflation is driving up the cost of mining but because the governments have convinced most investors that there is no inflation, they don’t see a reason to buy gold as a hedge. And so gold companies are kind of a victim of inflation as opposed to benefitting from it, which is what you would believe.

But I think ultimately they will. I think ultimately you’re going to see gold and silver prices just skyrocketing much higher than the cost of mining and that’s when these companies are going to be able to really start making money. So you would want to buy them before that happens and I think there are some great deals right now in the mining sector. If people are interested in knowing which stocks are my favorites they should contact Euro Pacific Capital, talk to the brokers, find out if these types of investments are suitable and then have a discussion about which of the gold and silver stocks I would recommend that people buy.

Daily Bell: Do you believe in a gold standard? How about a market-based gold and silver standard? Isn’t that a historically prevalent standard?

Peter Schiff: I believe what the Founding Fathers believed. My views are aligned with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. The Americans who founded this country founded it on a gold standard. They believed in real money, that the free market should determine the price of money and the quantity of money, not the government. Money is too important to be turned over to government. And whenever government has the power to do something they will abuse that power and that’s what they’ve done. Ever since they usurped the power to create money out of thin air they’ve debased the dollar dramatically. Ever since we created the Federal Reserve 100 years ago the dollar’s lost 98% of its purchasing power and now the country is on the verge of complete collapse.

The government, with fiat money, has turned us from the world’s wealthiest creditor nation to the world’s biggest debtor. We have a trade deficit with every country we trade with. We have an enormous national debt that we can never pay back. The only reason we can even pay the interest on the debt is because the Fed has got interest rates at zero. That’s the highest rate we can afford. But the minute interest rates go up the party’s over.

And this is the consequence of allowing government to usurp all these powers that were denied to it by the Constitution but they found a way around those safeguards and one way around it was the monetary system that unfortunately now exists in our country, where we just have fiat money, we have paper that has no intrinsic value, that is just created at will by the Federal Reserve, used to monetize government debt and the country’s suffering because we didn’t heed the good advice and the laws that were created by our founders.

Daily Bell: What do you think of President Obama’s reelection?

Peter Schiff: I think it’s a shame but sometimes you elect the government you deserve. To say that we deserve Obama is quite a statement because it’s pretty bad to say that we deserve this. But we voted for him and we’re going to have four more years of growth in government, four more years of decline in our living standards, four more years of taxes and inflation and regulation and stagnation and unemployment. President Obama constantly talks about how unlucky he was that he inherited such a bad economy from his predecessor. Well, his successor is going to inherit an even worse economy than the one that he did. I think the economy is going to be in much worse shape in 2016 when Obama finishes his second term than it was in ’09 when Bush finished his second term.

Daily Bell: Will Obama be able to turn the economy around in his second term?

Peter Schiff: No. The second term is going to be when it hits the fan. That’s when the chickens are going to come home to roost. People think that now that the economy is going, this is where we’re going to have the Obama legacy. He has an opportunity to really form his legacy and he doesn’t have to worry about fixing the economy anymore because he already fixed it.

He didn’t fix it; he just broke it beyond repair. We just don’t realize how broken it is because we’re drunk on a bunch of new, cheap money and more stimulus, the exact same monetary and fiscal policy that created the housing bubble and created the financial crisis of 2008. So we’ve numbed us to the greater pain but the novacaine is going to wear off in the Obama second term and we’re going to find ourselves in worse shape than we were in the depths of the financial crisis because we didn’t solve any of our problems. We made them bigger. Most people just don’t know that yet. It’s the same people that didn’t realize that we had a housing bubble, that didn’t see the financial crisis until they could see it in a rear view mirror. Those are the same people who think that the worst is behind us.

I think we’re in the eye of the hurricane and I think that once we get out of the eye and we get to the other side we’re going to realize that we were in the weak side of the hurricane before. We’re about to get into the much stronger side because I think the next downturn is going to be the more severe.

Daily Bell: Are elections rigged these days? Are votes trustworthy?

Peter Schiff: They’re rigged in the sense that you can’t outvote the mob at this point. The government has created so many people who depend on government, who are voting for theft, who vote for somebody who promises to steal from somebody else and distribute the loot to their supporters. That’s the problem. This is the fatal flaw in democracy. That’s why the Founding Fathers, when they wrote the Constitution had the foresight to create a republic, not a democracy. The Founding Fathers called democracy mobocracy. They thought it was tyranny of the majority, which they feared as much as tyranny from a king. And so they built in all these safeguards to protect us from what they regarded as the evils of democracy but over time, those barriers have been removed and now we’re suffering exactly the way the Founding Fathers warned.

So yeah, I don’t think the elections are rigged in that the votes are fraudulent; they’re rigged in that you don’t really have a choice. You can vote for the Republican or the Democrat, the lesser of the two evils. As far as I’m concerned it’s kind of both the same party, the Republicrats or the Demopublicans. They all believe in big government; it’s just that the Democrats want big government to be slightly bigger than the Republicans. But they all want to keep growing government, they all believe in this fiat monetary system, they’re all Keynesians and so you don’t really have a legitimate choice and even if you do your vote’s going to be canceled out by somebody who wants something from government.

When you have all these people who aren’t even paying income taxes voting to raise taxes on the few who are still paying, the society unravels. You’ve got people riding in the wagon and you’ve got people pulling it. And as you get more people in the wagon the wagon moves slower because you don’t have enough people pulling it. And now you try to whip the people who are pulling it even harder by raising their taxes and now you incentivize them to jump in the wagon, too. And you reward the people who are riding in the wagon with more government subsidies and you punish the people who are pulling the wagon with taxes and pretty soon the wagon can’t move at all because everybody’s trying to ride in it. That’s about where we are so voting is almost a waste at this point. We need real change and it doesn’t seem like we are going to get it at the ballot box.

Daily Bell: Can anything help the US economy at this point?

Peter Schiff: Yeah. Sure, there are a lot of things could help the US economy but unfortunately, they’re not going to happen. What we need is less government. We need big cuts in government spending. We’re getting opposite. We need to repeal lots of government rules and regulations; instead, we’re getting more of them. We need higher interest rates; instead, we continue at zero percent. The Fed needs to contract its balance sheet; instead, it keeps expanding it. We’re doing everything backwards from what we need to do and so instead of repairing the damage that’s been done to the economy, we damage it even further.

We’re digging this deep hole even deeper and eventually we’re going to suffer. Right now we’re kind of delaying the pain because we’re papering it over with debt and so we can continue to live beyond our means but at some point we’re going to run out of credit, we’re not going to be able to borrow to consume anymore, the world won’t finance this profligacy and then just like you see in Greece, the whole thing is going to implode.

Unlike the 2008 financial crisis, this time it’s going to be a crisis for the government. It’s going to be government bonds that are collapsing. It’s going to be the dollar that’s going to be collapsing, which means there’s no bailouts for anyone.

Daily Bell: Is the US turning into an authoritarian state?

Peter Schiff: Yeah, certainly. I think that we’re losing our freedoms, our individual liberty. It’s being replaced by this collectivist mentality, that it’s not about the individual; it’s about the State. And if you listen to President Obama’s inaugural that’s pretty much what he said. It’s not about individual liberty, about the value of the individual, but about society, about the State, about the collective. That is not the ideology that built this country. That’s the kind of ideology that built the Soviet Union or communist China or Cuba or any place they tried this nonsense.

We tried socialism in America initially. When the Pilgrims first landed in America they tried socialism and it didn’t work. They almost starved to death. It wasn’t until it was every man for himself, it wasn’t until it was about the individual that anybody actually farmed and that the Pilgrims didn’t die out. When they tried to do it all collectively and pool their resources, nobody worked, nobody farmed and they all almost starved.

Daily Bell: You’re very critical of the Fed. Is it improving?

Peter Schiff: Is the Fed improving? No. They’re getting worse. I’ve been joking about that everybody has been preoccupied with Lance Armstrong and the fact that he cheated because he doped. He used artificial stimulus to win the Tour de France. Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing on a national level. Ben Bernanke is doping the economy just like Lance Armstrong.

So we’ve got a Lance Armstrong economy. Instead of condemning him we might as well memorialize him. Maybe we should build a big statue to him in Washington, DC or maybe put pictures of Lance Armstrong on our money. That would be a little bit more honest because all we’re doing is juicing the economy with cheap stimulus but when it wears off we’re going to collapse. We’re going to have a fall from grace just like Lance Armstrong.

Daily Bell: Will there be hyperinflation?

Peter Schiff: I hope not. I don’t think we’ll have Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation because I think cooler heads will prevail before it gets that bad. Maybe before it gets that bad we’ll discover the error of our ways and take the very painful steps necessary to prevent hyperinflation. But it’s still certainly a scenario that is not impossible or even improbable. If we continue to do what we’re doing it’s inevitable. The question is will we continue on this path or will we reluctantly ultimately change directions. But I know that the longer we wait to do that, the more painful it’s going to be and maybe the less likely it will be.

Daily Bell: We tend to figure that there has been some deflation around the world as the bubble has collapsed but will there still be real – further – deflation as a certain group continually argues? We have a hard time with that idea because so much money has been printed.

Peter Schiff: We’re gong to see deflation in the sense that prices, including asset prices and consumer good prices, will come down when measured in gold. If you look at deflation as falling prices, you will see falling prices if you’re pricing things in gold. But the problem is, most of the people who are calling for deflation think that you’re going to have deflation in terms of dollars, that the dollar is going to become more valuable.

That’s not going to happen. The dollar intrinsically has no value at all but the government can create its dollars at will. They were talking about minting trillion dollar coins a few weeks ago. That shows you how easily the government can create money out of nothing. They can make trillion dollar bills. They’re making them in Zimbabwe. So I think that if you think that you’re going to see a collapse in prices in dollars you’re wrong because even though the price of things might come down, I think the value of the dollar will come down even more. So from that perspective you’re going to see inflation and potentially hyperinflation.

But in terms of real money you could see deflation, which is one of the reasons I’m saying people should buy gold because if you own gold then your cost of living is going to come down because for you, prices are going to get cheaper. But if you’re putting your faith in dollar bills, your cost of living is going to skyrocket because the Fed will always try to fight the markets because of deflationary forces. And these are healthy, corrective forces. It’s the market trying to re-price assets to where they should be. The government tries to artificially prop things up with cheap money and the market is fighting against that. But the government has a weapon that can overcome the market, and that’s the printing press, and so as long as you’re dealing in a fiat world, the rules of the game are different.

People who like to talk about deflation and they look at prior periods of deflation, they’re looking at countries that were operating under a gold standard. We’re not operating under a gold standard. We have no standard. And if you look at countries that have taken on tremendous debts in a fiat world, in a fiat system, it’s never been deflation in terms of that currency; it’s always been massive inflation or hyperinflation. It’s only deflation if you measure prices against the currency that didn’t collapse or against something like gold.

Daily Bell: Is it right that one man like Ben Bernanke should have the power to okay the printing of tens of trillions of dollars in a short period of time? How is it possible that people accept he and other central bankers have such great power?

Peter Schiff: No. It’s not right that one man should have that authority, nor would it be right for a group of men to have that authority. I don’t think any one man or any group of men is smart enough to know how much money should be there or what the price of money should be, no more than somebody can guess what the price of bread should be, or the price of oil should be. Prices should be determined by the marketplace. And I think money, interest rates are the price of money, the price of credit, is the most important price there. Money is one-half of every transaction. I think prices for money need to be set by the market.

Whenever the government does it they’re going to do it wrong and they’re going to create problems, either shortages or surpluses. Just look at America. Nobody is saving and everybody is borrowing because money is priced wrong. It’s too easy to take on debt. It’s too cheap to borrow, so we have too much of it. There’s not enough reward for savings so Americans aren’t saving because rates are too low. So rates need to rise so that we have more savings and less borrowing but the Fed won’t let it happen. So we have all these problems and eventually, as I said, it’s going to end in disaster because of this price-fixing.

If you believe in the free market then believe in it. But you can’t believe in the free market and then think the government should control the price of money.

Daily Bell: Should the US get rid of the Fed? How would it be possible?

Peter Schiff: Getting rid of it would be problematic because if we just got rid of it we wouldn’t get rid of their bad policy. I think Congress would just take over where the Fed left off and then some, and it might even be worse. At least with the Fed we have the pretense of an independent central bank. If we got rid of the central bank we would get rid of the pretense and we would just have this straight monetization and we’d have the government in control of the printing presses without any kind of buffer – even though the Fed, for all practical purposes acts like an arm of the government and it doesn’t really act like the independent central bank that it was designed to be.

What I advocate is limiting the Fed’s power, not turning the power over to Congress but limiting the power the Fed has so it can’t do as much damage – making it smaller, taking away its powers, kind of restoring to the Fed its original mission, which it has strayed from so dramatically. And I think if we diminish the Fed’s power enough then maybe we can eventually abolish it without worrying about Congress taking up those powers directly but right now it would be pretty dangerous to get rid of the Fed, knowing what’s likely to replace it. We wouldn’t want to turn all that power over to Congress or the president.

Daily Bell: You received criticism due to the performance of some of your client’s accounts in 2008, as well as controversies over the predictions themselves. How has your performance been of late?

Peter Schiff: Obviously, you’re always going to have critics. Whenever you put yourself out there people are going to want to criticize you, they’re going to want to take you down a peg. Sure, in 2008 we owned a lot of foreign stocks that went down and we owned foreign currencies that went down. The dollar went up in 2008 so pretty much everything we owned, including physical gold, went down in 2008. So if you were going to try to evaluate my performance and just use 2008 well then, yeah – if you were following my advice in 2008 you lost money in 2008.

But I think that’s an unfair benchmark. What if you followed my advice in 2007 and 2006 and 2005 and 2009 and 2010? You can always focus in on one short time horizon and say, "Well, gee, if you listened to him only during this period of time you lost money." I never claimed to be perfect. I never claimed that if you listen to me you’ll make money every day, every week, every second, although I think if you evaluate what I’ve been telling people to do over the long term then over the long-term perspective I think my advice has been very good. The dollar has weakened. In fact, the dollar surrendered all of its gains that it made in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Whatever gold lost in 2008 it more than made up in the following years. And, of course, I didn’t start recommending gold in 2008; I was recommending it ten years earlier, whether it was under $300 an ounce. So even if it fell from $1,000 to $700 in 2008 to say, "Well, gee, we followed Peter Schiff’s advice and bought gold at a thousand and it went to $700," I didn’t tell people to start buying it at $1,000; I’ve been telling people to buy it since it was under $300. And if it didn’t matter if it went down to $700; then it went up to $1900 so even if you bought it at $1,000 and rode it down to $700 you’re still ahead.

And, of course, they didn’t want to give me credit for shorting subprime mortgages. They didn’t point out, "How much money did people make who took my advice and shorted subprime mortgages in 2007?" They cleaned up. They didn’t point out Peter Schiff’s clients who were short subprime or who shorted any other of the financials that we were telling people to short. So again, if they’re looking at the long clients – the majority of our clients were long – but if they’re looking at it just in 2008, they’re not looking at it in its proper context.

And, of course, what makes it more difficult is that security regulations don’t allow me to basically point to the accounts that did really well. If I’ve got 15,000, 20,000 clients, certainly after a year like 2008, depending on when somebody started you’re going to find some clients that were unhappy back then. Every broker had unhappy clients in 2008. You probably can’t find any whose clients are happy because everything went down. No matter what you bought, if you bought anything it went down. So it’s easy to find some people who can criticize the performance but I can’t go ahead and point to the accounts that went up because that’s a violation of security law.

So I thought it was very unfair. I think some people tried to make a name for themselves by criticizing me. They tried to orchestrate marketing campaigns for their own firms based on saying, "Hey, you shouldn’t invest with Peter. You should invest with me." I think they were very unfair and unethical attacks. Everybody who attacked me back then refuses to come back and say, "You know what? We misjudged him. We were premature." Even the Wall Street Journal did an article about how much my clients lost in 2008 but they refuse to do an article about how much they made in 2009 or 2010 or 2011 or how much they made in 2003 or ’04 or ’05. The only article that the Wall Street Journal ever wrote about me was about my performance in 2008.

All they want to do is discredit me because I’m one of the only people who was publicly predicting the financial crisis of 2008. Instead of saying, "Hey, what did this guy know that everybody else missed?" they just want to discredit me so people don’t listen because I’m identifying a bigger problem now that nobody wants to acknowledge. I’m saying that the worst isn’t over yet, that we have a worse crisis coming, and the main establishment doesn’t want people listening to me. And they know that if they legitimize me by giving me credit for my prior predictions then some people might listen. So they want to try to create this false picture that I didn’t really get it right and if I got anything right it was because I was a stopped clock, I was the blind squirrel that stumbled on an acorn. They don’t want to acknowledge the accuracy of my forecasting and why I knew what I did so they try to use this supposed bad performance in 2008 to somehow discredit me. Meanwhile, all those people that they want us to listen to also had lousy performance in 2008. The difference is, they didn’t see the financial crisis coming and I did. And I might have been short subprime and they had no clue, and we were long gold or we were long commodities or we were short the dollar for ten years, not just for one.

I think that my overall track record in investments is good but I think my track record for forecasting economic events long term is better. I think I understand what’s going on and if people go back and read the things that I’ve been writing for the past ten years, look at the interviews that I’ve given, the more you learn about me the more you’ll appreciate the accuracy of what I’m saying. And it’s not because I’m so smart. I acknowledge that I’m not any smarter than all the people that are getting it wrong; I just think I have a better understanding of economics. Not that it’s a complex subject; it’s because it’s a simple subject. But so many other people have just been brainwashed. They drank all this government Kool-Aid and they believe what they were told by some professor at some university who also was clueless. I didn’t swallow any of that nonsense. I think my head is on straight and so I think I’m in a position where I can see something that’s obvious where other people are blind to it.

Daily Bell: Is gold going to US $5,000? Why isn’t it moving faster? Are powerful interests selling it short and otherwise manipulating the market for precious metals?

Peter Schiff: I don’t know whether or not the metals market is manipulated. Some say it is; some say it isn’t. Clearly, if it is being manipulated it’s not working. The prices have gone up dramatically so if people were trying to prevent the prices from rising it’s failed. Maybe the manipulation has somehow slowed the assent but even if that’s the case I still think that the assent is going to continue. A lot of people are worried about or point to the fact that gold hasn’t rallied more in the last year. I don’t know why. Markets don’t always move exactly the way you think they’re going to move. They’re going to move in steps and I think we’ve consolidated a big increase.

I think there are a lot of people that don’t understand. I think the short run assets get mispriced because the majority of people who are buying and selling and who are investing other people’s money I think get it wrong. So I think people don’t understand the real predicament the US economy is in. They don’t understand how much value the dollar’s going to lose. The people who are not buying gold right now are the same people who were buying houses at the top of the real estate bubble or buying mortgages, the same people who were buying dotcom stocks in 1999. Dotcoms were mispriced, houses were mispriced, gold was being mispriced because you have the same problems in the market but buyers and sellers are not getting it right.

But eventually, long term, the price is right. The fundamentals will win out and I am expecting a major, major rally in the price of gold and silver that will surprise a lot of people, including the gold and silver bulls.

Daily Bell: You’ve raised your profile tremendously by using the Internet to spread your views. Is the Internet generally an important force in spreading the word about free-market thinking? Is it still a positive choice for change and freedom?

Peter Schiff: I think so because you bypass the gatekeepers. Without the Internet, the only information you can get out there is what will be published in a newspaper or if you get an interview on ABC or CBS or CNN. So if they don’t want to advance your agenda, if they actually want to stifle it, then it’s difficult to get the word out. You can always write a book but then people have to know that the book is there, they have to buy it or check it out in the library.

But with the Internet you can bypass all those gatekeepers. I can bring information directly to the public and, more importantly, it’s easy for the public to discover that the information is out there because they can search it on the Internet. It’s not a function of me having to put an ad in front of their face that they’re going to see. If they’re looking for this material, they’re going to find it at their fingertips. All they have to do is search for it. So it’s a lot easier for people to discover voices like mine and, therefore, it’s a lot easier for me to get my message out there because the audience is there.

Then, if I help convince people of something or help educate people and they believe in something it makes it easier for them to pass this information on to other people because they have the vehicle, the Internet, to transmit this information either directly or to encourage other people to read my stuff or listen to my radio show or watch my video blogs. So it’s easier to get this information out there than it was in the past when you didn’t have this Internet and the social media forums to disseminate the information.

Daily Bell: Would you like to recommend any books and articles that are especially valuable?

Peter Schiff: My books, my articles – I write all the time. You can read my stuff on Europac.net, watch my video blogs at my YouTube channel, SchiffReport, listen to my daily radio show and you’ll get a lot of information. I bring on a lot of good guests that you might not hear if you just listen to more mainstream talk shows. Of course, people can get a free subscription to the newsletter I put out monthly, Peter Schiff’s Gold Letter.

Daily Bell: What’s your latest book? Are you working on a new one?

Peter Schiff: No new books right now. My latest book is The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy – How to Save Yourself and Your Country. That just came out earlier in 2012 so that’s the latest one. Before that, I came out with a revised edition of Crashproof, Crashproof 2.0. You can even buy that one in paperback. And I have a great little cartoon book I wrote called How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes. It’s an illustrated fable but it really teaches you a lot about economics and it’s quite humorous so if you haven’t picked that one up, that’s a really good one, especially if you have children. Children in fifth, sixth, seventh grade can really learn a lot about economics by reading that book.

Daily Bell: Where do we go from here?

Peter Schiff: I think we’re going to have a crisis. I think it’s going to be a real collapse and that’s going to be the catalyst, potentially, for constructive change. But until there’s a crisis it’s going to be more of the same until more of the same precipitates the crisis.

I think in the meantime we prepare personally, we get our investments in order, we make sure we have our money invested properly so it’s not a financial crisis for us, it’s just an economic crisis for the country – not that I want to belittle that but I think it’s important that you not go down with the ship financially, that you put yourself in a position to be able to help other people by being in a lifeboat. And then once it hits the fan and we have the crisis, hopefully we’ll be able to make a loud enough and strong enough argument so that we finally do the right thing, that the crisis is a catalyst for productive change – where we re-embrace our roots, where we go back to the ideas of the Founders, where we re-embrace the Constitution and free-market capitalism and sound money and limited government. We do all that and then the collapse can be a force for good.

On the other hand, if we completely abandon those ideas and embrace big government, if we blame everything on freedom and capitalism and we see a solution in even more government, then I think we’ve really consigned America to generations of poverty and oppression and at that point probably the only thing that we could do would be leave, to get out of the country while it’s still legal. I hope it doesn’t get that bad but we’ve got to be prepared to win this ideological battle because I think the future of the country will hang in the balance.

Daily Bell: Thank you for your time once more.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

Peter Schiff is a philosopher of sorts as well as an accurate prognosticator. He actually predicted the current crisis, and warned about its inevitability throughout the 2000s. Of course, Schiff is anti-state and not in the "elite" club, which is why his forecasts did not get circulated widely in the mainstream press.

Yes, Schiff’s message is negative, but his perspective is positive. He sees what’s taking place as a "catalyst, potentially, for constructive change." In fact, he believes that it will take a crisis to precipitate the end of destructive economic practices in the US and the larger Western world. The prospects on the other side of the crisis are favorable, in his view.

In the meantime, he wants people to protect themselves against what is inevitably on the way. He says, "We [must] make sure we have our money invested properly so it’s not a financial crisis for us, it’s just an economic crisis for the country." And he adds, "I think it’s important that you not go down with the ship financially, that you put yourself in a position to be able to help other people by being in a lifeboat."

These are good points. Schiff has a panoply of financial solutions that people might want to consider. They are all based on the same sound logic that led Schiff to make his accurate predictions about the problems of the US economy and how they might unfold.

Too often predictions of what is occurring and is about to occur in Western markets sound apocalyptic. While Peter Schiff shares some of this negativity, his overall optimism – a sense that Austrian-style human action can help people weather the storm and emerge unscathed on the other side – is encouraging, or ought to be.

What’s taking place is a battle of ideas, he reminds us. "We’ve got to be prepared to win this ideological battle because I think the future of the country will hang in the balance."

Peter Schiff himself, through his successful businesses, his outspoken advocacy for market-based economics and his profound knowledge of the Way the World Really Works, has proven a sound ally for people who value the truth and are concerned about where Western society is headed.

Thanks, Peter.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Here’s a new dominant social theme: US presidents are good and they ought to be in movies.

Of course, it helps if you are a socialist leader and make maximum use of the awesome power of Leviathan. The two presidents currently being lionized – surprise, surprise – are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Roosevelt presided over the initial, massive expansion of the welfare state – the same one that has brought the US some US$200 trillion in payables and will eventually spell the end of the US as a going concern. Lincoln paved the way for the activist leader Roosevelt by insisting that the Union was indivisible and doing his part to murder or otherwise maim about a million people to prove it.

The movies that portray these leaders don’t provide us with this stark – if historically realistic – point of view, of course. The bloody-minded decisions and subsequent ramifications are presented as historical necessity.

These are sympathetic portrayals and it is hard not to come to the conclusion that once again Hollywood is sending us a message about the Way the World Works, and US power politics especially. More on that in a moment.

Presumably, we are to walk away from these movies believing US presidents are bold visionaries who are willing to move their often warlike policies forward for the "greater good." And there is certainly an audience for this sort of perspective. Steven Spielberg’s "Lincoln" was just released and has already taken in more than US$13 million.

There is another movie out there on Lincoln that attracted a good deal of attention, as it featured Lincoln as a vampire killer. This isn’t strictly speaking a biopic but it is surely a kind of hagiography.

Two movies about Franklin Delano Roosevelt are currently being distributed. The one that hasn’t got much attention is called "FDR, American Badass." It is described by Wikipedia as "a slapstick comedy that has the 32nd President of the United States riding a ‘wheelchair of death’ to stop the world from werewolves who carry the polio virus, including werewolf versions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito."

The "important" FDR film – just released – is called "Hyde Park on Hudson." It’s about a social event hosted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (at his country home) for the King and Queen of England. The tension of the movie is in part derived from the mission of the Royals, who seek support for the war against Germany that had just started.

The movie seeks to portray FDR as a sly and charming mastermind who understands that the Royals need to be humanized if they are to win over the US populace. By feeding them hot dogs and otherwise presenting the weekend with the Royals as an informal event, Roosevelt presented the King and Queen of England as "just folks" who needed help facing the juggernaut of the German military machine.

The result, the movie implies, was the initial turning point in what was to become World War II. An incident little-noted by historians, this weekend of entertainment provided by FDR would generate enough US public sympathy for England to allow Roosevelt to begin the process of entering the war on England’s side.

Of course, Roosevelt’s masterful public relations manipulation was aided by the same media that protected his image by refusing to photograph or otherwise portray him below the waist throughout his three terms. Roosevelt was paralyzed as the result of what was once considered the effects of polio but is now thought to have been Guillain-Barré syndrome.

The media was also complicit in covering up Roosevelt’s extramarital dalliances as well as his wife’s apparent Sapphic ones. One of the titillating aspects of "Hyde Park on Hudson" is centered around Roosevelt’s complicated sex life and many mistresses.

Roosevelt is played by the famous comic actor Bill Murray and "Hyde Park on Hudson" is supposed to do for FDR what he intended to do for the King and Queen of England – humanize them and introduce them to a US audience that did not have a great deal of familiarity with them. The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick reviewed the movie sympathetically as follows:

Half as long and twice as much fun as the self-important "Lincoln,’ Roger Michell’s charming sex-and-politics comedy "Hyde Park on Hudson’ is basically a frothy tabloid take on presidential history. And for my money, that’s a good thing in a season filled with puffed-up prestige pictures.

Anchored by a thoroughly delightful performance by Bill Murray, the film shows President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrestling with two problems as World War II looms in the spring of 1939.

The far weightier one is considerable sentiment against Great Britain by an American public that fears our World War I ally will drag the US into another costly worldwide conflict – one the president knows is absolutely necessary to stop Adolf Hitler …

History tells us this was one of the biggest public relations coups of FDR’s career, convincing the American people that the English were "like us’ and deserving of support when World War II erupted just two months later.

The big problem with this review is that its premise is faulty. Today, we know that much of Hitler’s military buildup and indeed his rise to power was supported by same Western financial forces that are today pursuing "the war on terror" and apparently for much the same reasons.

Thanks to what we call the Internet Reformation, we can see the scope of history more fully. The information is finally available. It seems to show us that the real reason both the first and second world wars were fought was in part to generate global governance, a process that remains underway today.

And we can see that after every large war, the West lost considerable freedoms. Under Lincoln, the free press was suspended, politicians and journalists who opposed the war were jailed. The result of an exceptionally bloody war was that states could not secede without facing military retaliation. History shows us that once a regime is emplaced by force, empire (of a sort) is inevitable and then, eventually, a downfall.

This is certainly the process that is underway in the US – and Europe, too, where an EU empire is a-building … and tottering. The two US presidents most responsible for the current US empire are Lincoln and Roosevelt. (One could make a case for Woodrow Wilson, as well, but he was not as charismatic, it would seem.)

As students of elite dominant social themes, we long ago came to the conclusion that social and media trends are often deliberate rather than coincidental. The spate of movies portraying activist and warlike US presidents in a sympathetic light may well be intended to set a certain tone.

If so, this is a disturbing supposition. It would seem to be indicating that something is to unfold in President Barack Obama’s second term that may replicate some of the same sort of events that took place under FDR and Lincoln.

What those events are to be is not yet clear. But it is a most disturbing supposition.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Patrick Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. From 1966 through 1974, Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon, and from 1985 to 1987, White House Director of Communications for Ronald Reagan. In 1992, Mr. Buchanan challenged George Bush for the Republican nomination and almost upset the president in the New Hampshire primary. In 1996, he won the New Hampshire primary and finished second to Sen. Bob Dole with three million Republican votes. Patrick Buchanan has written ten books, including seven straight New York Times bestsellers, most recently Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

Daily Bell: Glad to have you back for another interview. Everyone knows who you are but remind us anyway. Give us some background on yourself and how you have developed professionally and intellectually.

Pat Buchanan: Very briefly, I started in journalism over 50 years ago in June. I was an editorial writer for three years and then joined Richard Nixon and his campaign and stayed with him right through his presidency. I became a syndicated journalist afterwards and served in Reagan’s White House and ran three times for president myself. That’s my basic summary.

Daily Bell: Suicide of a Superpower caused a lot of controversy. You eventually left MSNBC because of it. Can you fill us in?

Pat Buchanan: It’s almost a year behind us. MSNBC’s chief said he felt the ideas and beliefs in the book didn’t belong being discussed on MSNBC or on national media. I obviously disagreed with that assessment, as did all the other networks who had me on the air, and it did become a New York Times bestseller but I guess it was a breaking point with MSNBC. I was delighted to be with them for ten years and enjoyed it and enjoyed a lot of my friends over there, even though very few of them agree with me.

Daily Bell: What’s next on the agenda? Another book?

Pat Buchanan: I am working on another book right now on Richard Nixon and my first three years with him, from 1966 to 1969, about the great comeback and how he managed.

Daily Bell: Interesting how times have changed. You called the US a failing nation. Is it still failing?

Pat Buchanan: I think, in a way, like many of the Western nations, America is beginning to disintegrate along the lines of culture and ethnicity, and identity and social differences, and it does not seem to be the united country it used to be. That’s what I write about in Suicide of a Superpower, the reasons why I believe the country and our civilization are in decline.

Daily Bell: Did you vote for the GOP’s Romney for president?

Pat Buchanan: Yes, I did vote for Governor Romney and Paul Ryan and did so enthusiastically. My sister worked for his campaign as a national surrogate and I was disappointed in the outcome but it was not altogether unexpected. I think that Hurricane Sandy stopped the Governor’s momentum. It was a great benefit to the President when you can play the role of comforter-in-chief. I think he did it well. After that, President Obama seemed to have regained the footing he had lost in the debates. So I was not wholly surprised. I had not predicted a Romney victory but I did have hopes.

Daily Bell: We believe the GOP hijacked the nomination and took it away from Ron Paul who was clearly gaining momentum and gave it to Romney. Agree? Disagree?

Pat Buchanan: I disagree with that. I think Romney won it fair and square and it was a very rough campaign. Ron Paul is a friend of mine and I have campaigned for him down in his congressional district in the old days. I like him and he’s been true to his convictions but I don’t think he was winning the nomination.

Daily Bell: Why the antipathy to Ron Paul from top GOPers? Isn’t the GOP a big tent? Shouldn’t it have rejoiced in Ron Paul’s popularity? The numbers apparently said he had a chance to beat Obama where Romney did not.

Pat Buchanan: I do agree that Ron Paul belongs inside the Republican Party. Certainly he’s been a loyal Republican but I think on some issues neither he nor I are in the mainstream of the Republican Party. We are both deeply skeptical of foreign intervention and foreign wars and I share that view with Dr. Paul. We both opposed the Iraq War and I believe we were right. I think our views do belong in the Republican Party and I think they are growing in terms of acceptance.

I’ve had a number of people agree with the campaigns I ran in the 1990s, where we said we ought to stay ought of these foreign quarrels and wars that are none of our business and are bleeding our country, literally bleeding it of its young people and, of course, bleeding it of enormous amounts of money and wealth – unless the vital interest of the United States is threatened we ought to be deeply skeptical about foreign wars.

So these ideas certainly are long in the Republican Party and they’re not the dominant idea but I think on many social and cultural issues Ron Paul is in the mainstream. On his belief in small government and his opposition to taxes I think he qualifies as something of a purist but certainly in sync 100% with a lot of traditionalist conservatives so he’s certainly part of the Republican Party. I was glad to see him do the job he did and he did tremendously well. I will say this: I believe, and I’m not certain, that he consistently out-polled any of the other Republicans among young voters.

Daily Bell: Why is the GOP the party of empire these days? Has it always been that way? How did the GOP evolve?

Pat Buchanan: The GOP evolved in the pre-war era, pre-WWII. Some of the Republican Party’s leading lights and brilliant minds were leaders in the America-first movement to keep us out of WWII. While they succeeded for a long period of time, Hitler made his fatal blunder of attacking the Soviet Union and rival, Stalin. That’s where most all the casualties in WWII occurred; even though our side of the war was bloody as it could be, the losses over there were literally in the millions.

I think that after the war was over many Republicans, some of them young – Richard Nixon and Eisenhower and others – reluctantly came to the conclusion that the United States was faced with a global challenge in the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union in that it was imperialist, it was ideologically ambitious and it was hell-bent on global domination. I think they had good reason to believe that. So they adopted a defensive strategy during the Cold War of peace through strength and containment of the communist empire. I think that Republicans took over, if you will, the leadership of the Cold War when the Democratic Party broke and went with Senator McGovern in 1972. Republicans held the leadership, I think, all the way through the Cold War. There was Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I. And the Democrats only had one president and that was Jimmy Carter.

I disagreed with the conservatives and the Republicans in that at the end of the Cold War I thought we should have come home. Our war was over. If it was necessary to contain the Soviet Empire we had done it. The Soviet Empire collapsed, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall went down, the Red Army got up and left Germany and left Eastern Europe and went back to the Urals, and I thought America should have done the same.

I think Ron Paul and I basically agreed and argued that point. I was against the Gulf War and I was against the Iraq War. So I think the rift came inside the Party, to a degree, back in the end of the Cold War, from about 1989 to 1991. I ran three times for president and Ron Paul’s run a couple of times and our views did not ultimately prevail. They gained tremendous support but they didn’t ultimately prevail.

Daily Bell: You are very concerned about mass immigration. Has your concern abated with Obama’s re-election or has it increased?

Pat Buchanan: I think the problem is both legal and illegal immigration. Folks, we now have a mammoth welfare state, which if you add up all the transfer payments and welfare programs it’s really something like a trillion dollars. And this also is a magnet to very poor people abroad. They come into the United States and if they don’t get a job they are well taken care of nevertheless. I think the enormous numbers of folks coming in from the Third World have far more difficulty assimilating obviously in what still remains a First World nation. They don’t bring the skills and the academic achievements, and the capacity to really succeed, like Baby Boomers did in a First World nation and in America, as advanced as it is, I think we are becoming two countries.

If you look at the election and stats of native-born white Americans, for example, Governor Romney won by 20 points and he lost by 40 points among immigrants and people of color, young people and single women who depend heavily on government. So do I think it’s going to be solved? No. I don’t think it’s going to be solved.

Daily Bell: Do you think Romney would have done a better job on immigration from your standpoint?

Pat Buchanan: Sure, I certainly do.

Daily Bell: Libertarians believe that if all land were owned then there wouldn’t be an immigration problem. The problem is that government sets immigration policy. Should the US give the one-third of the land it owns to the citizens and get out of the immigration business?

Pat Buchanan: I don’t mean to be offensive, but are you kidding? But hey, listen. I admire, respect and like libertarians. Murray Rothbard was a friend of mine and he supported me in ’92 and then he became disillusioned with me by ’96. They are very principled people and I like them. They are very interesting in their ideas but to be truthful I don’t know of a single great nation that’s ever been built by libertarians. Libertarians say, sure, now we have all this industry from protectionism so let’s soften the borders.

Daily Bell: Is it true that certain policymakers in the US want to create a North American Union? Is this why former president George Bush wanted to grant a blanket amnesty? Is it true that George Bush and now Obama have created agreements with Mexico and Canada that will reinforce a union?

Pat Buchanan: I think not in a formal sense but there’s no question about it – the American Southwest is becoming, and will become, culturally, socially and linguistically as much a part of Mexico as it is of the United States. Politically, I think Republicans will probably capitulate and cease seeking to defend the border and send illegal aliens home and impose sanctions on those who hire illegals, and I think that’s the end of one nation indivisible. With regard to Canada, I think there’s less of a problem. If I were a Canadian I might want to build a border against the United States.

Daily Bell: US officials are very scared of terrorism. Is this why US regulatory agencies have purchased millions of dum-dum bullets? What are some other reasons?

Pat Buchanan: The reasons we are scared is because it can occur. It occurred in Europe, it’s occurred in the United States, Madrid and London, repeatedly. The IRA was engaged in terror there, as well as Islamic terror, Muslim terror. It also happens because we are over there. I think terrorism occurs because we need to get out of all the countries we occupy and leave these countries alone.

I don’t know who’s purchasing dum-dum bullets but I do know that Black Friday marked the biggest sale of guns in United States history. I think the FBI gave clearance for the purchase of up to 150,000 weapons for one day. I don’t think the American people need to fear that they are going to be disarmed. I think the folks who argue for second amendment rights basically won the battle, horse, foot and dragoons.

Daily Bell: Is the secession movement in the US picking up? If so, why?

Pat Buchanan: I posted a column on the secession movement at my website last week. I don’t think it’s as serious as the one my great-grandfathers were involved in that got one of them killed! One was from Mississippi and wound up in a federal penitentiary after being captured by the forces of General Sherman when he was trying to defend Atlanta. The otherr was killed and the only thing we found on his record was the word Vicksburg.

So is this serious? No, it’s not. But I believe it’s a manifestation of the fact that Americans really don’t like each other, some have even come to detest each other, and many have come to dislike and detest the United States and would rather not be a part of this country and be in their own separate country.

How serious they are about this or whether this is just an expression of feelings I don’t know. But I do know that this movement of people to associate with their own kind, if you will, and to pull away ancient states and nations is one thing I have written about in my book in the chapter on ethno-nationalism.

We see its manifestation with the Scots wanting to move out of Great Britain and the Catalonians wanting to break free of Spain and Flanders wanting to break out of Belgium and at last be a separate country. There are parts of northern Italy that want to break away. We saw Yugoslavia break up into seven different countries as soon as the Cold War was over. Czechoslovakia broke in half. The Soviet Union split into 15 pieces and is subdividing again.

So I think there is a tendency, it seems to me, to overcome the centrifugal forces that are pulling us toward one world and one-world government. That was a very powerful movement in the ’90s, when you had the EU advanced, the Maastricht Treaty, you had NAFTA and you had the World Trade Organization and the Copenhagen Meetings, these environmental things – all these things creating one world – and eventually, one-world government with the EU as the model. I think that’s gone into reverse.

Daily Bell: Is the US becoming a more authoritarian place?

Pat Buchanan: I think it’s going to become a more authoritarian place. When you have different ethnic groups and races and also different fundamental religious beliefs – and I consider ideology political religion – and these multiply, then you become less like the country we were in 1960 than say the Habsburg Empire and eventually, I find it hard to see how a democracy works.

We already see the effort – and this is very well advanced in the Democratic Party – to buy off interest groups, ethnic groups and all the rest and create sort of a balkanized America. I see that coming. This is one of the reasons why the subtitle on my book is "Will America Survive Till 2025?" I see that it’s certainly a geographic expression called America and maybe a political entity but will it be one country, indivisible? I’m not so sure.

Daily Bell: Are internal passports in the future? Will it be harder to get out of the US in the future?

Pat Buchanan: I don’t see that as a big problem, to be honest. People are moving all over the country. They can’t keep track of who’s coming to the country, but I do see, and you see it because its disintegration of society … you see identity cards and tags on students in schools so teachers know where they are at all times. Let’s hope the mayor of New York is not the wave of the future. You can’t smoke in Irish bars and you can’t have a 17-ounce soda pop and all the rest of it. I do see the nanny state growing, there’s no doubt about it.

The more people you have and the more diverse you become ideologically, racially, ethnically, socially, religiously, economically and when you commit yourself to egalitarianism and equality, the only way you can achieve equality in that kind of society is really to take from some and continue giving to others, which requires a bigger, stronger government.

Daily Bell: Why are the police and Homeland Security becoming ever more repressive?

Pat Buchanan: I just don’t know. I think this is a libertarian issue with which I am not all that familiar. Maybe I should be but I don’t see the Department of Homeland Security being that big of a problem.

Daily Bell: Why is the name of the organization "Homeland Security"? Why the appeal to what some perceive as having resonance with the Third Reich? Was this intention?

Pat Buchanan: No, not at all! The defense of the homeland is a very positive phrase to most Americans. Defense of the homeland – you have foreign policy and foreign wars so I don’t read something horribly Third Reichian into the name of the department. It’s another mammoth agency that was all cobbled together. All the various small agencies got rolled into one in I think probably a political response to 9/11.

Daily Bell: Is the American two-party system going to survive? Is a new party needed?

Pat Buchanan: Well, I tried that once and it didn’t work. I think the real danger right now is for the Republican Party. It is demographically facing a very grim future because its political base, which is predominantly Caucasian and Christian, is shrinking with the growth of population as people of color are growing as a part of the population. I think it’s about 38-40% and they will be more than one-half of the population by 2041. Anyone other than white or Caucasian, Barack Obama won those voters, if you aggregate them, 80% to 20%.

So I think the Republican Party faces a difficult problem but I don’t see a successor party on the horizon. You know, I came into politics with and I was very much for Barry Goldwater. He was a good libertarian and he didn’t do that well. But I came into politics when the Democratic Party was twice as large as the Republican Party, and working with Candidate Nixon from ’65 to ’69 and through ’72, we began to convert the Republican Party into America’s party and eventually it became that in the 1980s and early 1990s. But the mass immigration and the low birth rates with native-born Americans have combined to make the future of the Republican Party look terribly grim.

Daily Bell: You would never consider running for president again?

Pat Buchanan: I would consider it but I wouldn’t do it! I have a lot of scar tissue!

Daily Bell: In closing, any final issues you want to mention?

Pat Buchanan: Well, I do think the Republican Party will make a terrible mistake if it lets itself be bullied into signing on to higher taxes and violating its pledge to not raise taxes and basically abandoning one of the main principals and planks of the Party, which have held this bunch together. I think they are headed down that road and I think it’s a mistake. If they do it, I think they will rue the day they did it.

Daily Bell: Thanks for sitting down with us and answering the tough questions!

Pat Buchanan: Thank you.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

Mr. Buchanan’s worldview is expansive and informed, as one would expect from an author of many bestselling books on politics and US policy. Caveats can be presented as well, certainly from a libertarian point of view.

These might include Mr. Buchanan’s perspective that Homeland Security is a fairly harmless agency. From our point of view it is an extraordinarily invasive and arrogant one with immense power.

It is bigness that makes so many bad ideas dangerous – if one is concerned about individual freedoms.

Just yesterday came the following news about the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration – one of Homeland Security’s biggest subsidiaries – courtesy of Natural News. It’s entitled, "TSA claims Congress has no jurisdiction over it; refuses to attend hearings." Here’s an excerpt:

When officials who head up a federal agency created and funded by Congress no longer feel obligated to appear before the congressional committee charged with overseeing the function of that agency, a situation of genuine tyranny exists.

Enter John Pistole, the Obama Administration’s head of the notorious Transportation Security Agency. He is not only refusing to appear before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, but he’s even gone so far as to declare that said congressional committee possesses "no jurisdiction over the TSA."

That’s more than just arrogance; that’s a dangerous precedent to set.

We’d agree with that. Arrogance almost inevitably has an impact on subsequent actions. Here’s another article from Natural News, circa 2011:

TSA backscatter radiation safety tests were rigged … It can now be revealed by NaturalNews that the TSA faked its safety data on its X-ray airport scanners in order to deceive the public about the safety of such devices …

The evidence of the TSA’s fakery is now obvious thanks to the revelations of a letter signed by five professors from the University of California, San Francisco and Arizona State University. The letter reveals:??• To this day, there has been no credible scientific testing of the TSA’s naked body scanners. The claimed "safety" of the technology by the TSA is based on rigged tests.??• The testing that did take place was done on a custom combination of spare parts rigged by the manufacturer of the machines (Rapidscan) and didn’t even use the actual machines installed in airports. In other words, the testing was rigged.??• The names of the researchers who conducted the radiation tests at Rapidscan have been kept secret! This means the researchers are not available for scientific questioning of any kind, and there has been no opportunity to even ask whether they are qualified to conduct such tests. (Are they even scientists?)

Now, the issue of backscatter radiation has never been resolved, to the best of our knowledge, and it’s a good example of the arrogance we’re discussing. Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are subject to these sorts of facilities and they may be receiving doses of radiation that will prove injurious.

This irradiation is being done in the name of the "war on terror" – itself a dubious invention. But it is hard to parse reality when it comes to government and power elite memes. It is bigness itself that makes them so resistant to scrutiny. Even when someone is declared responsible for this or that issue, the myriad of public servants below him or her may prove resistant to agreed-upon change.

Bigness is not merely ineffectual. When it comes to government, smaller is better.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

A New York Times article has attracted attention in alternative media circles for its portrait of Bernard von NotHaus, the "Rosa Parks of the constitutional currency movement."

Entitled, "Prison May Be the Next Stop on a Gold Currency Journey," the article describes von NotHaus and his current predicament.

Mr. von NotHaus was convicted of using precious metals to back a currency he called the Liberty Dollar, which he says was "a private voluntary currency" for those conducting business outside the government’s purview.

His name is Bernard von NotHaus, and he is a professed "monetary architect" and a maker of custom coins found guilty last spring of counterfeiting charges for minting and distributing a form of private money called the Liberty Dollar.

… Mr. von NotHaus managed over the last decade to get more than 60 million real dollars’ worth of his precious metal-backed currency into circulation across the country – so much, and with such deep penetration, that the prosecutor overseeing his case accused him of "domestic terrorism" for using them to undermine the government.

This is, of course, the crux of the matter. Is von NotHaus a "terrorist"?

Here’s his answer, according to the article: "This is the United States government … It’s got all the guns, all the surveillance, all the tanks, it has nuclear weapons, and it’s worried about some ex-surfer guy making his own money? Give me a break!"

Of course, in a sense this is disingenuous. Simply by circulating honest money, von NotHaus WAS undermining the power elite that apparently runs the US and much of the rest of the world.

It is this elite that has undermined money in the US, starting with experiments in monopoly fiat that increased after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, people in the US were relatively free to do what they wanted with money. Formally minted gold and silver were put into circulation via the US mint but plenty of privately circulated gold and silver made its way into the economy in non-coin form.

Gold and silver WERE money and banks that warehoused that money offered receipts that were circulated in lieu of the actual money metals. There were various problems with this system, but it was relatively free compared with what came later and granted a good deal of independence to the people using the system.

The end for any kind of sound money came with the Civil War and the rise of the US fedgov. As time passed, the power of the fedgov when it came to money expanded. Eventually, in 1913, the US Federal Reserve was formed.

The Fed was created by various supporters of money power. It was a private/quasi-public system of monopoly money that acquired its power by virtue of its close association with the government. But it was evidently and obviously controlled privately.

This private control has funded the expansion of the globalist agenda ever since. Essentially, the power elite has built a seamless construct of military, corporate and educational control that controls the world. Every part of this larger construct constantly evolves towards bigness and complexity.

The mantra, endlessly chanted, is one interconnected, "small" world and the enforcers of this meme are the West’s Intel agencies and the larger judicial system.

Think of the power elite as a kind of metaphorical cuckoo bird. The cuckoo lays eggs in the nests of other birds and tricks the parents into raising the cuckoo chicks instead of their own. The entire Western demos has been hollowed out from the inside. The cuckoos are everywhere. Nothing is as it seems. Society’s resources have been taken over and their purposes perverted.

The main modern lever of this ongoing takeover is the "terrorist." One who has come of age in the 2000s may well be aware of how this meme has been cultivated. In fact, the theme (as with many dominant social themes) goes back decades.

This meme would be expanded after 9/11 – a tragic attack that is commonly held to have been caused by an apparent CIA asset, Osama bin Laden. The "terrorism" theme has been expanded aggressively ever since.

The beauty of the expanding terrorism meme is its vagueness. "Birthers" and "truthers" and now "preppers" are all accused in various contexts of being "terrorists." The term terrorist is constantly evolving because it is meant to be a catch-all term.

Ultimately, anyone who challenges the authority of the state (and thus the money power that stands behind it and controls it) is at risk for being labeled a terrorist. This explains why US prosecutors can label von NotHaus a terrorist. The term is merely a convenient nomenclature. It has been purposefully "evolved" so that an extracurricular judicial system can be brought into effect.

Simply by redefining definitions over time – and manufacturing events to buttress the terminology – the elites have been able to bring into being a new class of felon (the terrorist) and a new and oppressive judicial system, as well.

Here at the Daily Bell, we call this evolution "directed history." The elites, having cleverly created a new kind of criminal and an extra-curricular judicial process, are eager to generate the next phase of directed history – the show trial to illustrate how things have changed.

The purpose is intimidation. Elites – panicked by the Internet and what we call the Internet Reformation – are attempting to realize their apparent plans for world government at breakneck speed. Nothing must stand in their way, certainly not alternative currencies that threaten their monetary chokehold.

My perspective would be that this wholesale creation will not be any more successful than other elite memes now foundering. The Internet has exposed the power elite and made their manipulations ever more questionable.

That doesn’t mean they won’t continue to try, however. The terrorist meme is an especially useful one. Over time it could be applied – via certain show trials – to almost anyone who challenges elite plans. Perhaps this is how the elites REALLY intend to deal with the threat of the Internet Reformation.

I will end with the observation that while I think this is a very clever plan (if I have analyzed it correctly), I am not sure it will work. Many people already understand the nature of elite manipulations. Directed history tends to work well when it is created in secret.

Like a magic trick, once its mechanism is exposed, it tends to be a great deal less convincing. Sure, the terrorist meme is a ubiquitous one but the more it is applied, the more people will likely see through it.

The more money power tries to oppress and manipulate citizens, the more it drives people to the Internet where they begin to discover the truth.

It is said the bigger the lie, the more people believe it. But perhaps the Internet is bigger than the biggest lie.

I certainly hope so.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, which is usually given to a person. There’s been a good deal of astonishment over the award as people have a hard time understanding how an entity so sprawling as the EU could receive a prize ordinarily awarded to individuals.

But the Nobel was politicized long ago. The 1994 award to Yasser Arafat was quite controversial as was the 2009 award to Barack Obama, who confessed to feeling "surprised" by the award, only nine months into his term.

What is interesting about the award this year, beyond the blatant promotional gimmickry, is the caution, even contempt, with which even the mainstream news media treated the award. UK Guardian blogger Michael White was fairly scathing in his assessment, posting an article entitled, "Europe’s Nobel peace prize: bad timing all round" …

Why give the EU the Nobel peace prize now, rather than when it successfully expanded into the former Soviet Union? Is it right of the Nobel committee to award this year’s peace prize to the European Union at a time when the EU is facing the gravest existential crisis of its 55-year history, and when the continent’s elected leaders have repeatedly failed to resolve an economic conundrum which is largely of its own devising? No, I don’t think it is.

It smacks of bad timing, just as the committee’s award of the same prize to Barack Obama in 2009 – when he’d barely sat down in the Oval Office – was toe-curlingly premature. It damaged the new president’s standing at home (where plenty of US voters mistrust do-gooding foreigners) and was deemed sufficiently misjudged to make Obama stay away from Oslo award ceremony. Smart man, given that the winners list contained some failures and a few rascals.

Over at the New Statesman, the headline read, "Why the European Union does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize … Others deserve credit for ’60 years of peace’." The article calls the award "a misconceived decision" and adds that the prize is symptomatic of how the EU "tak[es] the benefit of the work of others and at promot[es] its own mythology."

AP circulated an article headed, "EU detractors slam Nobel Peace Prize decision." It begins, "While some Europeans swelled with pride when the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, howls of derision erupted from the continent’s large band of skeptics."

The article adds, "To many in the 27-nation bloc, the EU is an unwieldy and unloved agglomeration overseen by a top-heavy bureaucracy devoted to creating arcane regulations about everything from cheese to fishing quotas … The EU to critics now appears impotent amid a debt crisis that has widened north-south divisions, threatened the euro currency and plunged several members, from Greece to Ireland to Spain, into economic turmoil."

At the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes, "The wrong Europe wins the Nobel Peace Prize." He adds,

News that the European Union has won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning comes as we learn that Europe’s attempt to break the power of nation states through currency union has pushed Greek unemployment to a record 25.1pc – just ahead of Spain – with far worse yet to come.

It comes as EMU’s North-South split turns more acrimonious by the day, with the creditor bloc and debtor bloc (to use a very crude description that does not capture what is really a story of currency misalignment) eyeing each other with increasing hatred.

It comes days after Chancellor Angela Merkel was greeted in Athens by enraged crowds, some giving Hitler salutes, others protesting that Greece has become a "slave colony of the European Union".

The Greek state had to deploy 7,000 police and impose a partial lockdown of Athens to keep her safe. The Frankfurter Allgemeine said Konrad Adenauer enjoyed a friendlier welcome in 1954 – as he deserved – less than a decade after Wehrmacht occupation (and 300,000 deaths).

Evans-Pritchard’s point is that, "[Because] victim states have surrendered their key policy levers to the EU Project, they have no means of defending themselves … The Nobel Prize comes, in short, as events have shown that the … supranational assault on the ancient nation states of Europe – has proved to be an unmitigated disaster."

Even the Daily Beast, usually a dependable supporter of elite dominant social themes, came out against the award in an article entitled, "Nobel Peace Prize Is a Joke."

In case you thought the crumbling, ineffective, and overly-bureaucratic European Union was on life-support, the Eurozone in danger of splintering, and the single currency on the verge of collapse, a group of unexceptional Norwegians would like you to remember that the 27 member states of the EU are, in fact, the global bulwark against war and misery.

But when the Nobel Committee announced in Oslo on Friday that it would award its 2012 Peace Prize to the EU, the room full of journalists reacted appropriately – with a chorus of Joe Biden-like guffaws and incredulous yaps.

All of these responses and many more confirm what we’ve often suggested, that the powers-that-be are losing control of the larger promotional narrative. World governance is surely the goal, but this week the elite’s own, controlled media blasted a contrivance aimed at propping up one of their most valued projects.

What we call the Internet Reformation has allowed people to see behind the curtain of many elite promotions. Fear mongering is not quite so effective anymore and neither are statist solutions offered up to "solve" problems being created by the same elements.

Perhaps there was another (clever) reason for awarding the prize to the EU that is not yet in evidence. But lacking some larger plan, the designation of the award seems symptomatic of a loss of media control that is all the more startling because the power elite OWNS the mainstream media …

Of course, the alternative, Internet media is not yet consolidated. Perhaps that’s the problem.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Jim Rogers was a co-founder of the Quantum Fund, and is creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI). A native of Demopolis, Alabama, Jim Rogers was entrepreneurial from a young age. His first business venture at age five involved selling peanuts. He attended Yale University where he received a degree in history and then also Oxford University where he focused on philosophy, politics and economics. In 1970, Jim Rogers co-founded the Quantum Fund, possibly the most famous and successful fund of its type. Despite his success, he still makes media and television appearances, focused on the free-market principles he believes in and investments in all vehicles, long and short worldwide, that he espouses. He has issued many warnings about the West’s debt-making profligacy and has concluded that China will likely constitute tomorrow’s most powerful nation-state, in large part because of the energy and discipline of its billion-plus citizens. He is author of many well-received books including the best-selling Investment Biker, a free-market oriented meditation on life and investing.

Daily Bell: Hello, again. Let’s jump right in. Where is gold headed – US$5000 an ounce? Is silver headed toward US$350?

Jim Rogers: I’m not smart enough to know something like that. I own gold and silver and there are a lot of bulls right now. If you look at open interest and see all the speculators who own gold and silver, that’s usually a worrisome sign. I mean, I am not selling my gold and silver, I assure you, but I do worry about all these speculators getting in the market.

Gold and silver will both go much, much higher over the course of the bull market. The bull market has years to go. How high it will go, I don’t know, but maybe read your newsletter – I read it everyday – and so read your newsletter and you will find out where gold and silver are going. I’m not smart enough to know things like that.

Daily Bell: The CFTC just dropped an investigation into silver manipulation. Is it manipulated day-to-day and does it matter?

Jim Rogers: A) It doesn’t matter and B) I don’t think it is. There are conspiracy theorists out there who say it’s manipulated but I don’t buy it. Mainly, I don’t buy it because if it were manipulated like the conspiracy theorists say, it’s been going on for 25 or 30 years. By now somebody would have told us. You can’t keep a secret like that because then the conspirers would have to be all over the world. There would have to be tens of thousands of people. By now we would know about it. I’m a little skeptical.

It doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned. Silver is going to go much higher. I own silver and if there’s somebody trying to artificially suppress it, more power to them because in the end it’s going to go up even higher. Whenever you artificially suppress something, once it finally breaks free, boy, does it skyrocket. Look at gold in the ’70s. They artificially kept it down at $35 for a few decades. Finally the market said enough and it went up over 40 times.

Daily Bell: Who owns the gold in the world? Central banks? Individuals? Powerful families?

Jim Rogers: The statistics would probably indicate that the central banks are the largest owners of gold. I don’t know. I haven’t done my homework or checked any of those statistics but it certainly does seem that central banks, if you include the IMF and the US, own quite a lot of it.

Daily Bell: Is silver a better buy than gold right now?

Jim Rogers: As we just discussed, I see a lot of speculation, which gives me pause when I see the speculators in long tooth positions on the futures markets. But if I had to buy one today I’d buy silver, based on historic basis. Gold has been within a few percentage points of it’s all-time high; silver is quite far from it’s all-time high, 30 or 40%. So I would prefer to buy silver to gold but I am not buying either at the moment.

Daily Bell: What about paper gold and silver – ETFs and futures?

Jim Rogers: Well, I own some precious metals in the Rogers Index but I much prefer the physical stuff myself because I’m old-fashioned and simple-minded.

Daily Bell: How about mining stocks? Should people hold them or are they down for the count?

Jim Rogers: Well, with stocks, if you are a good stock picker you will certainly make a lot more in a stock than you will in the commodities itself but you have to be a good stock picker. Studies show that more money has been lost in gold mining stocks over the past century or so than any other sector, including railroads and airlines. You’ve got to be a good stock picker to buy gold stocks, silver stocks. You know, Mark Twain said the definition of a gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the top. If you are a good stock picker, by all means, you’ll make a lot more money but I don’t usually buy gold stocks because I don’t know enough and I’m not smart enough.

Daily Bell: Obviously you follow business cycles. Can you tell our readers how they work and who is responsible for them?

Jim Rogers: It doesn’t make sense that anybody but central banks has been responsible for them in this past century or so. Central banks didn’t always have so much power. Central banks used to be the lenders of last resort for the most part. People handed their own power over, in the past few decades, especially. Central banks, more than anything else, have had the main influence on business cycles in the past few decades. Mankind makes our own mistakes and we cause our own problems. People get exuberant for a while and they spend a lot of money, they add capacity and before you know it you have too much capacity and then you have a business cycle. There’s nothing unusual about it; it’s just the way mankind works.

Daily Bell: If there were no central banks would there still be business cycles?

Jim Rogers: Absolutely. I assure you there will always be business cycles, with or without central banks. We haven’t always had central banks in world history but we will again in world history.

Daily Bell: Would they be as bad?

Jim Rogers: Now, that’s a good question. In the old days, before the central banks had so much power, we used to have panics, and they were usually shorter term, of shorter duration. People would get too exuberant; you would have animal spirit and then the next thing you know, you have a panic. These were usually short and sweet. In 1907, they had the big panic in the US. Washington, New York, everybody got in a lot of trouble but then it didn’t last very long.

That’s the way the system is supposed to work. When people get in trouble, you clean out the system and then you start over. Competent people take over the assets, reorganize and start over. These days, with central banks and government, what happens is the central bank steps in to save everybody and instead of letting the system clean itself out the way that capitalism is supposed to work, the central banks mess it up, trying to save it. That’s why the recession has lasted longer or the depression has lasted longer than it did before. So in answer to the question, yes, central banks make it worse not better.

Daily Bell: What do you think of pure fiat currencies like bitcoin?

Jim Rogers: I don’t know anything about it. I heard the word but don’t know how it works.

Daily Bell: What about the resurgence of Fabian currency ideas like those held by Silvio Gesell and Major Douglas?

Jim Rogers: This did not work in the past and it won’t work now. Nobody wants to be a communist any more. Nobody even wants to be a socialist – but if they want to be a socialist, they want to be a rich socialist. Now, if the world gets into more economic trouble in the next decade or so you are certainly going to have more of that kind of ideology come to the fore again. People are going to be unhappy and they are going to look for answers.

Socialism sounds okay to people, especially people who are suffering. Will it work? NO! It’s never worked. Communism and socialism have failed many, many times and the propaganda notions will get the better of people when things go wrong. I am sure you are going to have a resurgence of all kinds of-off-the-wall economic theories as things get bad but none of them are going to work in the end. They may come to power but they are not going to work in the end.

Daily Bell: We’re probably in for massive price inflation at some point. When do you see that coming?

Jim Rogers: We already have inflation. Nearly every country in the world has acknowledged inflation. India, China, Norway, Australia – most acknowledge there is inflation except the US. The US says there is no inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been misleading us for a long time. Anyone who shops knows there’s inflation and it’s getting worse. Whether it’s education or entertainment or healthcare, anything, prices are going up. Worldwide inflation is going up and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Daily Bell: Will 2013 be a good year, investment-wise? If not, why not?

Jim Rogers: Well, it depends what you are investing in. In cotton it may be a great year, sugar may be a great year, currency may be a great year, selling stocks short may be a great year. Bonds – I don’t think it is going to be good for bonds.

Daily Bell: Let’s switch gears. What are your thoughts on China these days?

Jim Rogers: China has been trying to slow its economy for three years and they seem to be successful at it. At the same time, as you know, you have the West with numerous problems, and since the West has ten times the size of China’s economy, if you do business with the West you know there’s a problem, if you’re in China. If you’re in real estate in China you probably have problems. The Chinese government has been trying to kill the real estate bubble for over three years now and it looks like they are successful. Some parts of the Chinese economy are booming and will continue to boom. If you are in agriculture or water treatment or air pollution you are making a fortune in China because the government is doing everything they can to clean up the situation.

So when you ask what I think about China, there are many aspects to that question. I think China is going to be the most important country in the 21st century. Over the next few months a lot of people in China are going to be bankrupt and some are going to boom.

Daily Bell: Is it destabilizing?

Jim Rogers: If you are in real estate development in China you are destabilizing if you go bankrupt. What is destabilizing are the American central banks. Again, I want to repeat that America and Europe are over ten times the size of the Chinese economy. It’s hard for the Chinese economy to destabilize the world.

Daily Bell: What about Europe? Where is Europe headed?

Jim Rogers: Well there are many countries in Europe and some are doing better than others. Bulgaria is getting into a lot of agriculture and has shaped up its government. It’s going to be in better shape than places like Greece, which has not shaped up its government, which continue to spend a lot of money. Some countries in Europe are going to have serious problems down the road. I doubt the European economy is going to do well in the next few years and I don’t think the US is going to do well in the next year.

Daily Bell: Is austerity a workable solution?

Jim Rogers: Again, spending money you don’t have is not a workable solution; eventually, you are going to run out of other people’s money. Now, there’s not really any austerity in Europe. When you look at the projections, every government in Europe shows higher deficits over the next year; nobody has real austerity. All of these countries are talking one thing but doing another thing. The debts continue to rise and that’s not austerity.

Daily Bell: How about the US? Is the economy headed for a double-dip?

Jim Rogers: I’m not sure we ever got out of the last economic slowdown. Unemployment is higher than it’s ever been in most of our lifetimes and it will continue to be higher. We will certainly continue to have economic problems in the US. I suspect 2013 and 2014 will be bad again in the world economy, and certainly in the US economy.

Daily Bell: Who’s going to win the election?

Jim Rogers: I actually think Mr. Obama will win the election. It’s very difficult to unseat a president in the US. I think the Republicans have only done it once in the last hundred years. Once you are in power you have a lot of money to spend, and Mr. Obama has a lot of money to spend in places like Ohio. His popularity is going up in Ohio because he’s spending the money there. Because of that I suspect Mr. Obama will win. I didn’t say it was good for America or good for the world but I suspect he will win.

Daily Bell: What happened to Ron Paul?

Jim Rogers: His campaign didn’t win. He’s willing to fight the central bank for all of us but he didn’t win. It’s still difficult in America to teach people about reality because most people, even educated, and most politicians have a different view of the world. They don’t understand the real world; they don’t understand economics or history. Ron does but it’s hard to persuade people of that, as Ron clearly demonstrated.

Daily Bell: So you think Obama will win. What will that do to the American economy? Would Mitt Romney be any better?

Jim Rogers: No. They are both the same, as far as I’m concerned, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. One’s from Boston and one’s from Chicago. They both have the same view of the world and how the world works. These are the guys who got us into this situation. I don’t know why the world thinks they can solve our problems. They are both going to make our problems worse.

Daily Bell: Is the world headed toward a kind of global depression?

Jim Rogers: As I said, if you are in Chinese real estate and you go bankrupt you are going to get some depression. But some parts of the world economy, like agriculture, are going to boom. Overall, I don’t expect great things moving forward.

Daily Bell: Where are some monetary safe havens? Water? Food? Oil?

Jim Rogers: Agriculture – I am wildly bullish on agriculture. Water – I wouldn’t own water. If you own water, if things get tough they are going to take it away from you. They will confiscate it and maybe put you in jail for being so outrageous as to own water.

Some countries I’m excited about. North Korea, Angola – there are countries where there are very exciting things going on. If you are a farmer you aren’t going to know that Greece is going bankrupt. You are not going to care. You are too busy going to work every day to make money. If you are in water treatment it’s the same thing.

Daily Bell: How are the nation-states around the world going to react to more economic difficulties? Are they going to continue to raise taxes and inflate?

Jim Rogers: They are going to inflate – that’s all they know. They will print money. They will also put in motion the power to own other people. They will put on price controls and they will put on exchange controls; neither will work. It will make the situation worse but that’s all they know. They will blame it on others for a while and then they will put in place measures that will make the situation worse. And eventually, we hope that somebody will come to their senses before we hit rock bottom and start the process over in spite of the politicians.

Politicians always look for the easy answer. That’s one reason why socialism has a repeal periodically, socialistic kinds of measures, because people want the easy answer. But the easy answer is not going to work. The easy answer never works. They will try the easy way and make the situation worse.

Daily Bell: Are there going to be additional wars?

Jim Rogers: Oh, yeah. Throughout history there has always been war. There is no period in history where we didn’t have wars of some sort. Politicians like to blame somebody and it’s easier to blame foreigners, so as tensions rise people will blame foreigners more and more.

Also, I’m told throughout history when you have shortages of raw materials, that leads to strife and wars and we have shortages of raw materials developing which will be bigger and bigger. So we will have wars.

Daily Bell: How do you see the Middle East playing out? Are the US and NATO purposefully trying to destabilize the area? Is there some sort of plan to create a religious war?

Jim Rogers: I don’t know if there is a plan. Maybe some Machiavellian types have a plan to stir up things and cause a war but I don’t think any fellow has a plan to do that. The Israelis say they want to bomb Iran, which would cause a war, but I don’t think any government has a plan to cause a war.

Now, will there be wars in the Middle East? That’s a different question. These countries all seem to be making mistakes and when you have economic problems that always seems to lead to war and that’s the right place for it. The players are making the mistakes and it seems inevitable.

Daily Bell: What should people do when faced with all these difficulties?

Jim Rogers: Be very careful. Study some history and study some economics and see how these things always play out in the end. Prepare yourself. Make sure you have a professional advisor and you should do okay. Make sure you have investments that will do okay. Move to a new country if you are worried about your own country.

Daily Bell: What are YOU doing?

Jim Rogers: Well, I own commodities and currencies. I short stocks. I teach my children Mandarin. Both of my children speak perfect Mandarin. Both English and Mandarin will be important in the 21st century, in my view. We moved to Singapore so my children could learn and speak Mandarin. That’s how I’m living my life. If you talk to me in 30 years I’ll tell you whether I’m doing it right or not.

Daily Bell: Are you writing any more books?

Jim Rogers: Yes. I have a book coming out in February called Street Smarts. I am wrapping it up right now. I just took photographs for the cover last week.

Daily Bell: Could you tell our readers what you like most about The Daily Bell and our style of analysis?

Jim Rogers: I read it every day so I must find something interesting about it.

Daily Bell: Any final points you want to make?

Jim Rogers: Be very careful. These are perilous times and it’s going to get worse.

Daily Bell: Thanks for your time.

Jim Rogers: It’s my pleasure.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

We have one big agreement with Mr. Rogers and one disagreement. The agreement is about President Barack Obama – we also think he will be reelected. The disagreement is about China. Rogers thinks the downturn there is and will be patchy but we tend to believe it will affect a broad swath of Asia (not just China).

Of course, these are vital economies and no doubt will snap back. But monetary depressions can be relentless so we don’t expect that China and Asia will be in any sense immune. These downturns have already started, from what we can tell.

We certainly agree with Mr. Rogers about Barack Obama and have written so in the past. This is one single party we’re dealing with and it works just like British royalty – royalty that seeks an heir and a spare.

In this case, Romney is the spare and Obama is the heir, the designated one. The powers-that-be have a great deal invested in Obama after four years and we’d be very surprised if he lost.

As always, we enjoyed our time with Mr. Rogers and are pleased that he shared his thoughts with us again. We look forward to reading his book.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

We track power elite dominant social themes large and small. As part of this effort, we’ve uncovered what we believe to be patterns of "directed history" leading toward ever-bigger government at both national and international levels.

Elites love government because they control society via mercantilism, the use of public power to enhance private advantages.

As the US has evolved along increasingly imperial lines, mercantilism has grown more obvious and intrusive. Over US$3 trillion is administered via government programs and bureaucrats. With so much money at stake, the political process itself has been increasingly rationalized. In many ways US Inc. is a large business, run by powerful people who have a great deal at stake financially.

Less and less is left up to chance these days. Candidates are vetted for malleability and cooperation within the boundaries of what is tolerable. Someone like Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) offered up well-received ideas about freedom and free markets. The "establishment" ostracized him and the GOP itself worked hard to ensure he would not win the nomination nor even have a voice at the convention.

Rules were changed to ensure that Ron Paul’s delegates did not obtain clout and when this was not enough, delegates were intimidated physically and even beaten up. But someone like Democratic president Barack Obama ran into no such resistance. He was very obviously a "chosen" candidate – one selected by a US power elite for purposes that still do not seem entirely clear.

But there are many tales surrounding his background, most of which have to do with CIA affiliations not only for him but also for his family. Access to his records going back all the way to kindergarten have been barred and there is considerable evidence he was born abroad.

As president, Obama carried on with the various programs of what we might call the Imperium. He continued its wars, its domestic intimidation and its corporate empowerment.

Part of Obama’s program involved the continual degradation of the US economy. By raising taxes, increasing regulation and further militarizing the US economy, Obama guaranteed both the continued rise of mercantilism and the further impoverishment of US citizens.

This is a considerable accomplishment within the context of the anger and frustration that many in the country feel. Of course, Obama has been helped by what seems to be a controlled mainstream media that faithfully reports his perspectives and refuses to probe his policies too aggressively.

Obama himself has helped his cause with a professorial wonkishness that is somewhat disarming. He doesn’t come across as an especially manipulative or destructive type, not overtly anyway.

He is, in other words, a good front man for the interests that supported him and helped place him in the most powerful job in the world. His mission: To further mercantilism and increase US support for internationalism and global government.

His performance within this context has been adequate and thus those who backed him before are apparently making every effort to ensure he gets another term to "finish" whatever it is he has been charged with accomplishing.

Obama himself, as we can see from the first debate between him and challenger Mitt Romney, is probably somewhat psychologically at a disadvantage in this campaign. No matter who you are, it is difficult to defend behaviors that are intended to be destructive of the very citizenry you were elected to serve. Thus it is, perhaps, that Obama found it hard to defend his policies and term in office. Mitt Romney is said to have won the first debate.

Of course, Romney has been picked by the same special interests that selected Obama, one surmises. Nonetheless, Obama is the Chosen One. Romney is merely the backup.

And so a great many manipulations are now taking place to ensure that Obama is seen as having momentum despite his recent weak performance.

It is instructive to look at what is going on because it gives us a clearer picture of the ease with which the power elite exercises its clout on behalf of those it wants to support.

Whether you believe elites are merely a network of powerful people with similar interests or a cohesive cadre of globalists, the manipulations being applied to the Barack Obama campaign for a second term as US president are truly remarkable.

Again, they are worth noting because they show us the immense power of these elites when it comes to supporting a specific goal and personality. We can catalogue four separate elements of manipulation on Obama’s behalf, as follows:

• Jobs are suddenly up.
• Media is spinning like crazy on his debate performance.
• Polls now show him drawing ahead.
• Osama bin Laden books and movies are suddenly appearing.

Here’s something from just yesterday from the New York Times regarding employment, entitled "Jobs Report Brings Unexpected Good News for Obama" …

President Obama waved to the crowd after speaking at a campaign rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. … After a lackluster debate, President Obama faced the prospect of a second piece of bad political news with Friday morning’s jobs report. Instead, Mr. Obama – and the economy – received some unexpected good news.

Economists will spend the rest of the day parsing the numbers and arguing over exactly the best way to describe the report, but there is little question about its overall thrust: positive. An energized President Obama, appearing at a campaign rally outside Washington, seized on the news, saying "this country has come too far to turn back."

Speaking to 1,935 supporters at George Mason University a few hours after the numbers were released, Mr. Obama said, "This morning, we found out that the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since I took office. More Americans entered the work force; more people are getting jobs."

The rate dropped sharply, to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, because the Labor Department’s survey of households showed a large gain in the number of employed people in September. The survey of businesses showed a smaller gain, but it also showed that hiring gains in July and August were larger than expected.

When it comes to the debate itself, the mainstream media has worked hard to transform a defeat into victory. Here’s an excerpt of an article posted at Newsbusters describing this process. ("MRC" refers to the Media Research Center):

ABC’s Stephanopoulos Leads Post-Debate Media Spin for Democrats … Leading into tomorrow’s presidential debate, journalists are busy setting expectations for the candidates. On Sunday’s Good Morning America, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued that Mitt Romney is under "huge, huge" pressure: "He is behind right now. He is behind nationally, he’s behind in all of the battleground states. This is the last big audience that Mitt Romney is going to have with about four and a half weeks left to go."

But more undecided voters will be swayed by the media’s post-debate spin about who won and who lost than by any pre-debate expectations. Reviewing the last several campaigns, MRC analysts have found a clear trend of network reporters fawning over the performance of liberal candidates, while harping on any perceived weaknesses or gaffes from conservatives.

One of the most reliable pro-Democratic pundits is none other than George Stephanpoulos – not especially surprising, given his track record as a loyal operative for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, but hardly the objective, unbiased voice touted by ABC News.

MRC has documented how, in eight out of the last nine general election presidential debates (every one since he joined ABC News in 1997), Stephanopoulos has gone on his network’s airwaves to claim victory for the Democratic candidate, all in the guise of offering impartial analysis.

AP has joined the fray by reporting on Obama’s edge in political ads. After weeks of articles asserting that Romney has a fund-raising edge, we learn suddenly that Obama is well out in front when it comes to actual political promotion. Here’s an excerpt from an article written and posted yesterday:

Report: Obama campaign outpacing Romney’s in ads … A new report finds that President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has run more than twice as many TV ads in nine key states as has the campaign of his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

The Nielsen Co. said Friday that Obama’s campaign had run nearly 230,000 ads in Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire from the beginning of the year through early September, compared with about 87,000 for Romney. All are considered battlegrounds this year, with both candidates competing heavily in those states for votes.

The biggest disparity was in Ohio. Obama’s campaign ran just over 51,000 ads in the state compared to nearly 17,500 for Romney. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Obama ahead there.

Wisconsin, the home state of running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, is the only state where Romney has edged the president in ads. Nielsen said Romney’s campaign had run 1,952 ads there compared to 1,391 for Obama.

Perhaps the most startling promotional mechanism has to do with the death of Osama bin Laden. In numerous articles we’ve explained that it is very difficult to believe that bin Laden died on May 1, 2011. Along with many others, we believe he more likely died ten years ago of Marfan syndrome leading to kidney failure.

When proclaiming bin Laden’s death the Obama administration produced no DNA, no photos, no body and no eyewitness to support the announcement. Additionally, accounts varied widely regarding bin Laden’s death and even whether or not his body had actually been dumped at sea, as claimed. Search the Internet for "bin Laden" and "Daily Bell" for more on this topic.

Despite the obvious difficulties regarding the bin Laden death narrative, the Obama publicity machine has ground on. Though Pakistani eyewitnesses to the raid give a completely different story, the US mainstream media has done no investigative work. They’ve simply reported on the various triumphalist "spins" regarding bin Laden’s death. Here’s an excerpt from an article that was posted yesterday at Commentary magazine:

Bin Laden Film By Obama Bundler to Air Days Before Election … This is Obama-bundler Harvey Weinstein’s made-for-TV film about the Osama bin Laden raid, not to be confused with the much-hyped Kathryn Bigelow movie on the same subject (that one is supposed to come out at the end of the year). Weinstein’s film will air on National Geographic Channel on November 4, which many have pointed out is a pretty coincidental date:

A film dramatizing the death of Osama bin Laden is set to debut next month on the National Geographic Channel, two days before the presidential election. "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden," from The Weinstein Co. and Voltage Pictures, will air Sunday, Nov. 4, the channel said Thursday. President Barack Obama faces Republican challenger Mitt Romney at the polls two days later.

Weinstein co-chairman Harvey Weinstein is a prominent fundraiser for Obama’s re-election campaign, which has touted bin Laden’s death as an example of the president’s leadership.

When we add all this up, a fairly definitive picture of massive manipulation emerges.

The US economy is moribund and slipping into what seems to be an actual depression but according to brand new Fedgov statistics, employment is up sharply! Obama’s debate performance was a losing one but the media itself is defending his conduct and providing a number of alternative narratives.

There are polls being reported that show how the president’s campaign has been able to muster considerable promotional clout in "battleground states." And most disturbing of all, a flood of media reports continue to celebrate the recent death of an archenemy of the US who apparently died ten years ago.

There are many who dispute – who cannot psychologically tolerate – the idea that the US and the West are subject to massive elite manipulation on a number of fronts. We are told that to proffer the idea that Money Power has created a virtual false universe of sociopolitical and economic assumptions is simplistic and "paranoid."

But please observe these elections and the vastness of resources being brought to bear on reelecting Barack Obama. More eloquently than anything we can write, this barely concealed display shows how deeply elite control actually runs.

If all else fails, of course, the votes themselves may be miscounted. Conveniently, ballots are being sent to Spain. We’ve written about that here: VIDEO: Who’s Counting the Votes?

Directed elections, anybody?

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Just yesterday, a staff report entitled, "Islam Yearns for a Third Way, US Intel Will Provide," predicted "a third way for Islam that will allow Western-style central banking and finance."

Right on schedule, just as if scripted, Libya has erupted once again as "moderate Islam" battles against "radicals."

It could not be clearer or, of course, more illogical. To make the script work, Western Intel planners conjuring this nonsense have to gloss over just how these "radical Islamic" entities got into Libya in the first place.

These al Qaeda types and "extremists" reportedly infiltrated Libya and then were then supported until Muammar Gaddafi’s reign fell. Now they are expendable. But expendable or not, they are the same types of individuals apparently employed under Osama bin Laden – the same types now being insinuated into Syria.

We’re not supposed to ask why al Qaeda-types are serving as the shock troops for these so-called youth revolutions. Of course, we already know why.

Radical Islam is a chisel that US Intel uses to reshape the world. It’s not idle conjecture, at this point. Either one agrees with this scenario or one has to explain why Islamic fundamentalists have now fought with the support of NATO in Libya and Syria.

Yesterday’s article made the following points:

So this is what’s really going on. The Middle East has been destabilized by the US State Department’s AYM youth movement. Now that the Muslim Brotherhood is empowered, a surge of violence may give way to a "third way" regarding Islamic society, polity and economics.

Muslims are right to believe they are being manipulated. What they don’t understand perhaps is that the "third way" that many long for has already been prepared for them and it, too, is under Western control.

And here’s reportage from an article in today’s UK Telegraph:

Libya: Benghazi crowds drive out Islamist militants … Cheering crowds swept through the Libyan city of Benghazi clearing Islamist militias from their bases after protests triggered by the killing of the American ambassador, Chris Stevens.

Up to four people were reported dead in clashes which broke out when the last and biggest militia was attacked in the early hours of Saturday morning. Earlier, members of Ansar al-Sharia, the militant group accused of responsibility for Mr Stevens’ death, were forced out of their strongholds in the city …

The protests in Benghazi on Friday evening, estimated at 30,000-strong, featured pro-American slogans and banners, unusual for demonstrations in Arab countries. Though many protesters said they were attending "for Benghazi, not for America", some held up placards commemorating Mr Stevens, who lived in Benghazi last year while co-ordinating American support for the revolution. "We demand justice for Stevens," said one, and "Libya lost a friend" another.

After finishing with Ansar al-Sharia, some protesters moved further out of town and took on a base said to belong to the Rafallah al-Sehati Battalion, a Salafist group that is notionally allied to the government and in particular to the February 17 Brigade, a less militant outfit whose leaders are very powerful in the new Libya.

Officials in Washington have now largely dropped the version of events initially put out, that his killing and that of three other American staff was the result of a protest against the film that got out of hand.

Libyan eye-witnesses said there were no protests before the consulate building was attacked on three sides by scores of men waving black Islamic flags and carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles.

Militia and military leaders have been meeting members of the interim government and the newly elected prime minister, Mustafa Abushagur, in Tripoli this week to discuss how to deal with Ansar al-Sharia, or at least the members said to have been involved in the consulate attack.

This article provides us with a number of clues as to what is really going on Libya currently.

The article mentions the "Rafallah al-Sehati Battalion," a Salafist group. Salafism, as we mentioned yesterday, is a variant of Saudi-Arabian Wahhabism. The West, and more specifically the US, has been sponsoring the Saud family and Wahhabism for decades.

It is to the advantage of the West to sponsor Islamic fundamentalism because fundamentalists can be used to destabilize Middle Eastern and upper African regimes. Then historical dialecticism can be brought to bear. Fundamentalists can be attacked by "moderates" – and Western style regulatory democracy can suddenly emerge. This is surely the Hegelian model being applied to Libya today.

Libya, of course, is in ruins. Sectarianism and violence are everywhere. Gaddafi may have ruled like a dictator but for many under his reign life was good. The basic necessity of water had finally become accessible. Houses and cars were affordable and so long as you didn’t challenge the government directly, you could start a business, survive and even thrive.

Of course, human beings generally don’t like to live in circumstances where they must moderate their views out of fear. But certainly Gaddafi’s Libya was likely superior to today’s faction-ridden, partially destroyed and hate-infested country.

We mention this because of what the Telegraph relates: "… Protesters held up placards commemorating Mr Stevens, who lived in Benghazi last year while coordinating American support for the revolution. ‘We demand justice for Stevens,’ said one, and ‘Libya lost a friend’ another."

We are supposed to believe these are the genuine sympathies of the Libyan people? We are supposed to believe that after being bombed and shot, after seeing the country invaded by ragtag mobs of "fundamentalists," that Libyans support those who supervised the damage?

It strikes me as more directed history, just as I noted yesterday in my RT interview. You can see that interview here:

Anthony Wile on RT News: Arab Winter

The US in particular, through its Teddy Roosevelt "big stick" policy, has unapologetically meddled in other countries’ affairs around the world. In my view, the current situation in Libya is part of the same impulse. Nothing much has changed from that point of view.

But in another way a lot has changed, thanks to what we call the Internet Reformation. For instance, Western Intel seems to have had in mind creating the appearance of a religious war by planting an anti-Muslim film in the Middle East.

It was the appearance of this hateful film that was the proximate cause of the violence in Libya and elsewhere. Only it was not.

The Internet and the alternative media thoroughly debunked the film and its infiltration into the Middle East. What was obviously a Western Intel trick failed. And the administration was left scrambling to pro-offer a secondary justification – terrorism.

In fact, it is far more likely that all of this, including the placards, was orchestrated. The manipulation knows no boundaries and the same weary historical tricks are being applied over and over again.

They are not working nearly so well these days. As a result of the current manipulations, the Middle East is on fire, probably above and beyond what was expected. This is because Western manipulations are well known by now and people are furious.

They want to be left alone. Can you blame them?

Perhaps the era of the "big stick" policy is over and those orchestrating these policies just haven’t internalized that fact. Or perhaps they don’t know what else to do.

Perhaps the realization hasn’t struck them that the same realizations that have struck the Middle East regarding directed history are also infiltrating the West. And that is an even bigger danger – to them anyway. Not us …

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Recent violence, or blowback if you will, throughout the Middle East is not surprising. Many in the mainstream media are attempting to portray the violent attacks, in particular the one against the US embassy in Benghazi, as the fallout from a recent film titled "Innocence of Muslims" that reflects poorly on Islam, to say the least.

Now, I admittedly haven’t seen the film, nor do I think it matters. To me, the casting of blame on a movie that is highly insulting to Muslims is convenient. The truth of the matter is that the forces behind American politics, and world politics for that matter, desire the chaos that is ensuing throughout the Middle East. The rise of a militant Islamic crescent will create an ongoing platform for the continued good fight of democracy against insurgent Al-Qaeda fighters – who hate us, or so we are told.

When asked about the Libyan and Egyptian Arab Springs during interviews with the Russian television network, RT, I stated that the rise of radical factions like the Muslim Brotherhood would be the result of the misguided protests being instigated by organizations like the Alliance of Youth Movements and the US State Department. But I also stated that was exactly what the West wanted. To see exactly what I had to say and how accurately that played out, take a quick look at these two videos:

Gaddafi Funds Frozen; Why New Dictators Will be as Corrupt as Old Ones

US Intel Agencies’ Involvement in Fomenting the Libyan Uprising and Why Gaddafi will not survive

The problems facing the "civilized" world today are the outgrowth of Western powers’ insistence that it is the right, if not obligation, of the Anglo-Saxon to "tame" and "civilize" the "others." It is this blatant and arrogant premise that has America standing at the forefront of the battle lines around the world. It is America that has built more than 900 military bases in over 145 countries where, at the end of a diplomatic gun barrel, the leaders and industrialist families of others nations are bent to their new "civilizers."

The outgrowth of this arrogant-led foreign invasion/mission to spread democratic dogma, as it befits the powerful international banking cartel that controls the Anglo-American military-industrial complex, is the only reason American embassies are bombed and "civil servants" left for dead. It has nothing at all to do with some obscure film, for if it was the result of such a production, could American shores realistically be penetrated by an angry herd of disgruntled moviegoers?

Think about it for a minute. If America had not "followed the sun" under the fraudulent leadership of folks like Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft but had instead chosen to focus on self-defence of the nation, how could any country possibly threaten America?

Is it likely that a friendly and export-oriented neighbor to the north would invade? No. How about Mexico to the south? Are they likely to head north across the Rio Grande and attack the US military? No. And what about those two great bodies of water that separate America from Europe to the east and Asia to the west? Is it likely that a foreign navy could realistically threaten American shores? Again, the answer is no.

The raging fires that America has started in many countries around the world are escalating. The blowback–inspired "terrorists" want the US and allied troops the heck out of their backyards. Can you blame them?

As the fires of blowback continue to roar, the winds of discontent at home blow harder and harder. As the body bags return, the continued price being paid becomes ever more difficult for families to accept. And today, during what we call the Internet Reformation, the mainstream propaganda utilized during Big-Stick-Teddy’s era to manipulate the public’s perception of what is really happening is failing, and failing miserably. The truth is spreading like wildfire and people are starting to realize that on a global basis there has been a fraud conducted on a level that is simply staggering to conceive of.

The powerful banking dynasties that established the central banking system that insidiously taxes away morality have now left themselves exposed, naked for all to see – or at least those who want to. Those who do realize rather quickly that employing human action to take care of one’s own interests is the only way to protect one’s right to life and that of their families. The governments today are under the complete control of the international money power and are nothing more than puppet organizations aiding and abetting the fraudulent perpetration and desired ethnic cleansing that has yet to come.

Mainstream media, too, has found itself reeling like a punch-drunk prize fighter, hanging onto the memorable ropes of yesteryear while month after month the energy that supported its role in the mind-control battle continues to wane in the face of the cresting Internet Reformation process.

As the faith and confidence of the general public in the mainstay control systems governing, controlling and manipulating their lives begins to fade, the illusion melts and the dumbfounded look of complacency that previously occupied the collective minds of the manipulated becomes replaced with a look that makes the overseers silently shudder – it is called anger, shortly followed by hatred.

It is during such times as we now live that the fiction of how the world really works forces people to seek protection. For my family and me, I have done just that. Thanks to the many great relationships I have made with other free-market thinkers over the past decade or so, I have found solutions that fit for us. I have also found many that did not.

When individuals awaken from the "power elite" slumber party they were in and sees things clearly, the only viable action is to act. But the means through which one does that are uniquely their own – or should be.

When a man goes to a store to buy a suit, for example, there are many different fabrics, styles and colors from which to choose. Why? Because we all have unique wants and desires. And it is because of our uniqueness that we all should seek solutions to the public problems that exist that fit with our unique wants and desires.

Very shortly, the Daily Bell will be unveiling a new and dramatically improved multi-lingual website that includes a premium membership where I will be introducing you, should you wish to join, to a network of leading solutions providers and the various solutions they have created to help people like you and me protect assets, grow wealth and maintain a healthy and free lifestyle.

In essence, when I wrote High Alert back in the early 2000s, the book was subtitled, "How to Prepare for and Profit from the Coming Financial Hurricane." Well, dear reader, that hurricane is approaching and 2008 wasn’t it. As I have written many times before, that was a mere warm-up, a precursor for the real storm that is fast approaching. And when exactly will that be?

The answer is neither I nor anyone else knows. Gold has recently increased in its purchasing power against the paper currencies as the US dollar continues to sink, reflecting unwarranted confidence among people who desperately wish to remain optimistic in spite of reality. But one thing is certain: The major battleground, the one that controls the minds of the masses, is heating up with vigor. The Internet Reformation is a process, not an episode, and the end result of endless foreign conflicts, currency debasement and political and media manipulations will bring forth civil chaos in the streets of Western countries the likes of which mankind has never previously witnessed.

The fraud is global. The meddling reach of the power elite’s agenda seeking global-governance creates an environment in which there are very few places we can turn to protect ourselves and our families. All anyone has to do is take a quick read of the 19th century classic, The Crowd, by Gustav le Bon, to get a sense of the complete irrational behavior that accompanies widespread anger and the accompanying internal combustion.

We look forward to continuing to provide you with cutting edge analysis of the dominant social themes utilized by the powers that be. But now we look forward to sharing more than just our free-market analysis as we begin introducing viable free-market solutions, as well.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

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Introduction: Judge Andrew P. Napolitano joined the FOX News Channel (FNC) in January 1998 and serves as its senior judicial analyst. Judge Napolitano is the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the state of New Jersey. While on the bench from 1987 to 1995, Judge Napolitano presided over more than 150 jury trials and sat in all parts of the Superior Court – criminal, civil, equity and family. He has handled thousands of sentencings, motions, hearings and divorces. For 11 years, he served as an adjunct professor of constitutional law at Seton Hall Law School, where he provided instruction in constitutional law and jurisprudence. Judge Napolitano returned to private law practice in 1995 and began television broadcasting in the same year. Judge Napolitano’s many books include: It is Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom (2011), Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws (2006), A Nation of Sheep (2007) and NY Times bestsellers The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land (2007) and Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power and Deception in American History (2010).

Daily Bell: Let’s get started. What about the Rand Paul controversy? Where do you stand on his endorsement of Romney?

Judge Napolitano: Rand Paul is a friend of mine but yes, that endorsement certainly got him slaughtered on his Facebook page; they were running 50:1 against him. My whole view – and I’ve said this on air – Mitt Romney’s views are closer to Barack Obama’s than they are to Thomas Jefferson’s and he presents just a slightly different version of big government. In fact, in the defense policy he might actually be worse than the President because he seems to be itching to start a war with Iran. In terms of domestic policy, he contemplates additional borrowing, maybe a little less than the President has borrowed. If the President is re-elected he might bring us to $20 trillion in debt by 2016; Romney might bring us to $18 trillion in debt by 2016. Either of those federal debts would be unsustainable.

Daily Bell: Give us a quick summation and your thoughts on the election this year.

Judge Napolitano: I have harshly criticized Paul Ryan for having voted to offer the president to raise the debt ceiling; I have also criticized him for his support of the Patriot Act and its extensions and the National Defense Authorization Act. He is a classic George Bush Republican who does not believe that the Constitution means what it says. I was heartened to hear him quote me the other day when he said ‘our rights come from our humanity,’ which is a gift from God, and they don’t come from the government. But unfortunately, he lied by his vote to take our rights in the legislation that I have just articulated.

On the other hand, I don’t think his designation by Governor Romney has succeeded in getting capital and getting the Governor’s taxes off the front page, and has zeroed the media focus on what should be an essential aspect of this election. That is who would be a better steward of the economy. I say steward because they both want to be steward of the economy. To me, the steward of the economy should be the people who participate in it and not the government. It should be the free choices of entrepreneurs and consumers; they shouldn’t need the hand of the government.

Having said that, I disagree with the fundamental premise of both of their campaigns. Now, the President believes that government is there for people who can’t do what they should do for themselves. Governor Romney wants to make government more efficient. I don’t want to make it more efficient; I want most of it to go away. I’m sure I would be a challenger of much of what a President Romney would do – and I know that I sometimes get in trouble when I use the Romney/Jefferson comparison but I don’t think that’s an opinion; I think it’s a truism. His views are much closer to Obama than they are to Jefferson.

Daily Bell: Not much difference between the two of them would you say?

Judge Napolitano: Well, no, but that’s the society we’ve created. We really don’t have two political parties anymore. We have one big government party, with a democratic wing that likes war and taxes and individual welfare and staying in power, and a republican wing that likes war and deficits and corporate welfare and staying in power. There is very little difference between them. I mean, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson are so different from the mainstream Republicans and the mainstream Democrats; they really present the only alternative. It’s basically a choice between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

I understand the animosity towards the president, I understand the fear he instills in those who embrace traditional values, I understand the anybody-but-Obama. I understand the argument of those who say at least Mitt Romney is a step in the right direction. My own view is that those who are afraid of big government under President Obama will be equally as afraid of it under a President Romney.

Daily Bell: We saw he ran a rare press conference disputing the accusations that he is running an unfair and negative election campaign.

Judge Napolitano: Well, this is a very negative campaign. The President cannot run on his record. His record on the economy is reprehensible and he is, of all occupants of the White House, the most dangerous to human freedom since Abraham Lincoln. He doesn’t want to touch either of those subjects so his only approach is to attempt to destroy Governor Romney.

Daily Bell: What’s your take on Ron Paul? Give us a summation of his career.

Judge Napolitano: I think he probably continues to go around the country, keeping the dialogue going of small government and maximum individual liberty. I think he probably passes the mantel to his son, Senator Paul. Senator Paul and Governor Johnson probably battle it out and if they can’t come to some kind of agreement as to who will personify human freedom and who, in public life, will be the champion of it. I think that’s probably a good thing because I think the movement will continue to grow.

With Congressman Paul free from congressional duties he might actually stir up the pot even more then he’s done already. My next book, which comes out after election day, is an assault on the progressive era, dedicated to Ron Paul in large measure because no person in these times has done more to remind people about the loss of liberty than he. He has been an inspiration to millions and among those millions is me.

Daily Bell: Are you a backer of Rand’s generally?

Judge Napolitano: Look, I understand why he endorsed Governor Romney. Of course, I would never do it but I understand why he did it because he has to live in the Republican Party and has to have peace with the Republican establishment in the United States Senate. I am sure it was done with the consent of his father. I understand it did not go over well with rank and file and I know that because it didn’t go over well with me. Once this election is over, whether Governor Romney wins or the President is re-elected, I think Rand Paul will be his usual self and that usual self is one of the very few members of the Congress who believes that the Constitution means what is says.

Daily Bell: You were negative about the freedom trend in the US last time we spoke. Are you more hopeful now?

Judge Napolitano: No, not at all. No. The government keeps getting larger and more in our faces. There is less outrage than there used to be. The Air Force predicts that in ten years there’ll be 30,000 drones in the sky at any given moment and that some of them will be the size of golf balls and some will be the size of mosquitoes, and nobody is complaining about that. People seem willing to give up their privacy in exchange for safety. People forget they need protection from the government.

People are confusing freedom and safety. Freedom does not promote safety; freedom promotes unfettered choices, free from government interference. It accepts the fact that there will be some dangerous things in society but it assumes that risk from danger without is a more desirable state of affairs than an authoritarian government than within. I think these are bad days for freedom and unless a Ron Paul, Rand Paul or Gary Johnson is in the White House they will continue to get bad. I just couldn’t imagine a President Romney dismantling the security state, not enforcing the Patriot Act, disregarding the National Defense Authorization Act, stopping all the drones. I just couldn’t imagine that happening. Until that happens, we’re at the tender mercies of whatever faceless bureaucrats are running the government.

Daily Bell: How did the US Constitution get perverted?

Judge Napolitano: Well, I think that the problems with the Constitution began in the Lincoln administration, when he drilled people for doing what the founding fathers did, which was seceding from an overbearing central government. In the so-called Reconstruction years, which really were the years of military occupation in the South – Reconstruction is just a euphemism for that – the military directed daily life in the South for 10 years. That really whetted the federal government’s appetite for more power. Now we see a recession in that power for the next 30 years and then it comes back in the Progressive Era, and the progressives are so all-encompassing that they sit even on the courts. And the courts let Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson get away with things like, ‘we are not going to let the Constitution stand in our way’ for what the people need. That’s utterly inconsistent with their oath to office.

Of course, the real serious troubles with the Constitution are with the FDR years. FDR has eight members on the Supreme Court and they are doing bizarre things like saying that wheat to the farmer, which grows in his backyard, which is ground into flour and made into baked goods all of which are consumed by his family, somehow constitutes interstate commerce, and people accept that with a straight face. That’s, of course, the infamous, Wickard v. Filburn case in 1942. From and after that case, all bets are off and the Congress now knows that its authority to regulate even minute behavior will be held up by the court, even behavior so infinitesimal that it’s not measureable by standard economic mechanisms. Because Wickard v. Filburn basically says if small infinitesimal activity ended up with other small infinitesimal activity, that’s how the entire country could affect interstate commerce and the government could regulate even the small, infinitesimal parts of it. This would send Jefferson and Madison to the madhouse if they learned that the Supreme Court did this and the Congress acted upon it but as we know, that’s what happened.

Daily Bell: Comment on the Supreme Court’s decision regarding Obamacare, please.

Judge Napolitano: Well, I think it’s one of the most tortured, twisted, unexpected, unaccepted, created opinions in modern times. Think of it this way: The court is an arbiter between the sides that are arguing before it. Either one side is right and the other side is wrong or one is partially right and the other side is partially right but the court really is without authority to come up with its own theory of a piece of litigation. So if both sides say this is not a tax, it is inconceivable that the courts on its own could say it’s a tax. Rulings must come from the arguments made before it; otherwise there is no ability to rely on what the court will do if you are really just rolling the dice when you go in there.

Now, I know that sometimes bizarre compromises are necessary, to keep the five-person majority from becoming a four-person minority but this compromise – let’s call this thing a tax even when its proponent denied that it was a tax – is unprecedented in our history. The Supreme Court has never declared something to be a tax that the congress did not say was a tax. Think about it, the opinions to use for the following proposition: The government can do whatever it wants, as long as the penalty for your not complying with the government’s wishes is the imposition of tax, even if the behavior regulated by the government doesn’t come from the Constitution. That is simply unacceptable. It is simply blatantly unconstitutional. That is simply offering the Congress on a dish unlimited federal power that even the Congress and the president didn’t ask for.

Daily Bell: You are a libertarian. Are you an anarcho-capitalist?

Judge Napolitano: Well, it depends how you define those terms. I am a Randian, as in Ayn Rand, on economics. I am a Rothbardian, as in Murray Rothbard, on most philosophical principals, specifically the morality of government in our lives. Some of the younger producers who worked with me on the late, lamented, now-missed "Freedom Watch" used to say that I was an anarcho-capitalist. I don’t know what the term means, but I am always the most libertarian person in the room. (Laughing)

Daily Bell: Rothbard was. How can one believe in representative democracy as an anarchist?

Judge Napolitano: Representative democracy presumes that those who receive power from the voters will respect the natural law and will respect the Constitution. We rarely have seen in our era that both the natural law and the Constitution are respected. Majority rules obviously means the rights of the minority so only a government tempered by the natural law, and in America tempered by the Constitution, has a moral one. That’s why I said earlier almost all federal law is unconstitutional because it’s either not grounded in a power granted to the Congress in the Constitution, or even if grounded there, violates the natural law. Beyond that we’d have to get into specifics. Under the natural law, the government only has two purposes, and those are to preserve, protect and defend our rights from fraud and force and nothing else.

Daily Bell: Is representative democracy a positive choice? Or does it always lead to despotism eventually?

Judge Napolitano: It usually leads to despotism because it usually draws to it people who suffer from labido dominandi, a Latin phrase that St. Augustine used, which is the ‘lust to dominate’ and the government doesn’t usually draw people who think the way Ron Paul or Gary Johnson or I do. When I was in the government, in the judicial branch – we are really exceptions. The vast majority of people who are drawn there are busybodies, nanny-staters, bed-wetters and do-gooders who think that somehow they have the power to tell us how to live our lives differently than how we choose to live them.

So yes, representative democracy will lead to despotism without a judiciary seriously committed to constitutional principals and natural law principals. We do not have a judiciary today. Occasionally we hear it from Justice Thomas; sometimes we hear it from Justice Scalia; occasionally we hear it from Justice Kennedy. There are a smattering of lower court federal judges, but only these arguments are appointed by Democratic presidents. But for the most part, the Judiciary presumes to be constitutional whatever the legislative branch has done, and thus finds ways to uphold legislation.

Von Mises said that government is essentially the negation of liberty. I believe he is correct. From that it follows that whatever the government does should be presumed unconstitutional and violative of the natural law. Rather than the challenger having the burden of saying why the legislation or the government behavior is wrong, the government should have the burden of saying why the legislation or the government behavior is consistent with the Constitution and consistent with the natural law. Simply switching that presumption would radically change the ability and the inclination of the courts to invalidate much of what government does in deference to our individual choices.

Daily Bell: Is modern law made to include natural law and economics? If not, why not?

Judge Napolitano: It doesn’t matter. Natural law is part of our humanity and modern law is subject to that. The creature is subject to the creator. The creators of law are human beings and we all are subject to the laws of physics, the laws of economics, the laws of nature. ‘Some men say the Earth is round and some men say the Earth is flat but if it is round, let the kings command flatten it, and if it is flat by an act of parliament, make it round.’ Of course, the answer to both questions is no because all governments are subject to the laws of nature as are human beings. So the government ignores the natural law but it is ultimately subject to the natural law just like we are all subject to the movement of the Earth around the Sun and to a flat Earth or a round Earth, whatever the case may be.

Daily Bell: We’ve argued for common law here – not British common law but real common law, pre-Babylon, common law as it existed within tribal contexts for tens of thousands of years. Can you comment on that?

Judge Napolitano: That’s a very complicated observation on your part. The common law that we inherited was the common law in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, which is essentially judge-written law based upon notions of fairness and tradition in history. For the most part it embodied the natural law and for the most part it has been irradiated by positive law, by the statutes that have been enacted by Congress, for instance, and by state legislatures. You remember that TV commercial, "It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature?" Whenever the government violates the natural law, there are unintended consequences to it. I believe that we were created by an omnipotent, Supreme Being. Some people call him Allah; some people call him as do I, the Father. Now, I believe he made us in his image and likeness and he doesn’t have a body but we do; he’s not going to die and we are. But the one thing absolutely in common between the creator and the creature is freedom. When the government takes away human freedom, it takes away that one aspect of our humanity that is closest to the creator. There are inimitably adverse consequences to such interference.

Daily Bell: Follow-up: Why does the state need to be in charge of law? Why can’t people pursue justice privately?

Judge Napolitano: Because as a token of all this, government doesn’t share power. It would take a government of Ron Paul’s, Rand Paul’s and your humble correspondent here to shrink the government radically and to repose into the hands of individuals the ability to address injustice on their own. It truly goes back to the Middle Ages when people transferred to the government the right to punish.

Think about it. If my house is broken into and they steal my favorite book, what business is that of the government? Well, the government has decided that they have the right to prosecute and punish but in a different world, I would have insured and have insurers’ authority to pursue the thief, and it wouldn’t cost my neighbors any money to bring about justice. But we live in a world where the right to punish exists only in the hands of the government because it was perceived as fairer and more convenient at the time it was transferred. It’s not fairer or more convenient today; it’s politically subjective today. The greatest lawbreaker is the government itself so how could we possibly rely on the government to give us justice?

Daily Bell: What is justice?

Judge Napolitano: Depending on each individual, justice is different in different cases. Justice is certainly not the government taking property from us against our will. I mean justice is a series of voluntary transactions which, when interfered with, are made whole again on the basis of fairness and principals of morality. I can give you thousands of examples of injustice; most prosecutions are unjust because they tax the general populace for what is essentially a private dispute.

Daily Bell: Wouldn’t private justice with its duels and vendettas be far preferable to public justice that in the US has incarcerated up to six million or more people, many of them unfairly, for long prisons sentences that doom families to separation and poverty?

Judge Napolitano: I don’t want to get into duels and vendettas but if you are at home one night and you hear a knock on the door, and you answer the door and a guy standing there points a gun at you, and says give me your money, I want to give it away in your name, and you think the guy’s crazy and you call the police, and you find out he is the police, come to collect your taxes … if you don’t pay them they come with a gun. What do they do with the money? They give it away.

This is basically the system we have today and it is the system that we accept because we have come to the perverse belief in government, which can’t deliver the mail, which can’t run the school system, can’t manage roads without potholes in them but somehow it can keep us safe and keep us prosperous. It can’t. It is the perverse reliance upon government’s delivered goods and services that has proven for hundreds of years, or at least 120 years, that it cannot deliver. The continued refusal to examine the proper role of government in our society that has brought us to where we are today and to the point where we can see change in people’s thinking, for the government to be shrunk.

Daily Bell: What is the rationale for modern jurisprudence as applied by the modern state?

Judge Napolitano: The rationale is the assumption by a majority of persons that the state can more efficiently, and more justly, administer justice than individuals can. This, of course, has resulted in vast discretion being reposed into the hands of the state agents, police and prosecutors, whose charge is to prosecute. It has actually been argued that the decision to prosecute is among the most powerful in the government because it is essentially unreviewable. Of course, the decision to prosecute also denotes the decision not to prosecute; this, of course, enables prosecutors to violate the rule of law; that is to let some people off the hook while choosing to prosecute others for the same crime, thus making decisions on a political basis rather than on the basis of justice. The prosecutor essentially becomes the avenging angel for the victim and all the weight, all of the might and all of the state then comes down on the prosecutor’s target for the charge for which the prosecutor has indicted the target. Almost always they charge greater than what the evidence will have seen so that when the negotiation process begins to settle the issue amicably, by what is commonly called a plea bargain, the prosecutors starts from a position of strength and the defendant starts from a position of weakness.

Daily Bell: Our idea of common law is the patchwork of law and courts that sprang up in Europe and especially in Britain and Ireland. These courts had different standards for justice and different ways of arriving at a verdict. We see nothing inconsistent about this, as we believe that most justice is "rough" (one way or another) and that cases are unique. In fact, the idea of competitive, marketplace justice is, of course, most controversial. (Any kind of marketplace competition is a bit controversial these days.) What about the positives of rough justice? Must justice always be fair and homogenous? Is it in practice?

Judge Napolitano: It is not always fair but it strives to be fair. The government almost always wins because it can carefully pick its targets. I mean, there are federal prosecutors in the country that have conviction rates in the upper 90 percent area simply because they know what targets to pick and what charges to file. But the roughness about the justice, about what you ask, has had an interesting transition. In the earliest days of common law, now 500 or 600 hundred years ago in England and Ireland, a jury was chosen because the jury knew the defendant and the victim. This was basically your friends and neighbors judging you. The theory of the common law was that the collective wisdom of 12 people who know the defendant and know or knew the victim are likely to result is rough, proximate but genuine justice.

Today, of course, we want the opposite. We want a jury of strangers that does not know the defendant and does not know or did not know the victim, and has no interest in the outcome and has no preconceived notion. So we really have switched 180 degrees on where the jurors come from and what type of preconceived notions we expect them to have. Now, do these cases usually result in justice? In my experience as a trial judge, and I tried about 150 jury trials in the eight years that I was on the bench, I think the result was almost always just or close to just. Sometimes the defendant could or should have been convicted of a crime one degree lower or sometimes one degree higher and in civil cases, sometimes the plaintiff got a little bit more than he or she deserved or not quite what he or she deserved but for the most part the collective wisdom, is usually correct.

That’s why the decision to prosecute is so important and presumptions in the law are so important. The law presumes that what the government does is correct and even though the government has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty, it has all these presumptions going in its favor. They are sort of "hidden" in the law and they affect the language used by the judge in the courtroom, the procedures engaged in by the government, the advantages that the government has that it goes first and goes last, and it has virtually an unlimited budget in criminal cases. These are all things that a libertarian should know about and should want to examine, lest he or she come in the government’s crosshairs for a reason other than his or her criminal activity.

Daily Bell: The old common law courts were subject to private compensation, sometimes the compensation of a third party, as in Ireland. We believe that private payments might guarantee a better outcome than the current statist paradigm. What the West subscribes to today is a system in which the same entity (the state and its appurtenances) makes the law, enforces the law, renders the verdict and prescribes the sentence. To us this process is fraught with conflicts of interest. The person (the judge) who is rendering the verdict is on the same payroll as the prosecutor. What’s your take?

Judge Napolitano: Well, it requires a tremendous amount of courage and restraint and even fearlessness to resist the state when you are on the same payroll. One of the duties of the Constitution is the maintenance of duel systems of justice, state and federal. This frequently is a reason for challenging a state law in a federal court, rather than in a state court where the judge is popularly elected or subject to reconfirmation by the same officials whose law he or she is now being asked to invalidate.

In some states, like my own, New Jersey, after a period of time your tenure on the bench becomes life tenure and then, of course, you are utterly liberated to do the right thing. But in the probationary period, before you receive life tenure, there is in the back of your mind the awareness that you need to have your next appointment approved by the same people – or by the same mentality, let me say – who are enhancing the constitutional side of the law that you believe is unjust. Or you need to go before voters, who would never understand the niceties of constitutional jurisprudence and the fact that the rule of law protects the individual against the state – even if everybody else in society wants the individual to go, the individual still has certain rights.

So to tie a bow on your question, there is obviously an inclination on the part of state judges whose peril and tenure on the bench depends upon approval by the apparatus of the state to want to please the state. It is a rare state judge who has the courage to say to the state, "No. You are wrong because the constitution doesn’t permit it." It is far easier to do in the federal system, and it’s easier to do in the states that grant life tenure but only three states, New Jersey among them, do that.

Daily Bell: In free-market common law, the aggrieved party and putative offender might both pay a judge to render a verdict. The judge, who does this for a living, would have every incentive to present a fair verdict because such verdicts would add luster to his or her reputation and generate additional business. Additionally, common law has the added advantage that not everyone would make use of the system because some would seek to settle grievances on their own. This would result in a very polite society (and has in the past) as no one would want to offend anyone else. Once upon a time, "manners" were far more elaborate and prevalent for a reason. Can you comment, please?

Judge Napolitano: I would strongly prefer a system like that because it removes the heavy hand of the state from the resolution of disputes in which the state really has no legitimate interest. The state has no interest in providing a forum. This, of course, would require that laws be changed so as to provide insurance coverage for various events or calamities for which the state does have insurance companies to offer coverage or policies today.

Think about it. If you steal my chicken or I steal your cow, this is a dispute between us; what does the government care about it? The answer should be it doesn’t care at all but because the state loves power and the state does not like to share power, it likes to resolve all disputes the way it wants to resolve them. This drives up the cost and diminishes justice because it forces the disputants to follow the state’s rule and the state’s command and the state’s way, and this does not inure to politeness, civility or even the idea that a dispute could possibly be resolved amicably and justly, without the state being involved.

The state is not an instrument of justice; it’s an instrument of power. It holds itself out as an instrument of justice, and many of my former colleagues on the bench still believe it is an instrument of justice and jurors believe it’s an instrument of justice and trial courts believe they are instruments of justice, but basically they are wrong; they are instruments of power – the state’s power, the way the state wants it exercised.

Daily Bell: There is also an issue of honor and morality. In communal societies, where power has devolved to local levels, religion can often play an important role in how society is organized and how law is administered. Such societies are often shame-based, or have been in the past, and the prospect of shaming may act as a behavior modifier (as it does today but only vestigially). The combination of religiously oriented communal societies with local laws and customs, a common law heritage and the practice of dueling and so-called "vigilante justice" certainly poses an alternative to the current system of Western justice. Is this a realistic appraisal of past justice regimes or merely pie-in-the-sky?

Judge Napolitano: I think it’s a realistic appraisal of past regimes. I don’t know that it could happen here in the US tomorrow or in the lifetime of anybody reading this but it really was based on the first principals. One of the first principals of the common law and the natural law was the principal of subsidiarity. Why? Subsidiarity teaches that the least amount of government to resolve an issue is best so all governmental concerns should be resolved by the smallest amount of power, in the smallest unit of government, exercising the least power and the fewest resources possible. So it is far better for a dispute to be resolved by your neighbors than by Washington, DC.

Now, we don’t practice subsidiarity in the United States even though it is a first principal. Jefferson and Madison understood it. The Constitution was written subject to it and is a part of the natural law. The Catholic Church and most of Christianity teaches it and it is rarely practiced today. It is almost Jefferson’s "That government is best that governs least," so that would be the American version of subsidiarity. But when it was practiced, the concepts and experiences articulated in your question were real and did happen and induced compliance with accepted standards behavior without the heavy hand of the state being involved.

Daily Bell: Some other potential criticisms of modern law… Is modern Western jurisprudence actually admiralty law?

Judge Napolitano: Admiralty law is a branch of common law that governed the behavior of sailors aboard ship so it was a separate version of the common law because in the year in which it became accepted in British courts, sailors had been aboard ships for many, many months. So events that occurred there, disputes between sailors and disputes between the command structure, needed to be resolved while they were on ship rather than waiting until they could return to port.

Or if it was a grievance matter then the law would permit the restraint of the person charged aboard ship until return to port. They were different. It was high seas and there was not country. In the early days there wasn’t even a statutory law so basically at trials judges did what they thought was fair and jurors did what they thought was fair, and from that grew a body of law called admiralty law. Today, admiralty law is essentially federal law written by the Congress governing the behavior of military and the civilians aboard ship outside the territorial areas outside the United States.

Daily Bell: Do US lawyers serve a British system or are they independent?

Judge Napolitano: The British system is loser pays. We do not have loser pays system in the United States. We have the beginnings of loser pays, by what is known as Rule 11 in the federal system. Rule 11 in the federal system permits the winner to have his or her legal fees paid by the loser when the loser argument is utterly frivolous. Now, that’s a long way from loser pays but it is also a giant step in that direction.

The amount of civil litigation in Great Britain per capita is far, far less than what we have here in the US because of loser pays. You sue, you win, you go home happily. You sue, you lose, you not only have your own legal bills but you also have the legal bills of the entity that you sued. We don’t have that here and there are certain exceptions to it, probably not appropriate to go through now, but we don’t have it here.

The argument against it is we would not have had the expansion of human liberty here if loser pays were the law because lawyers would be afraid to challenge the government. It’s like saying Brown v. Board of Education, which is essentially a challenge, a challenges that reached these decisions by pertinence. So the argument is if we had loser pays the lawyers would be afraid to bring that challenge for fear that they would have lost. The flip side of that is we live in a society that is terribly expensive in large measure because of explosion of litigation, which would not exist if we had losers pays. I do not think that loser pays is coming but I do see some small steps in the direction of it.

Daily Bell: Is the US a secret corporation?

Judge Napolitano: No. I try to understand that argument and I reject that argument. I don’t reject the people who make the argument because they are simply challenging the ability of the federal government to write any laws whatsoever other than those specifically articulated in the Constitution. That’s a view that I share, about the ability of the federal government and its limitations. But the argument that the United States is a secret corporation is one I’ve never understood and do not embrace.

Daily Bell: Did America ever go bankrupt? Is the country in legal receivership?

Judge Napolitano: Well, the country has defaulted many times – when it seized gold, when it seized silver, when it didn’t pay its debt – so yes, you could argue that the United States is bankrupt. Our governance is in debt by 16 trillion dollars and Obama has borrowed about 1 trillion a year in his four years in office. If he gets re-elected and does the same thing, in 2016 we’ll have a debt of 20 trillion dollars. That would generate about a trillion dollars a year in interest payments. That’s about 40 percent of the revenue collected by the federal government from its various sources and it cannot sustain itself when 40 cents on every dollar goes to debt service. It also cannot sustain itself if it printed cash in order to pay those debts because then inflation would be crazy. We are in serious danger of defaulting, and the only solution to this, in my view, is a return to the gold standard, competing dollars and this requires an enormous change in mindset of people in Washington.

Daily Bell: Is America currently under a state of emergency and legally led only by the president?

Judge Napolitano: I think we are a police state. I think we are a national security state. I think the government pays lip service to the Constitution and basically does whatever it wants to do. When the Congress let the President decide that he can kill people on his own and he can start wars on his own – he once threatened to borrow money on his own – when the Congress permits that to happen, this is close to being a dictator. For the most part, Congress is a potted plant while the president, whether it’s George W. Bush or Barack Obama, is allowed to do virtually whatever he can get away with. Frequently, the courts are reluctant to restrain him. It’s a deplorable state of affairs in which we are on the precipice of a cliff. The true TV commercial should not be granny going over the cliff; it’s all of us going over the cliff with the federal government pushing the wheel chair behind us.

Daily Bell: Why did we move from private law to "public" socialized law?

Judge Napolitano: Oh, my goodness, because people were bought off by the federal government. Why did FDR and LBJ create their massive establishments in order to create entitlements and in order to create dependence on the Democratic Party? People accepted the giveaways in return for the loss of freedom. Jefferson and Hamilton rarely agreed on anything but one thing they did agree on is when the public treasury becomes a public trough and the public learns this, it will send to the government people who will bring home the larger piece of the pie. That has happened, beginning in the Progressive Era and heightened in the FDR years, and heightened yet again when Republicans fell in line. They previously resisted the entitlement state; now they fall in line with it. That has produced a country in which half of the population receives a salary or material goods from the government, paid for by the other half. That also cannot survive in the context of freedom for very long.

Daily Bell: Why should the Supreme Court be the last word on justice? Why should people live under interpretations of the law made by strangers with their own agendas?

Judge Napolitano: Sometimes the Supreme Court justices do the right thing, and somebody has to have the final say. In my own view, the Constitution contemplates that states can reject oppressive federal laws and that state governments, either state legislature or the highest court in the state, has the power to invalidate a federal law in the state. We haven’t had that for 220 years but that was clearly contemplated by the founders. That would remove the monopoly on the final word from the Supreme Court. There’s an old phrase that the Supreme Court is infallible because it’s final; it’s not final because it’s infallible. So removing its finality or sharing its finality with other courts would remove its aura of infallibility.

Daily Bell: Do you respect all of the Supreme Court justices?

Judge Napolitano: Do you mean the human beings on the Court or their decisions? I know some of them very well. I disagree with some of them. I think some of them are agenda driven. Rarely do you see a return to first principals. Stated differently, I would be in the dissent in most of the major decisions in our era because, in my view, it would be inappropriate for the Court to be ruling on this, or the behavior of the government that the Court is violative of the natural law or the constitutional law. A broad sweeping statement and to be fair I would have to examine each case and this is generally where I come down on this because, to me, the individual is greater than the state and the natural law is superior to all other law. Very few Supreme Court justices in the modern era have accepted either of those first principals.

Daily Bell: Do you believe that all of them abide by the laws of the land?

Judge Napolitano: I don’t want to start a hypothetical dispute but I would say that few of them remain true to first principals.

Daily Bell: Are any of them ideologues?

Judge Napolitano: Yes.

Daily Bell: Do you have any final thoughts? Anything you want to say to readers that we didn’t ask about?

Judge Napolitano: I thoroughly enjoy these interviews. I love your audience. I love your product but we live in very bad and gloomy and dangerous times for freedom. Freedom is more threatened today, in my view, than at any time since Lincoln was in the White House. We are on the precipice of losing freedom. Freedom lies in our hearts but it must do more than lie there. We must exercise freedom and make it difficult for the government to take it away from us.

Daily Bell: Thanks for your time once again.

Judge Napolitano: Thank you.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Doug Casey has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV shows and has been the subject of articles in People, US, Time, Forbes, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications. For nearly three decades, Doug Casey and his team have been correctly predicting major budding trends in the overall economy and commodity markets.

Daily Bell: Welcome, Doug. Give us an update on what you call the "Greater Depression."

Doug Casey: A depression is a period of time when most people’s standard of living drops significantly. I think we can argue that this one really started in 2008. For the last couple of years, by printing up trillions of currency units, governments have – so far successfully – papered things over. Instead of allowing markets to liquidate, their currency printing has made it possible for people to continue living beyond their means. It’s just a question of time before things really come apart but it’s impossible to say exactly how much time. My guess is, based on what is happening in Europe and what I think will be happening shortly in China, is that we go back into the storm within a few months. As you know, it’s not a good idea to predict both an event and its timing. But I’m an economist – which is to say, someone who tries to describe the way the world works – not a fortuneteller. So I’m willing to take a shot at the timing…

Daily Bell: We asked you last time how long you thought it would take before there is a complete breakdown in confidence of the US dollar.

Doug Casey: Unfortunately, confidence is a critical element here because the dollar – like all the world’s currencies – rests mainly on confidence. Confidence is a matter of psychology, and psychology can change very quickly. Confidence can blow away more quickly than a pile of feathers during a hurricane; it’s not a sound foundation for a currency.

Let’s talk about actual economic reality. At this point, everything the government is doing – and not just the US government but governments everywhere – is not only the wrong thing but exactly the opposite of the right thing. They’re passing more laws, raising taxes, creating more currency and incurring more debt. They should be doing the opposite. We’re currently still in the eye of the storm. Their actions guarantee that when we go back into the hurricane – the trailing edge of the hurricane – it’s going to be much worse and will last much longer than what we saw in 2007 to 2009. I expect this time it’s likely to be accompanied by high levels of retail price inflation.

Daily Bell: Where’s the best place to sit this out?

Doug Casey: I don’t want to be in a country that’s in the worst part of the storm. So I don’t want to be in Europe, I don’t want to be in the US, I don’t want to be in China. I’m a fan of developing countries – I always have been – that have high levels of growth with low levels of debt. We have to remember that having savings shows you’ve been producing more than you’ve been consuming. Debt is just the opposite; debt means you’ve been consuming more than you’ve been producing, that you’ve been living above your means. So I like a place that’s got a stable, growing economy, high levels of savings, not a lot of debt – along with minimal taxes and regulation. It’s not an easy call, because there is no country in the world today that’s going in the right direction, sad to say. But there are some that are definitely better than others. That said, forget about Europe, the US and China at this point.

Daily Bell: You explained last time that Washington is spending a trillion and a half dollars more than it’s taking in. When does that stop?

Doug Casey: It’s not going to stop because it’s entirely structural at this point in time; it’s going to get worse. If you look at where the government spends its money, it’s actually very interesting, as well as disturbing.

What it basically shows is that just as in Greece, or most of the EU for that matter, most US government spending is on entitlements and welfare programs of various types – mainly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, so-called Income Security and pensions. Those things are politically and legally impossible to cut; in fact, they’ll grow. Most of the rest of spending is on so-called "defense," which alone is 25 percent of the budget. As much as Americans love their military, that’s not going to be cut; in fact, the Republicans, idiotically and unbelievably, want to increase it. The other functions of government – the police, justice and regulatory agencies – are really just a tiny portion of government spending.

However, this last might be the very area that I would cut first, because it’s perhaps the most directly destructive area of government. If you abolished the praetorian agencies like the ATF, the FBI, the DEA, the CIA and the NSA and the regulatory agencies like the FDA, FCC, SEC, DOT, DOA, HEW, HUD, EPA, EEOC and so many more – it’s an endless list – that alone would help the economy boom and give us some prospect of recovery, some possibility of not having the US government declare bankruptcy. But that’s a fantasy, a pipe dream; meaningful reform is not going to happen. It’s a strictly academic discussion.

Daily Bell: Congress likes to pose as a part of the solution but it seems to be part of the problem. Are there political answers to these questions? What is to be done?

Doug Casey: It’s not just part of the problem; it is the main problem. One thing I always liked about Ron Paul is that he says we should observe the Constitution. Unfortunately, that’s not going to help right now because basically the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is. In other words, the Constitution has been interpreted out of existence. Everything that the US government does today is constitutional; it’s all been arbitrated by the Supreme Court. However, if you use a simple, common sense reading of the Constitution, and don’t try to parse it like a medieval scholastic or a Talmudic scholar, it’s completely obvious the whole thing is a dead letter – except for those portions that deal with procedural trivia, like who acts as the vice president of the Senate, voting procedures, administrative details and the like, things that are of no consequence to anyone outside of the Washington Beltway.

As much as I like Ron’s solution of observing the Constitution – the entire Constitution – it’s not realistic in the totally corrupt political system we now have. Any part of the Constitution that deals with maintaining liberty for the individual against the state – which is to say the important parts of the document, the parts that made it unique – are now meaningless. In fact, anyone who quotes the Constitution now runs the risk of being jailed, in the interest of "national security," as a subversive, a dangerous anti-government radical or perhaps sent to an institution for psychiatric procedures. I kid you not; things have changed radically in the US over the past few decades.

But let’s indulge in a fantasy and say Ron Paul somehow became President. Even if the Supreme Court didn’t overturn everything he did as unconstitutional, Ron would have another, even bigger, obstacle with the US Congress. They would impeach him. In addition, he would find that the people, average Americans, would be bitterly unhappy about having all the government freebies taken away; they would want to lynch him.

Even if, through some miracle, the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the rioting mobs didn’t remove him from office, he would still have to deal with the three million government employees, starting with the people who run the praetorian agencies – FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, DEA and others. He’d likely get a very forthright and disturbing talking to. The government as a whole – absolutely including the Pentagon – would, at a minimum, scheme against him.

So I’m afraid that’s the long answer to your question. There really are no political solutions at this point, not within the current framework.

The only possible "solution" for change is a dictatorship. We’ll probably see a dictatorship in the US, perhaps after the next major real or imagined terrorist event. Or perhaps if the US gets involved in a real war, not just a sport war like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or perhaps if the economy really collapses. Maybe we’ll hit the Trifecta and all these things happen. Of course, a dictatorship, although it won’t be called that, is actually the worst thing that could happen. Dictatorships are never a good idea even if their intentions are good. But that’s the way things usually progress; it’s a pattern throughout ancient, medieval and modern history. Why should the US be any different at this point?

Daily Bell: Can government be cut?

Doug Casey: No, I don’t think so, because people have become too reliant on it. Americans are no longer self-reliant frontiersmen; they’re now mostly dependent, inert and overweight consumers. You never hear people referred to as "producers," just as "consumers" – as if that were a good thing. The government is a major factor in their lives, and they like it. You can’t cut Social Security because a huge swath of Americans are living on it and most retirees have no other assets or income.

Then there’s Medicare and Medicaid, both of which should be abolished; that alone would cut the budget in half – but only in half – as well as induce people to be more responsible about their health. It would also radically reduce medical costs and improve the quality of care. But that’s out of the question; people would squeal like stuck pigs. They want more of that type of thing, not less; they want Obamacare. You can’t cut back on pensions and military pensions; those are contractual obligations. So what do you have left? You have interest on the national debt, which, at around $250 billion, is actually a small item. That’s only because interest rates are at the lowest levels in history. But in the next few years, interest rates are inevitably going way up. So instead of paying 2 percent on $16 trillion, let’s say the government will be paying 10 percent on $25 trillion. No doubt the Chinese will be happy to lend the US Government an additional $2.5 trillion a year…

There’s simply no hope for any change without totally draconian measures. Of course, we are going to get draconian measures but they are going to be the kind that make things worse, not make things better.

Daily Bell: What about the Fed? Should Bernanke raise interest rates? Can he?

Doug Casey: Well, I’ve got to tell you, that’s the wrong question to ask. It shouldn’t be an issue of what the Fed should be doing – the Fed shouldn’t exist. I don’t believe in price controls of any type, and for the Fed to determine interest rates, to overrule the market, is just a form of price control. The Fed should be abolished, as it serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It never has. It’s not necessary. With its current policies, the Fed is creating gigantic distortions in the markets, in the ways people produce and consume. The longer they suppress interest rates in a vain effort to keep unsustainable economic patterns going, the worse the collapse is going to be. Low interest rates discourage saving and encourage debt and consumption.

Daily Bell: Is it the people’s fault? Should they just vote the bums out?

Doug Casey: Well, if you vote the bums out you are just going to get a new set of bums. What kind of people do you think want to be politicians? Primarily sociopaths. The elections are a ridiculous charade performed every four years. People imagine that if you vote for Tweedledum, that he will somehow be an improvement over Tweedledee. There is vanishing little difference between the left wing of the Republicrat Party and the right wing of the Demopublican Party; they’re really the same thing. They are both philosophical statists and collectivists. The only difference between the two US parties is that while the Republicans pretend to like the free market, they definitely dislike social freedom. And while the Democrats pretend to like social freedom, they definitely hate economic freedom. What a choice! There’s no real difference between them; they’re just distinctions of rhetoric.

Recognizing all that, and everything else being equal, you might prefer the Republicans to the Democrats because at least they have some kind of an atavistic affinity for a semi-free market. I consider the right wing of the Demopublican party to be the stupid party and the left wing to be the evil party. The Democrats really do have bad intentions, while the Republicans are just hypocrites.

Is it the people’s fault? Of course. They’re all trying to live at the expense of everyone else through the state. I don’t vote because I don’t want to be complicit in the corrupt process. I urge others not to vote. You may recall, during the Viet Nam War, that they used to say, "Suppose they gave a war and nobody came." I like to say, "Suppose they gave an election and nobody voted." Entirely apart from the fact that your vote doesn’t count, I’m not interested in feeding more power to the system. Politics, which is an innately coercive process, should be de-legitimized through non-support.

Daily Bell: What is the destination of the US dollar?

Doug Casey: The dollar is an I O U nothing on the part of a bankrupt government. It will reach its intrinsic value because the trillion and a half dollar deficits that they’re running now – and it’s actually more than that if you use accrual accounting as opposed to cash accounting as any business would do – can only increase. They’ll fund the deficit by creating more dollars. Governments all over the world are doing the same thing, but it’s much more serious for the US to destroy its currency than for any other country because the US dollar is, in effect, the world currency. By that I mean it’s the actual de jure currency in at least three other countries, and the de facto currency in maybe 50 more. In addition, most of the central banks in the world have most of their assets in dollars. So if the dollar is wiped out, and I don’t see how that can realistically be avoided at this point, it’s going to be a worldwide catastrophe, not just a national catastrophe. So it’s much more serious than most people think.

Daily Bell: Comments about Ron Paul now that he has lost?

Doug Casey: I think that Ron has done more good politically, in the way of education, than just about anybody I can think of. I am also very gratified that most of his support appeared to come from the younger generations – college kids, teens and people in their twenties. This offers a ray of hope for the future. But the fact that he didn’t get any major traction in the US shows me how utterly corrupt and apathetic the population of the country has become. The trend today is more people want more government; that’s a fact. But we have to keep moving forward with our philosophy, not because we’ll necessarily succeed but simply because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t expect to win or even change anybody’s mind. But at the same time, I’m not going to roll over like a whipped dog and wet myself; I’m not going to run over a cliff with the herd. I’m going to keep promoting liberty because it’s the right thing to do.

But let me expand a bit on what I said earlier, about what would happen if Ron actually became president. Sure, he could get away with doing some positive things; he’d certainly try – unsuccessfully, I believe – to reverse the devolution of the US into a police state. But whoever wins this election is going to face the Greater Depression head on and will be blamed for it. I’d much rather, therefore, see Ron or someone like him try to win in 2016. If someone like Ron Paul had become president as recently as 1980, when Reagan was elected, he might have succeeded. But the tenor of the country has degraded a lot since then. The place is no longer America; it’s now the US, which is just another nation-state.

Daily Bell: Mitt Romney – will he win? Barack Obama?

Doug Casey: I don’t consider myself a good political handicapper because I’m usually too optimistic. The only person that I ever correctly guessed was going to win the US presidential election was Obama, the last time. I don’t fancy having my finger enough on the pulse of the average guy – whoever that is – to make an accurate prediction. But I suspect that unless the economy really goes into a tailspin between now and November people will vote for Obama because things have improved on the surface from the bottom of the crisis four years ago. And, shamefully, they buy into his envy-driven class warfare rhetoric. Furthermore, Romney comes off as a phony and an empty suit; it’s apparent he has no philosophical center at all. At least Obama has some core beliefs, even if they’re despicable. The fact that the best the Republicans can do is Romney is proof of their complete moral bankruptcy – and this after McCain, who was a mildly demented, hostile old man. The Republicans really are the Stupid Party and the Democrats the Evil Party.

As for Obama’s slick populist campaign, the average American – who has almost no assets, whose house is under water, who has no cash – will prove easy to bribe. He’s not likely to vote for a multi-millionaire. I find it disturbing the way all Obama’s attack ads on Romney center not on the man’s numerous flaws or complete lack of any philosophical core but focus on the fact that he’s actually made some money – the only really good thing about him … it’s horrible, shameful.

Daily Bell: You called Ben Bernanke a fool last time. Have you changed your mind?

Doug Casey: No, not at all. It’s hard to imagine a worse person to be running the US central bank, with the possible exception of Gideon Gono, who presided over Zimbabwe’s central bank a few years ago. He really deserves to be hung by his heels from a lamppost, if only because what he’s doing to the US economy is more destructive than what Mussolini did to Italy. Since I believe the Federal Reserve should be abolished, I’m forced to conclude that anyone trying to prop up the structure is either a knave or a fool, or both. But, looking at the bright side, perhaps Bernanke will unwittingly cause Keynesianism to be utterly discredited in the years to come.

Daily Bell: Prediction about QE3? You said it’s happening now by stealth. Still?

Doug Casey: Yes, of course. They have no alternative simply because with the government spending about a trillion and half more than it’s taking in, and few foreigners – in fact, almost nobody – wanting to buy government debt at close to zero interest rates, the Fed will continue buying most of the debt out there. And it is actually creating super money; the purchase of debt by the Fed is actually the engine of inflation, the most effective one. The purchase of US government debt by the Federal Reserve will not only continue but necessarily accelerate.

Daily Bell: What’s going on in Libya these days? Mali? Syria?

Doug Casey: The US Government is sticking its nose absolutely everywhere today. These are all ridiculous and counterproductive adventures. First of all, none of these countries are real countries; they are all artificial constructs, arbitrarily created in the boardrooms of Europe. Their borders on the ground have nothing to do with tribal, ethnic, religious or linguistic differences among the people that live there. They are always going to be unstable for that reason. That’s true of almost all of the countries of Asia and Africa and many of those in South America. For that matter, it’s true of Europe itself. Nation states are inherently unstable. Governments everywhere – but absolutely in developing countries – are basically just vehicles for theft. Running a government is by far the easiest way for someone to become wealthy, as well as to punish groups and individuals he doesn’t like.

There is nothing that the US can do to ameliorate the problems in these artificial countries as long as they exist in their present form. By intervening we only make things worse and we only create more enemies for ourselves. These people, the natives, don’t like to see teenagers from an alien culture shooting up the landscape and breaking down doors in the middle of the night. We’re only counterproductively creating problems, not solving any problems in these countries.

Daily Bell: War with Iran next on the menu?

Doug Casey: They certainly keep beating the war drums, don’t they? It feels like Romney is even more of a warmonger than Obama has been, or Bush, for that matter, which is hard to believe. But war is the health of the state. Whenever there are serious problems within a country it’s natural that the political class wants to find foreigners to blame for their problems. Iran seems like the best candidate for that at the moment. It certainly seems that a war with Iran is likely; I think it will be an absolute disaster because, unlike backwaters like Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is hunting big game and we might really get hurt. It’s one reason I remain bullish on oil, even above $90…

Daily Bell: How about Russia and China?

Doug Casey: As for Russia, I don’t think a country that produces almost nothing that anybody wants except oil, some minerals, and weaponry has a very good future. Add that to demographic collapse, widespread alcoholism, lots of restive minorities, the fact Putin is a veritable dictator and that most of the country is owned by 100 oligarchs.

China has a very different problem. The average person works hard and saves 20-30 percent of his earnings. But what does he do with his savings? It either goes into a bank deposit or the purchase of real estate. Unfortunately, there’s a property bubble, which has been fueled by bank loans. The Chinese banks will be buried under bad property loans, plus bad loans made for political reasons. The Chinese government has had its own QE program, creating trillions of yuan, relatively bigger than that in the US. They’ll have to create even more to prop up the banks – it won’t do if Mrs. Han can’t access her life savings. But they won’t be able to prop up the real estate market. So there’s going to be a big washout and a lot of people are going to be unhappy with their losses. China could easily disintegrate, at least for a period of time. That said, however, this is going to be the Chinese century.

The key with all these countries is that they should be left alone by the US government. I would, for practical purposes, abolish the State Department, too. Intervening in any way in any country around the world does nothing but make enemies and further bankrupt the US. So anything that the US does with these countries is counterproductive. Foreign relations should be the province of tourists and entrepreneurs.

Daily Bell: Why is the US growing even more warlike? What’s triggering it?

Doug Casey: What does trigger it? That’s a good question. My guess is that, as any government gets bigger it naturally tends to attract the wrong kind of people – people who are interested in power and willing to use coercion. As more of them get into government they have a tendency to drive out the ordinary, decent types who might be there. That’s one reason why large states always decline and fall. Another is that, like I said earlier, governments like to blame the problems they create on foreigners. Not only does it misdirect the blame but warfare also tends to unite a country behind its leaders. This is why war is often a consequence of bad economic times; the classic example is World War 2 stemming from the last depression. Perhaps also, as Christopher Hedges observes, war is a force that gives life meaning – as perverse as that sounds.

I fear there’s really nothing anyone can do to avert the trend towards another major war. The best thing is try to locate yourself away from likely participants so you’re not too adversely affected. The US will absolutely be a participant…

Daily Bell: We asked this last time. Should a new 9/11 independent commission be established to get to the bottom-line truth of what really happened that day?

Doug Casey: Of course there should be. Here you have one of the greatest crime scenes, perhaps the greatest crime scene, in American history, and yet the buildings were bulldozed within a week, very shortly after the fires were put out. That’s not the way you treat a crime scene. A simple murder scene can be blocked off and left open for years. There are all kinds of questions that never received satisfactory answers. For instance, what happened to World Trade Center 7? That building came down by controlled demolition about six hours after buildings one and two came down. If you’re going to destroy a building, it takes several weeks to plant the charges, to review structural engineering and so forth; there’s never been any explanation why Building 7 came down in its own footprint. I do know from my own research that there’s never been a high-rise building collapse due to fires, especially fires on upper floors.

The whole thing is very strange from beginning to end and a proper investigation should be done. There are about a hundred things that just don’t smell right. But then, there are so many things that don’t smell right about the US government, at least since the Kennedy assassination, even with the strange death of Vince Foster during the Clinton administration. There were about 50 separate things that made me think that it couldn’t have possibly have happened the way the story was reported in the popular media. The destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City is another; it’s literally impossible for a low explosive, ammonium nitrate fertilizer in this case, to have taken down the reinforced concrete pillars in that structure, especially from a van sitting out on the street.

I’m not asking these questions because I’m a conspiracy theorist. To the contrary. Even though I think Adam Smith was right when he observed that everyone is constantly conspiring, anyone who’s tried to get a few friends to agree on something as simple as what movie to see knows how hard it is. I’d simply like plausible, realistic explanations, the type you can only get from a hardheaded independent investigation. The concept of a government investigating itself is laughable.

Daily Bell: Why don’t you tell us about the Hard Assets Alliance you are involved with?

Doug Casey: What we are trying to do with Hard Assets Alliance is to make it easy for people all over the world to own gold, and to have specific, allocated, gold in specific locations, in several places in the world. I’m also a shareholder in goldmoney.com and a huge supporter of its excellent program but the world needs a number of alternatives. Hard Assets Alliance is an excellent complement for what goldmoney.com does. I think everyone should have an account. The first week we opened we established 1500 accounts; people are interested.

Daily Bell: So where are gold and silver headed?

Doug Casey: It’s important to remember that back when this latest bull market started, in 2001, gold was at $350 per ounce and silver was just over $4. But in real terms, both metals – especially silver – were actually cheaper than they were in 1971 before the Nixon devaluation. Now, at $1600 and $28 respectively, the metals are no longer at giveaway levels. But at the same time, there’s every reason to believe they are going higher – not just in terms of current dollars but also constant dollars.

I don’t recommend people buy them as speculation at this point. They should buy them because they are the only financial asset that is not simultaneously somebody else’s liability. You no longer should buy them with the idea of making capital gains but with the idea of preserving capital, keeping what you have. Now you want to buy them for safety and security as opposed to capital gains. I personally continue to buy gold. I don’t continue to buy silver because even at $28 an ounce it takes a lot of it to be worth significant money; you really do have storage problems with it. On the other hand, it’s not a potential political hot potato like gold… but I continue to buy gold all the time.

Daily Bell: How about the mining industry? Explorers versus producers … Where are we in the business cycle?

Doug Casey: The thing you have to remember about the mining industry is that it’s basically a crappy business, from just about every point of view. It requires gigantic capital investments, often billions of dollars up front, to build the mine – and that’s after you’ve already spent scores of millions finding and proving the deposit. Even then there’s no guarantee that the mine is going to be profitable. And even if it is economical you can’t move the asset, and it’s a sitting duck for taxes, regulations, shakedowns from NGOs and worse. That’s why Warren Buffett or his mentor, Benjamin Graham, never invested in mines. There is too much risk in commodity prices, and there’s too much political risk.

Furthermore, most of the low-hanging fruit in the mining world has been picked. Almost all the high-grade deposits in stable, convenient places have likely been exploited. So at this point what you have left is low-grade deposits in unstable and inconvenient places, with no infrastructure. It’s a horrible business.

So now, with that said, mining is cyclically a fantastic place for speculation. With mining, as with anything, actually – I’ll buy anything if the price is right and at this point mining stocks of all descriptions, both the producers and the explorers, have been beaten up so badly that right now I think they are excellent speculations. Governments all over the world are creating trillions of new currency units; that guarantees there will be new bubbles, new manias. This is ideal from a speculator’s point of view. I’m convinced that one of the bubbles is going to be in the precious metals, and a super-bubble is likely to appear in the mining shares. They’re a terrible business but can be the best of speculations. Where else is it possible to cyclically find stocks that can move 10-1, 100-1, or even more, in just a few years? Prices are now so low that this is an excellent time to accumulate them. They’re actually quite low risk now – and, most people don’t grasp this, a good speculation is a low risk speculation.

My method is generally to just accumulate the quality shares in companies that are going to survive; that’s critical because most miners don’t survive over the long run. That’s why we developed our 8 P’s approach to selecting these stocks. There are thousands of them and we don’t want to either miss opportunities or make major mistakes. Let me underline this: We’re at or near a major bottom. This is the time to back up the truck.

Daily Bell: Are there powerful central banking families intent on world domination? Is the Internet slowing them down? Will they take over the Internet?

Doug Casey: The Internet is absolutely the best thing that has happened to humanity since the creation of the moveable press by Gutenberg. It’s been one of the major forces of liberating the individual and working toward individual liberty, in all history. That’s the good news. On the other hand, that’s exactly why governments and the powers of darkness generally want to restrict and limit the Internet. I don’t know who these people are. As I said, I’m not partial to conspiracy theories of any type but I think it’s only natural that people who hate the concept of liberty would like to destroy the availability of Internet.

Daily Bell: Still a fan of South America after Argentina’s various takings?

Doug Casey: Well, the Argentine government is one of the most economically illiterate and politically destructive in the world. But this is nothing new in Argentina and has been the case for most of the time since Peron, for the last 60 years. The good news is governments come and go.

The nice thing about the Argentine government is they are mainly interested in padding their bank accounts; they don’t bother you if you are a foreigner who can pick up and leave at any time. It’s not currently a great place to own a mine, or an oil well, or a business. But it remains a great place to live. Property titles are sacrosanct, even more than in the US and Europe. There are still so many pluses about being in Argentina that they overwhelm the negatives of the current government, and the current government will be gone in three years. They’re not bothering us; there are inconveniences but that’s true everywhere, sad to say.

With what they are doing with the currency right now, Argentina has again become one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, countries in the world because the official exchange rate between the peso and the dollar is 4.5:1. On the black market, however, you buy pesos at 7:1, which means that the cost of living has plummeted in Argentina. I love hanging out down there. Our project is unquestionably the best resort community in the world, at any price, anywhere. I like my neighbors down there.

You know, there is now no place in the world where the government is not a problem; there’s just no place at all. I don’t know where you run at this point. I do know, however, that you’ve got to diversify politically. Your biggest risk today is political. I know Argentina is not ideal, but it’s a great place to be. I chose it by process of elimination from over 175 countries I’ve been to. I urge your readers to take a look at our website, lec.com.ar. Better yet, come visit at our next event in early November.

Daily Bell: Any final thoughts you would like to share with us?

Doug Casey: I am working with several governments around the world, believe it or not, to try to set up official gold-backed currencies and a 100% reserve gold-backed banking system. I’m getting some interesting results. It’s been a hobby of mine for about 30 years and I’m continuing to do that.

Daily Bell: Thank you again, Doug.

Doug Casey: Very nice talking to you. Take care.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Forecasting trends since 1980, Mr. Gerald Celente is publisher of the Trends Journal®, Founder/Director of the Trends Research Institute® and author of the highly acclaimed and best selling books, Trend Tracking and Trends 2000 (Warner Books.) Using his unique perspectives on current events forming future trends, Gerald Celente developed the Globalnomic® methodology, which is used to identify, track, forecast and manage trends. His on-time trend forecasts, vibrant style, articulate delivery and vivid public presence makes him a favorite of major media. The Trends Research Institute has earned its reputation as "today’s most trusted name in trends" for accurate and timely predictions. On the geopolitical and economic fronts, Celente and The Trends Research Institute are credited with predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the last two economic recessions, the dot-com meltdown, the 1997 Asian currency crisis, the 1987 world stock market crash, increased terrorism against America, "Crusades 2000," the quagmire in Iraq … before war began and much more.

Daily Bell: Let’s jump right in and ask you to comment on the Seed Event taking place on Saturday, October 13, 2012 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (Seedevent.org). Tell us about it. How are you directly involved?

Gerald Celente: The Seed people contacted me after hearing my interviews from various other media. The Seed Event is very different from most of the presentations that I give. What is interesting is this is the kind of audience I relate to genuinely. The first book I ever worked on was called Natural Healing, back in 1986. I also have an honorary doctorate in complimentary medicine from the National University of Health Sciences.

Daily Bell: You identify with the audience?

Gerald Celente: The Seed Event to me is the closest to the ideal type of group that I like to speak with because, by definition, people who attend are people with open minds. My motto at the Trends Research Institute and the Trend Journal is "Think for yourself." That was passed on to me by my father.

So going back to the upcoming Seed Event, it’s a learning experience. You go there with an open mind, wanting to obtain information that is going to improve your life, rather than going to an event so you can hear people reinforce your ideologies and reinforce what you already know. I was very much involved in the first "New Age" movement, which began in the ’70s, that went through to the mid-’90s. I lived in Reinbeck, where the Omega Institute is located. I began meditating back in the early ’80s and took Tai Chi and practiced close combat for 25 years. So I have broad interests in areas of New Age Philosophy.

The "New Age" was gaining momentum but what changed it was when Bill Clinton and Al Gore got elected. And I wrote this in my book, Trends 2000, in 1996. They were Baby Boomers, but they were no more than a continuation of the older Establishment regime and even worse. They codified what previous administrations couldn’t … like NAFTA and other legislation that took more rights away from people and exported jobs.

Daily Bell: That’s what really killed the "New Age" movement?

Gerald Celente: For a time. Now we’re going into a "New, New Age," as I mention in the latest Trends Journal, because people are broke, people are desperate, people are searching.

Think about it … Who are the great philosophers of the day? I’ll tell you who – Jon Stewart, Colbert, Bill Maher … CLOWNS have become the philosophers … two-bit clowns. So there’s this huge vacuum and people are searching for the truth. And what Seed is … you go to this event to help find the truth and if you are awake and aware you find out the truth that is within you.

Daily Bell: You’re speaking on "The Future of Life As We Know It – Environment, Economy, Globalization." Can you give us a bit of a summary?

Gerald Celente: Everyone is looking to the future but most people featured in the mainstream media are bringing more of the same. The future is dim and people have become walking zombies. You look at who the big producers are today in Hollywood. They are comic book freaks. Spielberg, a comic book freak. He’ll tell you. And what does he produce? Comic book crap. Batman. Comic book freaks.

The men have not grown up in America. They’re little boys. The people who want to progress, and that’s what’s going to happen, will go to the Seed Event. People there are searching for a future that’s richer than what’s now and that has integrity built into it as part of the DNA.

Daily Bell: Okay. Let’s focus a bit more on The Trends Research Institute you founded. What are the major trends occupying you right now?

Gerald Celente: Right now the major trends that are occupying me are the American election, the European debt crisis, the Syrian war and the push by America, Israel and NATO for expanding war in Syria and Iran. Time for class warfare, baby! People are losing it. They’re losing it in Greece. They’re losing it in Spain. They’re losing it in Egypt and Tunisia.

I remember when I was 18 years old. I went to see the movie, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It was these two guys who were terrorizing this farm family and they were overdosing on aspirin, if I remember. That’s an everyday occurrence now. How many people get blown away everyday? It’s a common occurrence now. I read about it all the time. Guy kills his ex-wife and her boyfriend and the mother. That’s today’s news. It’s happening everywhere. Nothing is going to change until the individual changes and that is what Seed Event is about. There is no leader to lead you. You’re the leader; you create your future. Why would you let anybody else do it for you?

Daily Bell: Speaking of leadership, let’s turn to politics, of which you are not a fan. Nonetheless, you are skilled in political analysis. What’s happened to Dr. Ron Paul’s campaign?

Gerald Celente: He lacked the fire and passion. I said this when it was going on, that he would be marginalized at the debates. He would talk over the audience’s head and he turned off a very large potential audience. For the record, I was asked to go meet Dr. Paul when the campaign started. I declined. Look, you can’t have it both ways. He didn’t stand up and fight hard enough to gain his position.

Just to give you a little background, I began running political campaigns in Westchester County, the most affluent county in the United States, back in the ’70s. I was the assistant to the secretary of the New York Senate and I taught American politics and campaign technology at St. John’s University. So I know a thing or two about running a campaign. Here’s the truth: He let his core constituency down. They were fighting harder than he was. He lacked the passion.

Daily Bell: What do you think of Rand Paul? Is he politically ambitious?

Gerald Celente: Most politicians are ambitious. Dwight D. Eisenhower said any man or any person that wants to become president is either an egomaniac or a crazy person, or something to that effect and that no one should run for office, they should be chosen. And of all the presidents, by the way, he’s the only one I really, really respect. So to answer your question, yes, he’s ambitious. He will keep running for office. This is a continuation of high school. Same people that you couldn’t stand who wanted to be class president and ran for student council … they haven’t stopped running.

Daily Bell: What are your thoughts on President Barack Obama? Can he win?

Gerald Celente: Our forecast that we made on October 3, 2011 was yes, Obama will win. The "teleprompter president." Politics is show business for ugly people. And Obama is a better performer. You couldn’t get a more stiff, insincere, programmed, plastic person than Mitt Romney. And Obama’s going to continue to attack Romney.

You have to understand the presidential reality show. Two candidates … well, who are the candidates? One is a guy that could have been a model for Van Heusen shirts, using Vitalis in his hair. The other is the savvy, scruffy guy from the streets who’s made good. Who is the better person to put on the presidential reality show? Van Heusen shirts are almost dead and nobody uses Vitalis any more. So even the best of the campaign strategists can’t deal with the wrong image at the wrong time and Romney is the wrong image at the wrong time.

Daily Bell: Does it matter if Obama wins?

Gerald Celente: If Obama wins, it matters because to me, by their deeds you shall know them. And Obama’s deeds terrify me. Obama overthrew Libya. Obama is instigating the war in Syria. Have you heard the words "peace plan" attached to either Israel or Palestine since Obama has been in office?

He doesn’t even make a pretense of it. To me it’s disgusting what the world is letting happen to the Palestinian people. And they are screaming and yelling what Gaddafi was doing to his people and what Assad is doing to his people!

Nobody speaks up for the atrocities against the Palestinian people. I am sick and tired of hearing the word "settlers." This is not an old western where wagons are going across the empty plains … no, this is a land grab. And I’m allowed to say what I want against America but I’m not allowed to say what I want against Israel? I’ll say what I want to say … I’m not an anti-Semite. So where’s it going to go? It’s going to get worse because Obama is slick!

Daily Bell: Do conservatives believe in Mitt Romney?

Gerald Celente: Romney has a problem. Remember, a big part of the conservative’s block is evangelical. And this is one of the reasons we said Romney was going to lose. When you look at the data when he ran the last time, evangelicals don’t dig Mormons. They have an image issue. The other issue, of course, is Romney’s hundred millions. People don’t relate to that. Obama, as we said when we made the forecast, is going to play the born-again populist card and that’s exactly what he’s doing. Obama is a brilliant politician but calling someone a brilliant politician is like saying he’s a skillful whore.

Daily Bell: True enough. Freedom is eroding in America. Can we expect the trend to continue or accelerate?

Gerald Celente: It is accelerating. Look at the latest information coming out about the Department of Homeland Security gearing up to control public disturbances at either the Republican or Democrat conventions and also on Election Day. Look at all the surveillance equipment that’s been put in place. This is what I am saying.

He’s slippery. This is a guy that passed the National Defense Authorization Act. They can arrest a guy like me for being an enemy of the state without any judge, jury or trial, without any charges. They can have the military come and take me away. Look at what they are doing. Look how they are training the military for militia duties. They repealed, with the National Defense Authorization Act, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prevented the military from taking over the police duties.

All aboard! Next train to Auschwitz …

Daily Bell: Are you concerned for your own well being?

Gerald Celente: Of course. And it makes me feel sad. It breaks my heart. I bought a 1750s building. Read the beginning of the last Trends Journal … there’s a story called "Haunted by Hitler," and how I came back from Germany in April, and I said to myself, how could the Germans, who were at the top of Western Civilization in the 1930s, let a two-bit freak destroy them? How could the Italians?

I mean, look at the Germans … Wagner, Einstein, Dietrich, Lang, Beethoven, Bach … the list goes on! How did the Italians let a little cartoon character like Mussolini destroy them? How did the Americans let Bush and Cheney destroy the nation, take them to war and put them under fear and control with Homeland Security? How could people believe in the presidential reality show again … Romney or Obama?

Daily Bell: How could they?

Gerald Celente: It’s the human spirit that allows people to do this. What is it about the human spirit that lets people give their lives up for others to run them? It goes back to the Seed Event. The SEED … You’re the seed. You better grow it.

So back to reading the latest version of Trends Journal: How can people keep letting these sociopaths and psychopaths with proven track records of failure and destruction keep leading their lives? There’s a wonderful Buddhist saying: When the student is ready the teacher appears. I always make this clear: I’ve had great teachers and a lot of them, in a lot of different areas. One teacher who was the glue for me was John Perkins at Attackproof.com. He taught me close combat. This is the real deal. Courage is especially important now. You can’t cower to power. I am not here for you to walk over me. I don’t care who the person is, I will fight to the death to preserve my life. No one is going to take it away from me. If someone is going to die, it’s not going to be me.

So back to the teacher. My belief is when the people are ready, the leaders will appear. These guys now couldn’t lead me across the street. Stop following the Pied Piper. The only salvation for the future, as I see it, is that people have to find the greatness within them and when they have the courage, dignity, respect, passion and integrity and they don’t cower to power … only then will they follow leaders who will improve civilization and not destroy it.

Daily Bell: That’s a tall order. In our last interview, you stated that women specifically were contributing to Obama’s base because they instinctively liked his style and personality. Is this still so?

Gerald Celente: Oh, yeah, more so than ever! "Oh, I like Obama … I like Obama." Go no further. Go on Google and look at Obama’s interview on "The View." Watch the performance and then I will ask you this question: Could you imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower going on "The View"? Never! Never! And guess what? I wouldn’t, either. I would never watch TV if I didn’t have to tune in and see what’s going on. I have to do this for my work.

Daily Bell: Update us some more on predictions. Any changes in business tactics or analysis?

Gerald Celente: Yes. This is the time to make sure that you are secure. Make sure that your money is where you want it and where you can get it and someone else isn’t holding it for you. Be prepared for the worst. In my 32 years of forecasting trends, never have I been more troubled about what’s going on in the world today and where the future is heading.

And I said this to others, talking to subscribers, and I have had premonitions before, which were borne out by events, but only once before have I ever had a premonition as powerful as this. You can go to my forecast page for the first one, but it came ten months before 9/11 when I forecasted my top trends of 2001, that Americans wouldn’t be safe at home or abroad.

On December 14, 2000, USA Today used this headline when reporting on my forecasts: "2001 Will Not be Our Year, Trend Seer Says." It began with the warning, "Get ready America! If the Trendmeister’s prediction is on target, 2001 will be no walk in the park." That was right before 9/11.

I feel that kind of premonition now. I feel a great unraveling. I see the very first great war of the 21st century unfolding in front of us. Riots in Spain, riots in Greece. Turmoil in Egypt and Tunisia. Riots in Bahrain and Yemen. Civil war in Syria, the Sudan, Congo and throughout Africa. Poverty is rampant and raging in South Africa. You see in China they are going back to 2009 lows. There’s no salvaging the European Union; it’s only going to get worse.

Daily Bell: Okay then, more recent predictions, please.

Gerald Celente: I still believe that gold prices are going to skyrocket and that digital money is not going to be worth the paper it’s not printed on. I am also very fearful there is going to be an economic crash. They are going to close banks and you are not going to be able to get your money out. It’s happening in Europe now. It was one of the top trends we wrote about in 2012, bank holidays. I am concerned about a collapse. I am concerned about war. I am concerned about terror, false-flag or real.

Daily Bell: Give us an update on the euro and the European Union.

Gerald Celente: There’s no salvaging it. It’s only around ten years old and it has all these problems. But the big news is that what they are doing is they are trying to centralize power even more by establishing a European Central Bank that subjugates all of the banks and sovereignty of all the nations that belong to the Eurozone. That’s the real story. So again, the merger of state and corporate powers … more fascism for Europe. They have had it before and you are seeing it again. Rather than Hitler and Mussolini, it’s Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse. How much more proof do people need? This haunts me, that people aren’t getting it.

Daily Bell: Technocracy? How is that working out in Greece and Italy?

Gerald Celente: They are bankers and it’s working perfectly for the banks. They are stealing it from the people and giving it to the banks. It’s perfect. It’s working out just the way they want it.

Daily Bell: The "China Miracle"?

Gerald Celente: In 1996 I wrote that no matter how China develops, they have 1.2 billion people and a million problems. If Europe and America don’t buy, the Chinese don’t make. If they stop producing, you are going to see civil unrest in China that will make what’s happening in Europe pale in comparison.

Daily Bell: What about Argentina and its oil takeover and rolling devaluation? Is that affecting all of South America?

Gerald Celente: Well, it’s bigger than that. We’re facing the first great World War of the 21st century. We’ll end up with another Hitler, another Mussolini, another Tojo. It all comes down to greed and power; that’s all it ever is. The money junkies have destroyed the world. They did it in the 1920s, and they are still in control.

Daily Bell: Go back to the LIBOR scandal. Our take was that it was a phony scandal. Can you describe it?

Gerald Celente: Oh, no, it’s not phony at all; it’s real. They are rigging the game. They rig the game to make their balance sheets look better; they rig the game so they can play the derivatives market. They rigged the game to cover up how big the panic of ’08 was. No, to me it’s a totally rigged game.

Daily Bell: Don’t central banks fix the price of money every hour of every day?

Gerald Celente: Yes, but so does LIBOR and they have been doing that for 25 years. This goes very deep. It shows you control that so few have. That to me is the story.

Daily Bell: Bloomberg is starting a LIBOR in Qatar, the QIBOR. Could that have anything to do with the current scandal?

Gerald Celente: Let’s look at Qatar. Who owns Al Jazeera? … Qatar. Who is one of the prime suppliers of munitions and instigating the revolution in both Libya and Syria? … Qatar. They’re all in the "club," the whole Arab League. Qatar is very powerful for a little country … and they own Al Jazeera. So they get to spread the propaganda and they get to arm the people to overthrow city governments.

Daily Bell: How are your finances after the MF Global debacle?

Gerald Celente: I was hurt by it. Nobody likes having their money stolen but, again, when you tie it all back together, well … the whole thing is rigged.

Daily Bell: Thoughts on the CFTC?

Gerald Celente: What CFTC?! Who’s the head of it? Gary Genzler, who worked under "John the Slime" Corzine and the Goldman Sachs gang! It’s the money mafia. That’s all it is.

Daily Bell: You are still buying local, being local and living locally?

Gerald Celente: All the time … it’s the only way! We have great farmers’ markets here. Repatriate, repatriate … that’s my motto. Bring it back home. We have a great community here in uptown Kingston. There are a number of very successful businesses and I know the people. We are all of the mentality of wanting to see each other do great. There’s not a lot of little minds here, another one of my father’s sayings.

Daily Bell: How about the Internet and what we call the Internet Reformation? Is the exposure of all this corruption helping?

Gerald Celente: Yes. I mentioned my career in politics. In all my life I have never experienced an election year where so many people cared so little who was going to get elected president. And it’s because it’s becoming so transparent what a fraud it all is. I have to give you this quote. A reader sent it to me; it’s a great one. Ready?

"If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it." ~ Mark Twain.

When I mentioned before about America and the world not having a philosophy, look up the meaning of philosophy. It’s the study of general and fundamental problems such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, value, reason, mind. If you put those words together it spells s-e-e-d. And that is what the event is about. It’s about philosophy and what else is on this planet.

Daily Bell: Any final thoughts? Can you give us a few more predictions for 2012? You spoke of economic martial law last time.

Gerald Celente: Well, the economic martial law is already in place and it’s going to expand around the world. I am most concerned about a major geo-political event and an economic crisis. There is no solving the European debt crisis. The only thing they can keep doing is pumping more money into it … but the Ponzi scheme is about to end.

What other schemes-undreamt-of they will come up with next, no one knows. But we are facing a timeline analogous to the Crash of ’29 and the start of World War II. The only thing that will stop a rerun is the human spirit … but the human spirit needs a lot of work! It’s going to take a lot of hard work to reverse this thing …

Daily Bell: Thank you for speaking out. You are one of the courageous few.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Robin Koerner is an influential political journalist who coined the term "Blue Republican." He also runs WatchingAmerica.com, a volunteer force some 400 strong that finds and translates news and views about the USA from all over the world. This interview was conducted prior to the announcement that Congressman and Presidential Candidate Ron Paul (whom Koerner backs) would not further contest various states in the Republican primary. However, Ron Paul has not given any indication he is actually dropping out of the race and Koerner’s statements below thus stand as stated (unless Ron Paul issues further clarifications) without need of further clarification.

Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself.

Robin Koerner: I am in my mid-30s and born in south of England. I studied physics and philosophy at Peterhouse, Cambridge University and have traveled quite extensively. I’m now a permanent resident of the USA (living in Seattle), with the intention of becoming a citizen. I am also the founder and publisher of Watching America.com and probably best known in the USA today for coining the expression "Blue Republican" to refer to those former non-Republicans of more liberal sensibility who are switching to the Republican party specifically to support Ron Paul.

Daily Bell: When did you decide to get involved as an alternative media political commentator?

Robin Koerner: I have been writing on and off for a few years, after I founded www.WatchingAmerica.com, but was not very motivated because I didn’t feel that my writing was making much of a difference… Then about a year ago I was invited to write on the Huffington Post and I thought that I should give writing a serious go to see if I could do any good. In particular, I thought HuffPo offered a great opportunity to provide an alternative account of US politics to liberals. I soon found that many thousands of people were following and sharing my articles. Feeling I was indeed making a useful contribution to the American political scene, I committed myself more firmly to writing, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have enjoyed significant success.

Daily Bell: Why did you develop the Blue Republican nomenclature specifically?

Robin Koerner: The reasons are in the article that set it off, called "If You Love Peace, Become a Blue Republican (Just for a Year)."

Daily Bell: Is it a feasible idea?

Robin Koerner: Yes. The free market of ideas decided within a few days that "Blue Republican" had legs. (The article was shared over 11,000 times within a couple of days on Facebook alone.) It seems that thousands of Americans have gotten the sense that Left and Right are equally responsible for the mess we’re in and that the Democrats are not standing up for true liberal values (civil rights, peace over war, against crony-corporatism).

They also feel that Obama has been Bush-plus in most of these areas, so there is great disappointment among some Democrats and Independents. I articulated that perception and gave it a name. And I provided a suggestion as to how to be true to liberal principles in the USA today – by supporting Ron Paul.

The "Blue Republican" label gives a political identity to those who have never identified Republican but will put principle over party to support Paul. "Blue Republican" is almost at the status of a meme now, as a term used by various political media. That is the ultimate indicator of its feasibility. Special thanks to Zak Carter for helping us get media attention and to Israel Anderson for being the first to person to contact me (on the day my Blue Republican article came out) to identify that I probably had a political movement on my hands and for helping to make that so on Day 1!

Daily Bell: More about what you think of Ron Paul …

Robin Koerner: So much to say. So many of my articles on HuffPo and elsewhere cover this. Specifically, please see these articles (all of which can be found in my blog entries at Huffingtonpost.com/robin-koerner):

• Ron Paul Can Win
• "Blue Republicans": An Idea Whose Time Has Come
• If You Love Peace, Become a "Blue Republican" (Just for a Year)
• Ron Paul, Conservative Champion of Liberalism
• Ron Paul and the Love Revolution of 2012
• A Legal Immigrant’s Take on Illegal Immigration
• "First Do No Harm": Constitutional and Conservative

Daily Bell: Is Paul a consistent civil libertarian?

Robin Koerner: There are some purist libertarians who might disagree on fine points but I would say that Paul is as consistent a civil libertarian as any active politician in either the USA or the UK, the country of my birth. So to all intents and purposes, yes he is.

Daily Bell: What do you think of Rand Paul, his son?

Robin Koerner: I like him a lot. He is perhaps more of a polished politician than his dad. More importantly, he has all the right views and principles of his father, as far as I can tell. I think many people have been delighted by his sometimes stand-alone vocal and active opposition to some of the most anti-civil-rights and anti-constitutional laws that Congress has tried to foist on us since his election as Kentucky senator. I hope Rand’s star rises high and fast.

Daily Bell: Will Paul win the election?

Robin Koerner: Who knows? If he does, it will be because of the paradigm shift that is underway in the USA. (See "Ron Paul Can Win" and Paradigm Lost: Why the rEVOLution Has Not Been Televised.) The more the GOP reacts with panic to Ron Paul’s success, the more likely it looks. We’re not at an even chance yet but his chances are increasing daily because of the zeitgeist of the country and the accumulated impact of the work of his supporters.

The people who support Ron Paul are beyond a political movement now. They are more like a cultural phenomenon. If Paul wins the Republican nomination, he will almost certainly win the presidential election. If he gets that nomination, it will be because some non-linear change or unpredicted event that changes the political calculus that shows Romney for what he is, on the one hand, and Paul for what he is, on the other – in other words, it will be because of some creative chaos – and that is always very possible.

Daily Bell: Is there a Democratic Republican dialectic? Are the Dems generally better than the Republicans?

Robin Koerner: The most important thing to know is that the Dems and Repubs are the same where it matters (civil rights, war and peace, crony-corporatism, selling out to special interests).

The interests of the two mainstream parties and their politicians mostly intersect, so I often refer often to the "Republicrats." It so happens that the momentum to get the country’s political thinking out of the Republicrat box is inspired by a Republican, so for that reason alone, I say the Republicans are better right now than the Democrats. More generally, the pro-liberty movements is definitely reshaping the Republican party now from the inside. That movement has not begun in the Democratic party BUT I have recently been contacted by the campaign for a gentleman who is running for Congress as a Democrat, who also believes that we need a new, post-partisan paradigm that emphasizes many of the issues that we’re emphasizing as Blue Republicans, and that Ron Paul emphasizes.

I may well endorse him "officially." There is every possibility that Dems who wish to stay inside the Democratic Party will wake up to the message of Ron Paul – especially when they see that so many people who espouse liberal values are being lost to the liberty movement – which is currently associated with the Republican Party.

Daily Bell: Why was Bush elected to second term?

Robin Koerner: Short question with long and complicated answer. Suffice to say that Senator Kerry did not sufficiently inspire the country to transcend the fear that was driving (and absolutely continues to drive) American politics. We are living in a decade of the politics of fear. Bush had a strong hold of the old-style neocon, religious right base. Americans hadn’t sufficiently tired of the wars and didn’t understand the negative (i.e., dangerous) consequences of the Bush neocon foreign policy. (Many still don’t but a large number have now started to do so.)

Daily Bell: How would you characterize his reign?

Robin Koerner: "Reign"?! My gut tells me he was well meaning. But I think he was misguided. He contributed massively to turning a confident and admired nation into a scared and disliked one. We shall be paying for it for a long time unless we do something dramatic (like vote for Ron Paul in huge numbers).

Daily Bell: Has Obama brought any hope and change? If not, why not?

Robin Koerner: He has brought us the extension of the Patriot Act. He has brought us the National Defense Authorization Act. Obamacare was a huge opportunity missed, in my opinion, exposing the continued fettering of the government by large corporate interests… and I have huge issues with the constitutionality of it. (Of course, the Patriot Act and the NDAA are completely at odds with the Bill of Rights.) So while we can point to some things he deserves credit for, there’s been no change in the areas in which I most hoped we would see change.

Daily Bell: Was he steered the wrong way?

Robin Koerner: Steered by whom? His advisors? He is responsible for picking them.

Daily Bell: Is he a genuinely good man?

Robin Koerner: I cannot say he is a bad man. And I can’t say he is a better man than any other. But I’ve no reason to believe he is deliberately trying to do harm. I am always very wary of trying to pass moral judgment on those who say or do things one disagrees with.

I suspect he is doing the best he can given his view of the world, and I think his view is deeply flawed – especially in the fact that he doesn’t understand the Blue Republican message that traditionally progressive means have been shown in many cases to be hopeless at delivering on their stated goals and liberal intentions.

Daily Bell: Is he American born and raised?

Robin Koerner: I’m not much interested in the birther debate. I’ll extend him the same courtesy I extend to anyone else I don’t know and take him at his word in the absence of conclusive evidence.

Daily Bell: Why has he blocked access to all or almost all of his personal records?

Robin Koerner: I don’t know enough about that to comment.

Daily Bell: Whom does Obama really work for?

Robin Koerner: What do you mean by "who" and "work for"? The US government writes his paycheck. Are you asking about his motivations? If so, see my earlier answer.

Daily Bell: Does he work for the military-industrial complex?

Robin Koerner: Again, what do you mean by "work for"? I don’t think Military Industrial Inc. is paying him in brown envelopes but I think that our system is now such that it would take a huge and very concerted change from the top to alter things so that large-scale government action and policy no longer favored that complex. Govt and MIC interests are so intertwined, and in many respects, overwhelming.

Daily Bell: Is there a power elite that wants to take over the world?

Robin Koerner: Depending on how you define it, there is a power elite that to a large extent already runs the world… But they don’t run it so effectively that we couldn’t stop them. If they run it, it is because we let them. Most of us let them because we are too busy "getting on with our lives" actually to understand how things really work.

Daily Bell: Why is America in so many wars?

Robin Koerner: To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. America’s hammer is its military. There is also a dangerous self-righteousness in American foreign policy that operates between arrogance and naivete, i.e., American decisions to go to war are based on an assumption that the policy-makers know more of what they need to know than they in fact do … and on the idea that because their intentions are good, the methods they use cannot be bad. Moreover, as per your earlier questions, it appears that special interests associated with the MIC have an incentive (and the political and economic means) to nudge policy in a certain direction.

Daily Bell: Is there ever a good war?

Robin Koerner: Yes.

Daily Bell: Are politics salvageable in the US?

Robin Koerner: Yes. I’m working on it. If I believed all was lost, I wouldn’t do what I am doing. There seems to me to be more hope for salvage in the USA than in Europe.

Daily Bell: What is necessary to save US politics?

Robin Koerner: My articles all address this question in one way or another. Fundamentally, though, we need to start seeing what Dems and Repubs have both done – what they tacitly agree on. We must no longer be distracted by what they traditionally disagree about, i.e., we must have the paradigm shift to understand that "Left and Right" do not cover all political space, and that they are not fundamentally "oppositional." (In other words, the terms "left" and "right" are themselves misleading.)

I would like to see the American nation give more of the "How dare you?" attitude to their political masters. We have begun to see some of that sentiment with the tea party and OWS. Now Americans need to do their own research to find out what is being done to them in terms of reduced civil liberties and a system that redistributes destructively (at least as much upward as downward).

There truly is a liberty-oriented spirit in the USA that does not exist in Europe. We need it to continue to strengthen. Then we need America (both people who identify "liberal" and those who identify "conservative") to recognize that the Constitution is sublime – and then demand that it is followed. That may mean taking to the streets, etc. The currently burgeoning liberty movement will, of course, be critical. It needs to stay energetic, focused and passionate, and must take care to remember that it is impossible simultaneously to antagonize and persuade: It needs to focus on winning supporters – not just arguments.

Daily Bell: Is government necessary? Are laws necessary? What kind?

Robin Koerner: I am not a purist in politics. Politics is a rather pragmatic undertaking for me. All I know is that constitutional government would be infinitely better than what we have now. I want us to go back to that conception of government provided by the Founders.

I’m interested in that practical change. These two questions are more philosophical to me and I don’t have a position on them. (For one thing, I’ve not done all the reading I would need to do even to be confident in an answer). But I don’t feel I need to answer them. I’m not trying to be the poster child for anarchists! I’m pointing out that we need the country to change direction drastically and immediately.

Daily Bell: Should government pay for poor people?

Robin Koerner: My answer is here: "America’s Not Faring Well on Welfare."

All the data show that the delivery of welfare by the central government has failed by its own stated goals, and is having massively damaging unintended consequences that ultimately harm those it is meant to help. Please see the article. This is not the same thing as saying there is no place for structured means of helping the poor in our society. It is to say that a) we should treat the disease (crony-corporatism, the capture of politics by special interests, a government monopolistic fiat monetary system) and not just the symptoms (poverty etc.) and b) there are a myriad other ways of manifesting compassion for the poor in our society other than federal government-driven, and it is time to bring the innovativeness and genius that resides in our nation to start working on them. A good place to start is with the Tenth Amendment and the laboratories of the 50 states.

Daily Bell: Do we need to change the US money system?

Robin Koerner: Yes…

Daily Bell: Should the US get rid of the Federal Reserve?

Robin Koerner: Ultimately, the Fed-based system has to be uprooted. It ensures a systematic transfer of wealth/value and power to a tiny segment of our society, and ensures that no economic limitations are imposed on our government and its spending. It also provides an avenue for the making of huge political decisions that the citizens – and even in some cases their representatives – cannot see. Moreover, I believe in the rule of Law, and that Law includes the Constitution, and I just don’t see how our monetary system altogether (Fed monopoly over fiat, etc.) is constitutional. I realize that it’s not a simple matter to eliminate the Fed overnight in a world in which other nations have central banks and monopoly control of fiat money. Other things (other than simple abolition) would have to be done to reap the benefits of a non-central-bank-planned monetary system. Ron Paul seems to recognize this.

Daily Bell: Is it necessary to have a standing army in the US?

Robin Koerner: I’ve not given much thought to that, so I’ll say "I don’t know" for now…

Daily Bell: Are the powers that be in some sense getting ready for a kind of martial law if they cannot sustain the present system?

Robin Koerner: It is looking more like that every day. The idea that the government is the servant of the people has clearly gone from government. Government is scared. Like every other institution, it will do what it needs to do to protect its own existence. It has the monopoly of force and it would almost be surprising if it did not gear up to use that force when threatened.

Daily Bell: Why did Homeland Security order 400 million hollow-point bullets?

Robin Koerner: I don’t know, but it doesn’t look good, does it? In the absence of any other information, it seems like they’re expecting something and they’re preparing for it. Perhaps there is to be an event in the near future that will cause significant societal unrest/chaos. If so, one’s first guess has to be that it will be an economic event … or perhaps the revelation of something that will reflect badly on our masters that is currently unknown but can’t be kept secret indefinitely. Perhaps they’re signing up to something internationally that the American people are going to resist. These are all speculations, of course. Perhaps someone in Homeland Security just owns a ton of shares in a company that makes the bullets!

Daily Bell: Can Ron Paul become the GOP candidate for president?

Robin Koerner: This is really the same question as "Can Ron Paul become president?", because if he gets the GOP nomination, he is almost certain to win. The reason it could happen is that unprecedented things are happening in the GOP because of the passion, clarity and (most importantly) directedness of action that is in the liberty movement.

The ultimate consequences of the creative chaos that is happening in the Republican party cannot be predicted. In particular, if the party establishment behaves in a way that is clearly dishonest and seeks to disenfranchise Ron Paul’s supporters (and we are seeing multiple indications of this), we will attract sympathy and credibility and then all bets are off – in our favor. Basically, is a Ron Paul win likely today? No. Is it possible? Yes – very possible … because the changes that are occurring in, and coming to, the GOP (and the country) are highly "non-linear".

Daily Bell: Will Mitt Romney be the candidate?

Robin Koerner: Not if Ron Paul is! I am so convinced about the danger of extrapolating events linearly and simplistically that I absolutely do not believe that Romney has it in the bag.

Daily Bell: What is necessary to make Ron Paul the candidate?

Robin Koerner: Continued relentless work by his supporters, and (most likely) an unpredictable turn of events that will probably involve the GOP’s doing something stupid to try to retard the rise of Paul and then getting found out. Since Romney is completely (and rightly) identified with the mainstream of the GOP and the party hacks, any such error by the party could do Romney enough damage that Paul becomes clearly the most credible candidate. This is absolutely possible (and getting more so by the day).

Moreover, absent all these things, even now the delegate math is changing. Ron’s delegate count is building – and it may reach a point that suffices to make it so clear that the required depth and breadth of support for Romney in the GOP (let alone the country) are not there that the party, out of sheer self-interest, changes its mind about him, opening the way for anyone else. In that case, Ron Paul will, of course, be the overwhelming favorite.

Also, Paul’s supporters are simply not going to just fall in line behind Romney. It is clear to me that the GOP stands more of a chance of victory with Paul than with Romney, and with a little gestalt switch, that could become clear to the party as well. It is possible that the brute fact that a Romney candidacy would result in the loss of the most energetic and passionate chunk of his party (the liberty movement around Ron Paul), and that he can’t pull in the Independent vote like Ron Paul, who wins that segment against Obama overwhelmingly, causes the party actually to do the math and so support Ron Paul out of sheer pragmatism. (See my article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-koerner/how-ron-paul-can-win-on-a_b_1098770.html).

They can’t see this now, but when they see the faces of all those hundreds of delegates in the convention hall in Tampa whom they know will be gone if they insist on their anointed candidate, who would bet their life that they wouldn’t have a tinge of doubt?

Basically, Ron Paul can win the nomination precisely because no one knows, in the face of all the unusual variables in the process this time, what is possible. Our lack of ability to predict the future is in our favor. Again, I don’t expect Ron Paul’s victory, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Daily Bell: Is the Internet important?

Robin Koerner: Hugely. Without it, we would not be talking about Ron Paul in the way that we are here.

Daily Bell: Is the Internet the hope for the future of independent people or is it another facility that will soon be controlled?

Robin Koerner: Probably both. On the one hand, it empowers independent citizens, but on the other, huge, current economic interests are threatened by it, making attempts to control it all the more likely severe. We are already seeing that with bills like CISPA, etc.

Daily Bell: Where do you go from here?

Robin Koerner: Blue Republican will be pushing the post-partisan, pro-liberty, pro-Constitution philosophy that I am currently articulatingwell beyond 2012, regardless of what happens in the election. I have found that the USA is hungry for a new non-Left, non-Right account of American politics.

I will continue to provide it in a way that makes clear to those in the middle and on the left why liberty and the Constitution are their best friends in the achievement of their principles of "economic and social justice." I will be pointing out that liberal ends have not been well served by traditionally Liberal means – and certainly not by statist means – and I will be offering suggestions about what we should do about that. I guess, generally, this all comes under the rubric of opening the American political mind.

You may also see the "Blue Republican" brand attached to products and even candidates. I would be very happy to find candidates of any political stripe that we can get behind.

Daily Bell: Any other comments you want to make?

Robin Koerner: We’ve covered a good amount here already.

Daily Bell: Any books or websites you want to recommend?

Robin Koerner: My sites are BlueRepublican.org, BlueRepublican.com (coming soon), www.facebook.com/bluerepublican, and www.WatchingAmerica.com.

All my articles are at huffingtonpost.com/robin-koerner.

As for books and websites, my current list of each would run to the many dozens, so I necessarily feel I’m misdirecting if I only mention a few. That said…

The first thing everyone needs to read is the Constitution!

Everyone should also read Bastiat’s The Law and Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Then go and read Daniel Hannan’s The New Road to Serfdom, which is about the current state and direction of the USA.

Finally, since I think political progress in the USA depends on people’s opening their own minds … and realizing how little they – and everyone else – really know. To that end, go have some fun with the likes of Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness and similar. Most of all, make sure that you don’t only read stuff by people you already know you agree with!

Daily Bell: Thanks and good luck.

Robin Koerner: Thank you.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Thomas H. Naylor, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University, is a writer and a political activist who has taught at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. For 30 years he taught economics, management science and computer science at Duke. As an international management consultant specializing in strategic management, Dr. Naylor has advised major corporations and governments in over 30 countries. During the 1970s he was President of SIMPLAN Systems, a 50-person computer software firm whose clients were Fortune 500 companies in the US and abroad. Recognizing that the United States had become more like its former nemesis the Soviet Union than most Americans care to admit, in 2003 he founded the Second Vermont Republic, a nonviolent citizens network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of corporate America and the US government and committed to the return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic. Ode Magazine editor Jay Walljasper dubbed him, “Tom Paine for the 21st century.” The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Adbusters, Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, and Business Week have published his articles. For additional information, visit www.vermontrepublic.org.

Daily Bell: Can you give us some background on yourself?

Thomas H. Naylor: I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s where my father admonished me to "be cautious" and always be concerned about "what people will think." I was never very cautious nor very concerned about what people thought. I used to refuse to stand when Dixie was played at Ole Miss football games, and I understood fully the significance of that decision.

After three years at Millsaps College I moved to the Great Satan, New York City, and entered Columbia University where I earned a B.S. in Industrial Engineering. Two years later I received my M.B.A. from Indiana University. Summer jobs at International Paper Company, Sun Oil and Dow Chemical convinced me that Corporate America was not for me. At I.U. I became interested in computers, which played an important role in my life for the next 20 years.

In 1961 I began teaching management science at Tulane University while working on my Ph.D. in Economics. Upon completing my Ph.D. I joined the faculty of Duke University where I taught economics, management science and computer science for 30 years. For 6 years I taught all of the courses in Corporate Strategy at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

In 1969 I co-founded the L.Q.C. Lamar Society, an organization of progressive young Southerners committed to the premise, ironically, that the South should return to the Union, get off the race kick and start solving its own problems. By 1972 literally all of the important progressive political leaders in the South, black and white, were members of the Lamar Society. Some of them included Jimmy Carter, Winthrop Rockefeller, Terry Sanford, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young.

During the 1970s I was president of SIMPLAN Systems, a 50-person computer software firm whose clients included Fortune 500 companies such as General Motors, United Air Lines, McDonald’s, IBM, Shell Oil, Texaco, Monsanto, Pacific Gas & Electric and Kuwait International Petroleum. I was a strategic management consultant to major corporations and governments in over 30 countries. The happiest day of my life was when I sold the company to a bunch of Germans for a profit in 1979.

As a result of the fact that the Russians illegally published one of my books on computer based planning models and free market models, in the Soviet Union in 1974, I received a steady flow of Soviet and Eastern European visitors to Duke until 1991. This gave rise to a 1982 visit to Moscow for a preview of perestroika three years before Gorbachev came to power. My book was being used to build computer simulation models to evaluate the effects of introducing free market capitalism into the Soviet economy. Throughout the 1980s I made frequent visits to the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In 1985 I married a Polish psychiatrist. My life would never be the same.

Between 1982 and 1991 I became a self-appointed, unpaid, cheerleader for Gorbachev, whom I considered to be the greatest political leader of the 20th century. During this period The N.Y. Times published several of my pieces about the Soviet Union.

On the evening of January 16, 1991, ten minutes before the bombing began in Baghdad, William H. Willimon, Dean of the Duke Chapel, and I launched a freshman seminar on "The Search for Meaning." Three years later Willimon, my wife Magdalena and I published a book bearing the same title. This was the first of five books Willimon and I would co-author, the last of which was Downsizing the USA in 1997.

In 1993, my wife, son Alexander and I moved to Vermont in search of community. We found it. Vermont is different – very different. It is all about the politics of human scale – small towns, small businesses, small schools and small churches.

Vermont provides a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized, mass-production, mass-consumption, overregulated, narcissistic lifestyle which pervades most of America – an alternative to the politics of money, power, speed, greed, gridlock and fear of terrorism.

Recognizing that the United States had become more like its former nemesis the Soviet Union than most Americans care to admit, in 2003 I founded the Second Vermont Republic, a nonviolent citizens network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the US government and committed to the return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic, as it had been between 1777 and 1791.

Daily Bell: How did you come to be involved in the Vermont secessionist movement?

Thomas H. Naylor: Nearly three years before I moved to Vermont, on October 9, 1990, The Bennington Banner published my article entitled "Should the U.S. Be Downsized?" Four years later in Challenge (Nov.-Dec. 1994) I wrote, "The time has come both for the individual states and the federal government to begin planning the rational downsizing of America." Continuing, I suggested that Vermont might lead the way by helping "save our nation from the debilitating effects of big government and big business" and by "providing an independent role model for the other states to follow."

In 1997 William H. Willimon and I published Downsizing the U.S.A., which not only called for Vermont independence, but the peaceful dissolution of the American Empire. We argued that the US government had become too big, too centralized, too powerful, too undemocratic, too militaristic, too imperialistic, too materialistic and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities. However, since we were in the midst of the greatest economic boom in history, few Americans were interested in downsizing anything. The name of the game was "up, up and away." Only bigger and faster were thought to be better.

For the most part, before September 11, 2001, my call for Vermont independence and the dissolution of the Empire fell on deaf ears. It was as though I were speaking to an audience of one, namely myself. But a year or so after 9/11 that gradually began to change. On March 5, 2003, two weeks before the second war with Iraq began, I spoke at an anti-war rally at Johnson State College and decided to test-market the idea of an independent Vermont.

Basically, my pitch to the students was, "If you want to prevent future wars in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, we have no choice but to break up the United States into smaller regions and that process should begin with Vermont declaring its independence from the United States." They were stunned, but they got it. Their positive response literally provided the energy to launch the Second Vermont Republic.

Ten days after the bombing began in Baghdad on March 19, 2003, we held the first of four monthly meetings at the Village Cup in Jericho to discuss how such a movement might evolve. These meetings were attended by only a handful of people. Early on we decided not to become a political party but rather a civic club. The name "Second Vermont Republic" was proposed by Jeffersonville high school student Walker Brook and registered with the Secretary of State on June 19, 2003.

Over lunch in the backyard of the Bread & Puppet Theater Museum in Glover, Vermont on July 18, 2003, the puppeteers, under the leadership of Peter Schumann, agreed to cooperate with the Second Vermont Republic to promote Vermont independence.

In conjunction with the release of my book The Vermont Manifesto on October 11, 2003, the first statewide meeting of the Second Vermont Republic was held in the New Building of Bread & Puppet Theater in Glover. The daylong meeting was attended by around 50 people.

During the two preceding years I received a dozen or so letters from Ambassador George F. Kennan and Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith voicing their support for a Second Vermont Republic. About the idea of Vermont independence, Kennan said, "I see nothing fanciful, and nothing towards the realization of which the efforts of enlightened people might not be usefully directed." Galbraith added, "I must assure you of my pleasure in, and approval of, your views of the Second Vermont Republic."

Daily Bell: Tell us more about the movement itself. How has it unfolded and where it is going?

Thomas H. Naylor: The Second Vermont Republic is a nonviolent citizens’ network and think tank committed to: (1) the peaceful breakup of meganations such as the United States, Russia and China; (2) the political independence of breakaway states such as Quebec, Scotland and Vermont; and (3) a strategic alliance with other small, democratic, nonviolent, affluent, socially responsible, cooperative, egalitarian, sustainable, ecofriendly nations such as Austria, Finland and Switzerland which share a high degree of environmental integrity and a strong sense of community.

Supporters of the Second Vermont Republic subscribe to the following set of principles:

1. Political Independence
2. Human Scale
3. Sustainability
4. Economic Solidarity
5. Power Sharing
6. Equal Opportunity
7. Tension Reduction
8. Community

Major Events

October 11, 2003 – SVR holds first statewide meeting at Bread & Puppet Theater in Glover, VT.

June 19, 2004 – Parade in downtown Montpelier with Bread & Puppet followed by State House rally attended by 350 people. Vermont declares independence.

November 5-7, 2004 – SVR and the Fourth World sponsor an international conference on "After the Fall of America, Then What?" The Middlebury Institute is launched.

January 15, 2005 – SVR celebrates Vermont Independence Day at the Langdon Street Café in Montpelier.

March 4, 2005 – SVR holds a memorial service to commemorate the day in 1791 when Vermont joined the Union.

April 22, 2005 – Award-winning journal Vermont Commons is launched.

April 2005 – Vermont Legislature adopts resolution naming January as Vermont History and Independence month.

June 3-5, 2005 – SVR officially represented at the fifteenth national Congress of the Parti Québécois in Quebec City.

October 28, 2005 – SVR holds first statewide convention on secession in the US since 1861. The event takes place in the House Chamber of the State House and is attended by 300 people.

November 3-5, 2006 – Middlebury Institute holds First North American Secessionist Convention in Burlington, VT. The convention attracts delegates from 16 secessionist organizations in 18 states.

April 12, 2007 – UVM Center for Rural Studies releases results of its annual "Vermonter Poll" showing that thirteen percent of eligible voters in Vermont support secession, up from eight percent a year earlier.

June 3, 2007 – Associated Press releases a piece entitled "In Vermont, Nascent Secession Movement Gains Traction." Article is run worldwide by hundreds of newspapers, websites, radio stations and TV stations.

June 4-5, 2007 – SVR founder Thomas H. Naylor is interviewed by Fox News three separate times including The O’Reilly Factor.

October 3-4, 2007 – Second North American Secessionist Convention takes place in Chattanooga, TN. Representatives from thirty states attend. It too receives worldwide media attention.

November 7, 2008 – Second Statewide Convention on Vermont Independence in the House Chamber of the State House in Montpelier.

November 14-16, 2008 – Third North American Secession Convention in Manchester, NH.

May 22, 2009 – Dennis Steele launches Radio Free Vermont, a Vermont based music Internet station.

October 6, 2009 – SVR issues Scott Nearing 50 clover silver token.

January 15, 2010 – Ten secessionists announce their candidacy for the November 2nd election including candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor, seven Senate seats and one House seat.

January 10, 2011 – SVR named one of the "Top 10 Aspiring Nations" in the world by Time magazine.

September 14, 2012 – Third Statewide Convention on Vermont Independence in the House Chamber of the State House in Montpelier. Keynote speakers: Morris Berman and Lierre Keith.

Daily Bell: It is not so much in the news these days. Is it less of a force?

Thomas H. Naylor: Three events put SVR on the political radar screen so to speak: (1) George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 – the war on terror; (2) the 2003 war in Iraq; and (3) the 2004 re-election of Bush. Bush was probably the movement’s greatest asset.

Vermont is perhaps the most left-wing state in the nation. Two-thirds of the voters supported Barack Obama in his 2008 election bid. To the political left in Vermont, led by Senator Bernie Sanders, Obama represented the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. After three years some Vermonters on the political left have finally figured out that Obama does not walk on water and is merely a smirk-free George W. Bush. But because he is smarter, more articulate and more charismatic than Bush, he is much more dangerous. Secession is a very tough sell in Vermont as well as elsewhere. In January of 2009 it became a much tougher sell.

Abraham Lincoln really did a number on us 150 years ago. He convinced most Americans on the political Right as well as the Left that secession is a complete anathema. Secession is thought by most to be immoral, illegal and unconstitutional. Never mind the Declaration of Independence, the fact that the United States was born out of secession from England, the tenth amendment to the Constitution and the escape clauses which three of the original thirteen states had built into their respective constitutions. Secession immediately conjures up images of slavery, the Civil War, racism and violence. Many otherwise intelligent Americans neither know how to pronounce or spell the word secession. More often than not it is pronounced as though the correct spelling were s-u-c-c-e-s-s-i-o-n.

Because of the perceived absurdity of tiny Vermont confronting the most powerful empire of all-time, the Second Vermont Republic has arguably attracted more attention outside of Vermont than within. It’s classic David and Goliath.

Since its inception SVR has employed two quite different parallel strategies in its efforts to promote secession – a hard sell approach and a soft sell approach. Neither has proven to be particularly effective.

The hard sell paradigm confronts the issue head-on. Because of its size, the United States government has become unmanageable and unfixable. Our nation has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable. A state such as Vermont either goes down with the Titanic or seeks other options. Secession is one such option. But because of its association with the Civil War, secession is toxic as hell. The mere mention of the word brings forth the charges of racism from the political left. It is virtually impossible to have an intelligent conversation about the subject with a liberal ideologue.

The alternative paradigm speaks of political independence as though it were some desired state of being achievable in the future only after a state such as Vermont achieves economic, energy and agricultural independence. Middlebury College environmentalist Bill McKibben has wrongheadedly convinced many Vermonters that political independence is an impossible dream without food and energy independence. McKibben is apparently unaware of the fact that Japan, the third largest economy in the world, imports every drop of oil that it consumes as well as most of its food. Secession is not a synonym for economic isolationism.

The problem with the soft sell paradigm is that its supporters are so busy planting organic gardens, building root cellars, cutting their own wood, acquiring solar panels and driving their Priuses that they don’t even notice the nine hundred pound gorilla in the room, namely, the American Empire. So benign is the soft sell approach that is adherents never get around to talking about political independence.

Nine years of experience with the Second Vermont Republic have convinced me that the real issue is neither Vermont, states’ rights, secession, political independence, energy independence, agricultural independence, nor economic independence but rather the American Empire itself. In the words of economist Paul Craig Roberts, "The United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government. Americans no longer have a moral conscience. They have gone over to the Dark Side."

There is no longer any moral justification whatsoever for the existence of the United States. The only morally defensible alternative to empire is peaceful dissolution.

So long as the Empire remains intact, there will be no end to all of the nasty little wars, corporate personhood, Wall Street dominance and our unconditional support for the Israeli military machine. These are all gifts from the Empire.

Peaceful dissolution could be initiated at the state, regional or national level through some combination of demonstrations, strikes, protests, tax revolts, civil disobedience and eventually secession. The US Congress could even initiate dissolution but don’t hold your breath over that option.

Since dissolution would be nationwide in scope, it would arguably be less self-centered and less ethnocentric than if a single state such as Alaska, Texas, or Vermont tries to go it alone. Everyone has skin in the game so to speak. The primary focus would not be on "What’s in it for my state?" but rather on ending global dominance and military madness, stopping the exploitation of the poor and the middle class by the superrich, curbing the use of fossil fuels and other natural resources, curtailing the dependence on economic growth at any cost, reining in corruption and deceit and ending the suppression of civil liberties.

Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, for example, might join the four Atlantic provinces of Canada to create a little country the size of Denmark and call it New Acadia. Upstate New York and New York City might split into two separate countries. Chicago and Los Angeles could become independent city-states. Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas might go it alone with South Texas and South Florida splitting off separately. It’s not hard to imagine California being divided into three countries and Washington, Oregon and British Columbia evolving into Cascadia. A New South and a Rocky Mountain Republic also seem like likely possibilities.

We have no illusion that a large number of Americans will embrace dissolution any time soon. Our problems will have to become a lot worse before that happens. But the time to start the conversation is now! How many people predicted the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union? Planned, orderly dissolution is surely preferable to unexpected collapse and utter chaos.

If the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street eventually figure out that the US government is unfixable, then they may both turn to peaceful dissolution as the only game in town.

Daily Bell: Tell us about the books you have written on secession and how you came to focus so forcefully on this issue.

Thomas H. Naylor: I have published three books on secession: Downsizing the USA (with William Willimon, 1997), The Vermont Manifesto (2003), and Secession (2008). Given the level of ignorance about secession in the United States, the degree to which it has been demonizedand the fact that there were virtually no books on the subject, I decided to take a shot at it.

Daily Bell: What are you doing now? How do you make a living? Are you switching careers in a sense?

Thomas H. Naylor: I spend most of my time writing about Vermont independence and the peaceful dissolution of the American Empire. I write for the SVR website as well as Counter Punch.

My personal income comes from my Duke retirement, book royalties, speaking fees and investments in gold. My wife has a real job.

As my friend, Yale economist Martin Shubik, used to say, the Second Vermont Republic keeps me out of the pool halls.

Daily Bell: It is interesting that you have degrees in science and industrial engineering. You also received a Masters in Business from Indiana University in 1961 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from Tulane University in 1964. How did you become so motivated to learn so much?

Thomas H. Naylor: Mathematics, computers and economic theory provide the underlying linkages connecting my academic disciplines. These tools are also useful for conceptualizing complex socio-economic, political problems. As for motivation, if one grew up in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s, one couldn’t avoid being imbued with a heavy dose of the Protestant ethic and an intense desire to get out of Dodge.

Daily Bell: Did you intend to become a kind of Renaissance man?

Thomas H. Naylor: One of the advantages of teaching at Duke University was that it afforded me the opportunity and the freedom to reinvent myself every few years. By that I mean the freedom to go into some totally unrelated field about which I knew nothing. Although I began my career as an econometric model builder in 1964, I became actively involved in Southern politics in 1969 and also launched a ten-year career in corporate simulation model building that year. SIMPLAN Systems was started in 1971. During the 1980s I did a lot of consulting for major companies in strategic planning. Beginning in 1982 and continuing until the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were my passions. Then in 1991 I turned to the search for meaning and French writer Albert Camus. Today I am at work on a philosophy of peaceful rebellion against the human condition – separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness and death.

Daily Bell: You taught at Duke, which is known as a communally oriented academy. Did you absorb this ethos?

Thomas H. Naylor: Clearly, I benefited from the sense of community at Duke University. However, my interest in community took a quantum leap forward in 1992 while my wife and I were working on "The Search for Meaning." We decided to take a family vacation in Switzerland, Austria and Northern Italy to see if life in Alpine villages was all that it was cracked up to be. We wrote about this in our book and moved to Vermont in search of community.

Daily Bell: Do you consider yourself a socialist? A progressive? How would you peg yourself?

Thomas H. Naylor: I am a left-leaning libertarian with strong anarchist tendencies. This means that I believe there are two enemies, the US government and Corporate America, the latter of which owns the former.

Although I voted for Nixon in 1960, Kennedy had won me over by 1962. I remained a liberal Democrat until the early 1990s when slick Willie Clinton pushed me over the brink. In addition to being a pathological liar, Clinton was a conservative Republican disguised as a liberal Democrat. He gave the Republicans their every wish. He made me realize that there is absolutely no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. They are both corrupt to the core.

Daily Bell: You taught economics. Are you a Keynesian? An Austrian?

Thomas H. Naylor: I am mostly a pragmatic eclectic. Every time I was being considered for promotion (twice) at Duke there was only one issue. "Is Naylor a real economist or not?" It was probably the right question.

Basically, I am favorably disposed towards markets. I am also a gold bug. Does that make me an Austrian? On the other hand I am not averse to the use of government spending to stimulate the economy. Does that make me a Keynesian?

Two of my favorite economists were Joan Robinson, a Marxist, and Leopold Kohr, an Austrian.

Daily Bell: Can you give us a critique of why Austrian economics has expanded so fast? Coincidence? Internet?

Thomas H. Naylor: I believe Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did about as much for Chicago and Austrian economics as anything else.

Daily Bell: What kind of impact has the Internet had on the world and your movement?

Thomas H. Naylor: The Vermont independence network has no doubt benefited from the Internet. We have four websites and most of our supporters communicate via e-mail. However, I am not nearly so sanguine about the Internet as most. It may be one of the most anti-intellectual, anti-educational, anti-creative, anti-social devices ever invented – capable of destroying community, undermining democracy, creating a spiritual vacuum, inducing emotional instability and downloading the human mind.

My view of the Internet is similar to Henry David Thoreau’s view of the magnetic telegraph. "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas may have nothing important to communicate. We are eager to tunnel the Atlantic and bring the Old World nearer the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and others claim that the Internet leads to empowerment and enhanced democracy. But who is being empowered by whom? As e-mania has exploded, voter turnout has declined, as well as every other form of civic participation including involvement in religious groups, town meetings, local school activities, civic clubs, union meetings and political organizations. People transfixed by PCs and cell phones have little time to participate in anything and are a threat to no one.

If one surfs the Internet one can find hundreds, if not thousands, of Web sites espousing every conceivable political philosophy. There are endless blogs and chat rooms devoted to the discussion of politics. But is anyone really listening to all of this electronic chatter? Above all, what the Net does extremely well is keep us busy – distracted from noticing what the cipherpriests are doing to us in the name of freedom and democracy. Social networks like Facebook are more of the same.

While individual Internet junkies pretend to be doing their own thing, in reality they are insignificant pawns in a vast global experiment in commercially controlled anarchy. They are, in fact, doing precisely what the high priests would have them do.

Daily Bell: Is the Internet a kind of modern Gutenberg Press?

Thomas H. Naylor: I believe I have already answered this question. I have no e-mail address, no cell phone and no telephone answering machine but I do have a copy machine.

Daily Bell: You were president in the 1970s of a 50-person computer software firm with Fortune 500 clients worldwide. You were also an international management consultant advising major corporations and governments in over thirty countries. What do you think of corporate America? Is it a problem?

Thomas H. Naylor: I have the same problem with Corporate America that I do with the US government – size! Many American corporations, banks and other financial institutions, just like the federal government, are simply too big. In the words of Leopold Kohr:

There seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.

Daily Bell: Are modern corporations a problem? Do you they need to be further regulated?

Thomas H. Naylor: Big corporations are a problem. Small ones are not.

If Vermont had been an independent republic ten years or so ago, it could have kept Wal-Mart out. However, the US Constitution makes it virtually impossible to do so. Wal-Mart is the Great Satan of Corporate America.

I am against all forms of bigness – big government, big business, big cities, big farms, big schools, big universities, big buildings, big churches, big military and big social welfare.

Daily Bell: Your articles have appeared in so many publications. What is your main message?

Thomas H. Naylor: The American Empire is a metaphor for the human condition – separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness and death. Peacefully rebel against the money, power, speed, greed and size of the icons of the Empire – the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street, the Internet, Fox News, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, as well as the churches, schools and universities which try to appease them. Live life to the fullest and try to die happy.

Daily Bell: Why did you move to Vermont? Was your activism mostly as a result of the increased activity of the US military industrial complex?

Thomas H. Naylor: During my last four years at Duke we actually lived in Richmond, Virginia where I commuted back to Duke weekly. Unfortunately, Richmond was going to hell in a hand basket. There were 160 homicides for 200,000 people during our last year. In a big year Vermont experiences a dozen murders for a population of 625,000 people. My wife had three personal friends independently murdered in Richmond.

The move to Vermont was motivated by a longing for community and the search for a proxy for an Alpine village. Vermont is neat, clean, rural, green, democratic, nonviolent, safe, noncommercial, egalitarian and humane. It is a mirror image of the way America once was, but no longer knows how to be.

Supporters of the Second Vermont Republic would like to free themselves from a government which condones illegal wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan, unconditional support for the Israeli military machine, a foreign policy based on full-spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch, multitrillion dollar budget deficits, endless Wall Street bailouts, corporate greed and fraud, environmental degradation, dependence on imported oil and a culture of deceit.

Daily Bell: Should the US cut back on welfare as well as the military-industrial complex, or should the US aggressively provide more military aid to countries that have been apparently identified as potentially in danger of "terrorist" destabilization?

Thomas H. Naylor: There is no such thing as a just war. Wars are about money, power, wealth, size and greed. Wars are fought not to achieve social justice, but to serve the interests of political elites pretending to be patriots, who demonize their alleged enemies so as to manipulate their minions into sacrificing their lives for false ideals.

The threat of Islamic terrorism is a problem of our government’s own making. It is grounded in American arrogance, ignorance, racism, imperialism and support for the terrorist state of Israel. President Bush’s so-called war on terror was an insidious campaign to create fear and hatred among Americans and Europeans towards Muslims so as to rationalize a foreign policy aimed at doing whatever is necessary to control their oil in the Middle East. Under President Obama it’s more of the same. Plus the threat of terrorism helps justify trillion-dollar plus defense budgets, 1.6 million American troops stationed in 1,000 bases in over 153 countries, special operations strike forces in 120 countries and pilotless drone aircraft operating worldwide.

Daily Bell: You were involved in the 2004 "radical consultation" among various grass roots secessionist groups in Middlebury, Vermont, which resulted in the creation of the Middlebury Institute. Tell us about that.

Thomas H. Naylor: November 5-7, 2004, forty people from eleven states and England attended a conference at the Middlebury Inn co-sponsored by SVR and the Fourth World of Wessex, England entitled "After the Fall of America, Then What?" The Fourth World, which published The Fourth World Review, a periodical inspired by Leopold Kohr and Fritz Schumacher, was committed to small nations, small communities, small farms, small shops, the human scale and the inalienable sovereignty of the human spirit. Speakers included Kirkpatrick Sale, Robert Allio, Frank Bryan and Thomas H. Naylor.

The underlying premise of the conference was that the United States had become unsustainable, ungovernable and unfixable. If that were indeed the case, then do we go down with the Titanic or seek other alternatives? Among the options discussed at Middlebury were denial, compliance and political reform, proven to be dead-ends; revolution, rebellion and implosion, equally problematic; and decentralization, devolution and peaceful dissolution. The conference also included a mock town meeting.

At the close of the meeting over half of the delegates signed The Middlebury Declaration, which called for the creation of a movement that would "place secession on the national agenda, encourage secessionist organizations, develop communication among existing and future secessionist groups and create a body of scholarship to examine and promote the ideas and principles of secessionism." The Middlebury Institute headed by Kirkpatrick Sale is now engaged in the pursuit of these goals. The Middlebury Institute sponsored three North American Secession Conventions in Burlington, VT (2006), Chattanooga, TN (2007) and Manchester, NH (2008).

Daily Bell: You were criticized when it was alleged that some advisory board members had affiliations with Neo-Confederate groups, such as the League of the South (LOS). Can you tell us how that happened and what was your rebuttal?

Thomas H. Naylor: From the outset we expected to be attacked by right-wing, flag-waving, superpatriots, since we were calling for the peaceful dissolution of the American Empire. What we had not expected was that beginning in February 2007, we would become the target of a vicious five-year smear campaign spearheaded by the cash cow of the civil rights movement, the hate-mongering, witch-hunting, left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center accusing SVR and its founders of racism. In 2008 they issued a so-called "Intelligence Report" on SVR which read like a government document written by either the CIA, the FBI, or the Israeli Mossad. In reality these charges had absolutely nothing to do with racism. They were, in fact, payback for the articles which I had written criticizing the US government for its unconditional support of the apartheid state of Israel which routinely engages in genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.

Daily Bell: We have identified a lot of Green influences on the Vermont secession movement. Are you behind a carbon tax agenda?

Thomas H. Naylor: I think it is safe to say that there is a strong green influence in the Vermont independence movement. Although Vermont Commons, the multi-media voice of Vermont independence has most likely published some pieces about the carbon tax, it is not one of our passions. Remember, we are more interested in dissolving the Empire rather than fixing it.

Daily Bell: Is the world running out of oil?

Thomas H. Naylor: Although a geologist I am not, I tend to agree with James Howard Kunstler that the world is most likely running out of oil. Kunstler was the keynote speaker for both our 2005 and 2008 statewide conventions.

If one looks closely at all of the wars the US is engaged in, hegemony of the supply of crude oil appears to be the common subtext, not freedom and democracy. I think they are all about oil.

Daily Bell: Does the world need a UN style carbon solution – carbon tax, etc?

Thomas H. Naylor: I’m not a big fan of the UN, just one of many international organizations which is too big to manage. Others include the World Bank, IMF, NATO and the EU. The UN is merely a front organization for the US State Department.

Daily Bell: Are you pro Smart Meter in order to track and tax people’s carbon usage?

Thomas H. Naylor: I am unconditionally opposed to the so-called smart meters. Big Brother lives on.

Daily Bell: Is the Vermont secessionist movement formally Green, as the Huffington Post suggested?

Thomas H. Naylor: The SVR mission statement says:

Sustainability: We celebrate and support Vermont’s small, clean, green, sustainable, socially responsible towns, farms, businesses, schools, and churches. We encourage family-owned farms and businesses to produce innovative, premium-quality, healthy products. We also believe that energy independence is an essential goal towards which to strive.

Daily Bell: The New Hampshire secessionist movement is not Green. Is this why you have not made common cause with them?

Thomas H. Naylor: I am assuming you are referring to the New Hampshire Free State Project. It is not a secession movement. Its primary aim seems to be to abolish the government of New Hampshire and create a state that has no government and no taxes. SVR is not in that business.

Also, a couple of years ago I spoke at the Free State’s annual convention. Half of the people there were actually carrying loaded weapons, as if to say "Mine is bigger than yours." Vermont has no gun control laws, but you will not find people at the SVR statewide convention walking around with loaded weapons. Frankly, I thought it looked pretty stupid!

Daily Bell: Where do you stand on Ron Paul? Will you vote for him? Will your movement endorse him? Why or why not? Is he a friend of secessionism?

Thomas H. Naylor: I like Ron Paul a lot. After all he is a graduate of the Duke University Medical School, just like my wife. Ironically, I met him in 1995 at a secession conference sponsored by the Von Mises Institute in Charleston, SC. It may have been the most interesting conference I ever attended.

I find myself in complete agreement with his positions on foreign policy, reduced military spending, Israel and the Federal Reserve. But in his heart of hearts, Ron Paul seems to believe that the US government is still fixable. All we need do is return to the Constitution and everything will be just fine. But it will never happen. Our Congress is owned, operated and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America. They like the way the Constitution is being interpreted and will see to it that nothing changes.

In the end, Ron Paul, not unlike the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, is just another distraction preventing the American people from seeing that America is in a death spiral. We will not be able to reform our way out. This is the endgame! The vast majority of Americans are in a complete state of denial. Congressman Paul, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are there to make sure we don’t wake up.

Daily Bell: Where do you stand generally on the US as empire? Ron Paul disagrees with this sort of Leviathan.

Thomas H. Naylor: A nation that has nearly 1,000 military bases in 153 countries, by definition, cannot be anything other than an empire.

President Obama’s 2012 "Proud to be an American" State of the Union address was little more than a collection of narcissistic American clichés aggrandizing our military prowess and hyping war with Iran. Among the Republican candidates for president, only Ron Paul has not engaged in this form of demagogic drivel. As today’s most war-like nation, America’s penchant for trying to solve complex geopolitical problems with simplistically violent and destructive military solutions goes virtually unchallenged.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing new about the notion of American exceptionalism. Its historical origins can be traced back to the concept of "Manifest Destiny" or "God’s will" to justify our annihilation of Native Americans starting in the 16th century. Although our nation was founded on the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the story of how Native Americans were relentlessly forced to abandon their homes and lands and move into Indian territories to make room for American states is one of arrogance, greed and raw military power.

The barbaric conquest of Native Americans continued for several hundred years and involved many of our most cherished national heroes, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson, to mention only a few. Adding insult to injury, the US government has violated over 300 treaties, which were signed to protect the rights of the American Indians.

In over 200 years, the North American continent has never been attacked – nor even seriously threatened with invasion by Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, or anyone else. Despite this fact, over a million Americans have been killed in wars and trillions of dollars have been spent by the military – $13 trillion on the Cold War alone.

Far from defending its homeland, Washington has drafted citizens to die in the battlefields of Europe (twice), on tropical Pacific islands and in the jungles of Southeast Asia. On dozens of occasions political leaders have used minor incidents as provocation to justify sending troops to such far-flung places as China, Russia, Egypt, Greenland, Uruguay, the Samoa Islands, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon and Iraq. Today the United States has a military presence in 153 countries.

Back in the 1980s, even as it was accusing the Soviet Union of excessive military aggression, the Reagan administration was participating in nine known wars – Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Chad, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Morocco and Nicaragua. The US bombed Tripoli after the CIA alleged that Libyan secret forces blew up a nightclub in West Berlin, invaded Grenada and repeatedly attempted to remove Panamanian dictator Manual Noriega.

President Bush I deployed over a half million American troops, 50 warships and over 1,000 warplanes to the Persian Gulf in 1991 at the "invitation of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to teach Saddam Hussein a lesson." Most Americans proudly supported this little war. President Clinton’s repeated bombing of Iraq invoked a similar response, even though the Iraqi people had never inflicted any harm on the United States. It matters not whether we send troops to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, or Kosovo or bomb Afghanistan, Pakistan or Libya. America is "exceptional." "We’re number one," and might makes right.

And since 9/11 the Bush-Obama war on terror has just been more of the same. Full spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch are the premises on which American foreign policy is based. All of which leads to so-called "smart diplomacy" that means sending in drones, Navy Seals and Delta Force death squads to show who’s boss. That’s what American exceptionalism is all about – Empire!

Daily Bell: You don’t think the US is governable anymore. Do you believe in smaller government?

Thomas H. Naylor: Just as it was impossible to manage 280 million people from one central bureau in Moscow, so too is it impossible to manage 310 million people from Washington. The Soviet Union was too big and contained too many heterogeneous republics, ethnic minorities, religions and nationalities to be run by Kremlin bureaucrats. Why should we be surprised that gridlock is the rule on Capital Hill? What else could we expect from one legislative body trying to represent so many heterogeneous states, ethnic minorities, political ideologies and religious sects? The United States is ungovernable and, therefore, unfixable. It is but one of eleven countries in the world which has a population of over 100 million people, all of which are ungovernable.

I believe the time has come for the smaller nation of the world to confront the meganations and say, "Enough is enough. We refuse to continue condoning your plundering the planet in pursuit of resources and markets to quench your insatiable appetite for consumer goods and services." These small nations should call for the nonviolent breakup of the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan and the other meganations of the world.

A small group of peaceful, sustainable, cooperative, democratic, egalitarian, ecofriendly nations might lead the way. Such a group might include Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

What these five European nations have in common is that they are tiny, very affluent, nonviolent, democratic and socially responsible. They also have a high degree of environmental integrity and a strong sense of community. Although Denmark and Norway are members of NATO, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland are neutral. Once considered classical European democratic socialist states, the four Nordic states in the group have become much more market-oriented in recent years. Not only is Switzerland the wealthiest of the lot but it is also the most market-oriented country in the world, with the weakest central government, the most decentralized social welfare system and a long tradition of direct democracy. What’s more, all of these countries work, and they work very well. Compared to the United States they have fewer big cities, less traffic congestion, less pollution, less poverty, less crime, less drug abuse and fewer social welfare problems.

Three other small countries that might also join the party are environmentally friendly Costa Rica, which has no army, ecovillages pioneer Senegal and the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Since 1982 the king of Bhutan has been trying to make Gross National Happiness the national priority rather than Gross National Product. Although still a work-in-progress, policies instituted by the king are aimed at ensuring that prosperity is shared across society and that it is balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government.

This group of small, nonviolent, sustainable countries could evolve into the Small Nations’ Alliance. Such an alliance might encourage the nonviolent breakup of meganations, the peaceful coexistence of a community of like-minded, small nations and the independence of small breakaway states such as Quebec, Tibet and Vermont from larger nations. The Small Nations’ Alliance could become a sort of international cheerleader supporting breakaway nations.

We do not envision the SNA as an international governing body with the power to impose its collective will on others. Rather we see it as a role model encouraging others to decentralize, downsize, localize, demilitarize, simplify and humanize their lives. Membership in the SNA will be open to those nations who subscribe to the principles of the SNA and are approved for membership by a consensus of SNA members. The only mechanism available for enforcing policies endorsed by the SNA would be expulsion from the organization for noncompliance.

According to Leopold Kohr: "A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power."

Daily Bell: What should government do?

Thomas H. Naylor:

Power Sharing. Vermont’s strong democratic tradition is grounded in its town meetings. We favor devolution of political power from the state back to local communities, making the governing structure for towns, schools, hospitals and social services much like that of Switzerland. Shared power also underlies our approach to international relations.

Equal Opportunity. We support equal access for all Vermont citizens to quality education, housing, employment and health care.

Tension Reduction. Consistent with Vermont’s long tradition of "live and let live" and nonviolence, we do no condone any form of state-sponsored violence. An independent Vermont will have no standing army. In its place will be a voluntary citizens’ brigade to reduce tension and restore order in the event of civil unrest and to provide assistance when natural disasters occur. Tension reduction is the bedrock principle on which all international conflicts are to be resolved.

Community. We support a strong sense of community among our citizens and their neighbors including their international neighbors.

Daily Bell: Is government always force? Is force necessary within the context of the human condition? Should rulers always use force?

Thomas H. Naylor: A common underlying problem throughout the United States is over institutionalization. An institution is a self-perpetuating social organization created to achieve a specific purpose that enables its founders and their allies to maintain power and control over other members through a set of formal rules and regulations. Over institutionalization has overwhelmed America and resulted in a loss of community; economic, political and social chaos; as well as violence and war, so says Butler D. Shaffer in his prescient book Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival (2004).

Our lives have become hopelessly entangled with and therefore controlled by, a plethora of institutions. We have become increasingly registered, licensed, taxed and digitized. According to Professor Shaffer, "We are born in hospitals, educated in schools, married in churches, employed in business establishments or government agencies, supervised by political authorities, retired with institutional pension plans and government security benefits, and we return to hospitals to die." (p. 20)

Continuing, Shaffer adds, "The political State has not established order; religions have not made us more moral; education has not blessed us with wisdom; the mass-marketed affluence or our industrial system has not provided us with security; our ideologies have not advanced our understanding." (p.269) "Institutions are the principal means by which conflict is produced and managed in society. The success of institutions depends upon the creation of those conditions in which personal and social conflict flourish." (p.6) "In unity there is vulnerability, not strength." (p. 292)

No institution better illustrates the problem of overinstitutionalization than the government of the United States of America. The US is currently engaged in a never-ending war against Islam disguised as a war on terrorism.

According to Leopold Kohr: "For whenever a nation becomes large enough to accumulate the critical mass of power, it will in the end accumulate it. And when it has acquired it, it will become an aggressor, its previous record and intentions to the contrary notwithstanding."

Daily Bell: What is the future of your movement and the US secessionist movement in general?

Thomas H. Naylor: Secession is a radical form of rebellion grounded in anger and fear with a positive vision of the future. For reasons stated previously, secession is a very tough sell in Vermont and elsewhere.

The decision to secede necessarily involves a very personal, painful four-step process:

1. Denunciation. The United States has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable, ungovernable and unfixable.

2. Disengagement. I don’t want to go down with the Titanic.

3. Demystification. Secession is a viable option constitutionally, politically and economically.

4. Defiance. I personally want to help take my state back from big business, big market and big government, and I want to do so peacefully.

By far the most difficult step in the process of deciding to embrace secession is the emotional one of letting go of one’s images of America as "the home of the free and the brave" and "the greatest nation in the world." These images have been ingrained in most of us since early childhood. Reinforced by World War II, the Cold War, an uncritical education system and our pro-American media, they are very difficult and painful to shake.

The decision to secede involves reaching the point where you are unwilling to risk going down with the Titanic and must seek out other options while there are still other options on the table. Secession is one such option. But it may very well be the only viable option available to us.

The Second Vermont Republic has neither the resources not the persuasive powers to convince people to consider secession. Unfortunately, our problems will have to become much worse before a significant number of people will become more interested in secession in Vermont or elsewhere. However, some combination of the collapse of the euro, war with Iran, or the election of Mitt Romney could give rise to a dramatic increase in interest in secession.

Our next major event will take place in the House Chamber of the Vermont State House in Montpelier on September 14, 201. It will be our Third Statewide Convention on Vermont Independence. Keynote speakers will be Morris Berman, author of Why America Failed, and Lierre Keith, co-author of Deep Green Resistance.

Daily Bell: Are you worried about growing authoritarianism in the US?

Thomas H. Naylor: Yes. Virtually everything we ever accused the Soviets of back in the 1980s we are guilty of in spades. Ronald Reagan was right when he accused the Soviet Union of being an evil empire. What he overlooked was the fact that it was not the only evil empire in the world.

Daily Bell: Any more books planned?

Thomas H. Naylor: Since shortly after 9/11 I have been working on a theory and philosophy of rebellion called Rebél. Its preface follows:

REBÉL

What are the people of Germany doing? Sleeping. Their sleep is filled with nightmares and anxiety, but they are sleeping. We have awaited their awakening for so long, yet they continue to remain stolid, stubborn, and silent as to the crimes committed in their names, as if the entire world and its own destiny had become alien to them. All agree: the German people slumber on amid the twilight of their gods. They do not love liberty, because they hate criticism. That is why they are sleeping today.

~ Albert Camus, September 17, 1944

Albert Camus’s insightful description of life in Nazi Germany, which appeared in the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris, could just as well have been written about life in the United States today. Not unlike the people of Nazi Germany, the American people are also asleep.

We have slept through the annihilation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Palestine, a war with Islam, the rendition of terrorist suspects, prisoner abuse and torture, the suppression of civil liberties, citizen surveillance, corporate greed, pandering to the rich and powerful, global warming, full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, and a culture of deceit. Massive military spending, multi-trillion dollar budget deficits and Wall Street bailouts, mounting trade deficits, and a precipitous decline in the value of the dollar have gone virtually unnoticed.

During our long period of slumber the United States government has lost its moral authority. It is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Israeli Lobby with the full complicity of the national media. The United States has become ungovernable, unfixable, and, therefore, unsustainable economically, politically, militarily, and environmentally. It has evolved into the wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all times.

Paraphrasing H.L. Mencken, "The leaders we admire most are those who tell us the biggest lies. Those whom we trust the least are those who tell us the truth."

While claiming to be individualists, we behave as world-class conformists. We think the same, share many of the same religious beliefs, vote the same, watch the same TV programs, visit the same websites, and buy the same low-priced Chinese plastic yuck from Wal-Mart. "All the women are strong, the men are all good looking, and all the children are above average," just as they are in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon. And we all pretend to be happy. But is it really true?

Even though we spend over $10 trillion annually on consumer goods and services, $2.5 trillion of which is for health care, and billions more on spiritual gurus and religious shamans, are we as happy as we pretend to be? I think not, because what we are up against is the human condition, God’s gift to us in the Garden of Eden from which there is no escape – separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death. Not a pretty sight. Our feel-good religious leaders to whom we turn for spiritual solace try unsuccessfully to sugarcoat it. French existentialist Albert Camus called it absurd.

Unfortunately, the American Empire itself is a metaphor for the human condition. Tens of millions are drawn to the Empire in search of a refuge from the human condition only to discover that the Empire is an integral part of the problem, not the solution.

What are our options in terms of possible responses to the existential angst produced by the human condition? Escape, denial, engagement, and confrontation.

First, we may escape the human condition altogether through suicide. We may choose death and nothingness now over the pain and suffering associated with separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and fear of eventual death.

Second, we may deny the human condition through a life based on having – owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth. Through having we try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. Our compulsive desire to have leads to affluenza, technomania, cybermania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism. Some call it technofascism. It often leads us into the arms of the Empire in search of a safe haven, which turns out to be illusory.

Third, we may choose to engage the human condition through being – by our creations, our personal relationships, our spirituality, our sense of community, and our stand towards pain, suffering and death. So-called simple living is a popular form of being. But if the world is going to hell in a hand basket, for how long can a life based only on being allay our angst?

Fourth, we may confront the human condition and peacefully rebél against the money, power, speed, greed, and size of the icons of the Empire – the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street, the Internet, Google, Facebook, Fox News, Wal-Mart, Apple, and McDonald’s, as well as the churches, schools, and universities which suck up to them.

Rebél is a philosophy of rebellion. It provides us with the faith to claw meaning out of meaninglessness, the energy to connect with those from whom we are separate, the power to surmount powerlessness, and the strength to face death rather than deny it. Since the word rebel has more than one meaning, we use Rebél to connote resistance to authority and control.

Two rebels are our role models – Jesus Christ and Albert Camus. One was thought to have been the Son of God, the Messiah, the other a French agnostic. One offered a message of hope; the other admonished us to "live only with what we know." Both had an uncanny grasp of the human condition and an unwavering predisposition towards nonviolent rebellion against it. Somewhat surprisingly, the Holy Bible turns out to be one of the best handbooks a rebel can read whether one be an atheist, an agnostic, or a believer.

If life is absurd, is there any reason to believe that tomorrow or the day after will be any different from yesterday or the day before, as in the movie Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray? Even though no cosmic source of meaning has been revealed to us, we find ourselves drawn to Camus’s idea that the purpose of life is to die happy and that the path to a happy death leads straight to rebellion.

Therefore, rebél against the human condition and the Empire, live life to the fullest, and try to die happy by mindfully defining your personal legacy, which some call your soul.

However, Camus warns us that rebellion is no bed of roses. "Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity."

Rebél is not for everyone, particularly not the faint of heart, for it offers no spiritual elixir or magic potion to relieve our existential pain. It is neither a fire insurance policy against hell, nor a ticket to heaven. It is not a touchy-feely, self-help, feel-good, be-happy philosophy promising pie-in-the-sky to its adherents. Religious fundamentalists, pacifists, and those in search of a spiritual nirvana are not likely to be drawn to Rebél. Although it may not be what we learned in Sunday school, it surely beats nothingness.

Rebél is about the peaceful denunciation, demystification, and defiance of the tyranny of ciphers, which psychiatrist M. Scott Peck called people of the lie. Its radical imperative involves disengagement, decryption, decentralization, downsizing, and dissolution.

In the meantime,

Rebél

Thomas H. Naylor

Daily Bell: Sites, articles and information you’d like to recommend?

Thomas H. Naylor:

Websites:

• Second Vermont Republic
• Vermont Commons
• Radio Free Vermont
• Middlebury Institute

Books:

• Morris Berman, Why America Failed (2011).
• Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance (2011).
• Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon, Downsizing the USA (1997).
• Thomas H. Naylor, Secession (2008).
• Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849).

Daily Bell: Thanks for sitting down with us.

Thomas H. Naylor: It was my pleasure. Imagine…Free Vermont!

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Colonel (ret) Douglas Macgregor is a decorated combat veteran, the author of four books. He is also Executive Vice President of Burke-Macgregor Group LLC, a consulting and intellectual capital brokerage firm based in Reston, Virginia. Macgregor was commissioned in the US Army in 1976 after one year at the Virginia Military Institute and four years at West Point. Macgregor has testified as an expert witness on national security issues before the House Armed Services Committee and the House Foreign Relations Committee. He is a supporter of Ron Paul (R-Tex) and a spokesperson for veterans’ groups that are organizing marches and demonstrations on behalf of Republican candidate for president, Ron Paul.

Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself and the US military-industrial complex.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Let’s be clear. I think we are spending far more on defense than we need to and that’s been true for a very long time. It’s become a self-perpetuating industry, sometimes referred to as a self-licking ice cream cone. I think it’s a good way to depict the American defense establishment at this point, though. I am by no means anti-defense or anti-defense industry but I think we can extract more for our money and we can do business much better than we are or what we have been doing for a very long time. One of the reasons that I wrote the books on military reform and reorganization is because until you go after the defense system and reorganize it and change it, the defense industry is not going to be changed. The defense industry has organized itself to support the client and it mirrors a very Byzantine, bloated defense establishment that we maintain in the United States.

Unlike many people, I walked away in 1991 from Desert Storm with the view that we had failed strategically to achieve our objective. The generals were, as usual, very timid and reluctant to fight. We assembled this monumental military force designed to take on and defeat the Soviet Armed Forces in Europe and we didn’t use it effectively. We didn’t use it effectively for a whole range of reasons – because we were organized to refight WWII, which was a mistake, but also because the people at the top were very much bureaucrats who had risen through the ranks in peace time and they failed.

The political leadership chose to ignore that failure because they could, and I’m talking about George Bush Sr. and others, who thought they could capitalize on this great strategic achievement, which was not a great strategic achievement politically in the next election. As we know, that did not work. The American people, as usual, were not terribly engaged. They were happy to lead cheers, happy to receive the usual glowing reports regardless of whether or not they were accurate.

And so I walked away from the desert and that experience and we should have taken it more seriously than we did and made fundamental changes in reforms. Again we did not because there was no interest in the senior ranks to do so and no one in Congress was either sufficiently well informed or interested to make any changes. So the result is you have this trillion-dollar defense establishment that is still designed for the most part to maintain large numbers of generals and admirals and headquarters and to feed politicians’ re-election campaign coffers and sustain this bloated defense industry. Again, it’s all linked together but it all begins fundamentally with the nature of this military establishment.

Daily Bell: What was key to your realization that the US military was not what you thought it was?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: The key to realizing that was seeing the various people in the chain of command operate, the various senior officers. I describe it in great detail in my book, Warrior’s Rage, which describes the largest tank battle the US Army fought since the end of the Second World War. It describes the enemy and it describes the generals and their failure to come to terms with the weakness of the Iraqi enemy, and the opportunities that were presented, because they really weren’t interested in fighting at all. To sum it up briefly, they were much more worried about losing the fight than they were about winning it. So their objective was to emerge without having lost as opposed to having won anything. And that’s the mentality that continues to this day. We’ve seen it again and again in Afghanistan and Iraq and the consequences have been destructive and disastrous for the American people and the American taxpayer.

Daily Bell: What is it?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: I think it’s a self-licking ice cream cone. The generals are not oriented on waging war; they’re pre-occupied with maintaining the bureaucratic status quo. Remember, depending on at what level you retire, the higher obviously the better, you can make a great deal of money in the defense industry. The defense industry hires you not because you know anything or you are a particular expert; they hire you because you can call your friends on active duty and tell them to buy things or do things in return for which when they retire, they too will be rewarded with handsome retirements inside the defense industry. This extends to Congress; it’s kind of a form of what I would call legalized corruption.

So the last thing anyone is concerned about is the quality of the fighting formations, the people in them, what happens to them and their readiness to deploy and fight against anyone who can fight back. I think that’s the most important feature that your readers should keep in mind, that certainly since 1991, we have not fought anyone who has armies, air forces, navies or air defenses. In fact, we haven’t fought anyone who is capable of presenting real resistance or fighting back so we haven’t had real wars, in that sense. What we’ve had are colonial expeditions reminiscent of what the British and the French conducted in the late 19th century.

Daily Bell: Is it a danger to the US republic?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Very much so but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. I think your readers will appreciate this. We are on the threshold of budgetary Armageddon. There are people, of course, in Washington – in fact, the majority at this point – who don’t seem to think that matters. They seem to think we can borrow money in perpetuity at 2% interest, that the world is so dependant on this enormous American consumption machine that people will lend us money regardless of the circumstances.

I don’t happen to share that view. My view is quite the opposite. Debt matters. It’s always mattered and it’s going to crush us. The United States within the next two to three years is going to be in a position very similar to Greece, Italy and Spain. And long before that occurs, of course, we are going to watch the Eurozone collapse along with London, I suspect, and the British economy and then it will reach us and Japan. The Chinese, who are already in the throws of a downturn, if you will, is going to have an effect on them and on us, in ways that today no one really appreciates.

So in the final analysis, budgetary Armageddon is going to provide us with an opportunity to make fundamental changes, not just in the defense establishment but also in the organization of our government. Because it’s not a question right now of simply tinkering on the margins and making modest reforms. The whole structure is in serious trouble because it doesn’t work very well and it no longer performs the tasks for which it was designed. To understand why this budgetary Armageddon will make a difference, just keep in mind that the British ultimately left India not when they should have left India – that was probably immediately after WWI, because certainly from the beginning of the 20th century onward, the British were investing more in their empire than they were taking out of it. So the empire was mortgaged to British vanity and you can make the argument that our bloated military establishment, the way we do business, is mortgaged to American vanity.

There are lots of Americans who equate bombing people in remote places who can’t fight back with the demonstration of American greatness. There are lots of them on the Hill but there are lots of citizens who simply don’t understand that war has consequences because, again, we have been faced with adversaries who couldn’t fight back. So again, the whole idea of war is no longer understood. Its consequences and impacts are not appreciated because it doesn’t hit home.

Well, we are going to go through something very similar. We are going to make profound change in this country not because we should but because we will have no choice. There will simply be no more money to finance the kind of insanity that we’re engaged in right now, both overseas and at home. We’re not going to be able to finance social security, Medicare, Medicaid or the defense establishment in the scale we have in the past. This is going to be a very difficult time for the United States – a true catharsis for the English-speaking public.

Daily Bell: Is there a US republic?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Well, there certainly are the outlines of one. I have great confidence and faith in the people who I call Americans. Not everybody in the United States today is an American, unfortunately. We have a country that is Balkanized and divided. Multiculturalism ultimately equates to multinationalism and a multilingual state. We’ve been on this road now since the late ’60s and early ’70s and I think the proverbial chickens have come home to roost. We have large numbers of people who are divided along racial as well as economic lines, and unfortunately, much of the economic divide overlaps with the racial divide.

Again, these issues of prosperity have effectively submerged and no one really wants to deal with them. But the collapse in prosperity, the downturn in living standards that will come as a consequence of this crisis that looms on the horizon, which Ron Paul has talked about for decades, as you know. This is going to throw all of these divisions into very sharp relief. And at that point we are going to discover, first of all, the answer to your question, which is, is this republic real? Does it still exist? I think it does but I think it’s going to be a very serious crisis. And then we are going to discover who is an American and that’s going to be another catharsis. We are going to define ourselves. What are we – who are we – that is something we have not had to do for a very long time, certainly not since the Second World War.

Daily Bell: Were the Founders in favor of a standing army?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Well, I think the Founders were concerned about the experience with Cromwell and the English civil wars even though Cromwell frankly had a huge impact on the development of the United States. If you want to understand the American Constitution and you want to understand the development of the American people, you have to go back to the Protestants from Great Britain who came to the United States in the 17th century, their experiences and backgrounds. They really defined us. What we thought of our religious freedom and the American Constitution, contrary to what people think today, they were not talking about all religions at all. We were talking about religious freedoms for Christians and those Christians at the time, as I am sure your readers know, where Protestants, and largely Baptists, Presbyterians, a few Lutherans thrown in, these people had been oppressed and suppressed by the Anglican Church and before that the Roman Catholic Church. So they were very concerned about religious freedom for those sects.

At the time, no one considered the possibility that we would have large numbers of Muslims come to the United States and I doubt seriously if that had occurred to anyone at the time that they would have wanted it. These are divisive issues. We now have more Muslims in the United States than we have Jews. Again, where do they fit in? Do they assimilate? Do they become Americans, particularly in an environment where we have renounced assimilation? In fact, the Obama administration is encouraging all these people from the Third World to set up and establish their own independent states inside the United States for all intents and purposes. The lessons of history are that great nations that go through this don’t survive. Austria/Hungary is gone. Czarist Russia and the success of the Soviet Union are gone. Yugoslavia is gone. Czechoslovakia is gone. Nations that tolerate that kind of division and Balkanization inside their countries do not last.

Again, this is a catharsis. We are going to have go through it and deal with it and answer to it and all of it overlaps with the economic problem. We know from our study in history that it is the economic crisis, the downturn in economic prosperity, the collapse of economic strength that inevitably brings on these developments. So when you ask about a standing army, the same thing is true for the English-speaking people, that they are uncomfortable with large standing professional military establishments because historically the English people haven’t needed them. Britain is an island; it has no need for a large standing professional military establishment. It needed a professional military organization, which it had, which was a small but effective professional army and a confident navy that was designed to protect access to markets. We in the United States were very similar but in the last 50 or 60 years we have become quite confused. We have become effectively an imperial power, something the Founders never thought would happen and would object to, and that I object to, I don’t think we need to be an imperial power. I don’t think we need to be but we now have inside the United States, interests, single-issue interest groups, with agendas that are frankly divorced from the American people.

Daily Bell: Give us some specifics on the Iraq war. Afghanistan. Success or failure?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Iraq and Afghanistan are disasters and anyone who asserts otherwise is misinformed. I recently met with someone who is an advocate for Mitt Romney and he was unhappy with me because I pointed out that the differences between Governor Romney and President Obama are marginal at best. He was trying to demonstrate how profoundly different they were. He was unsuccessful but one of the things he insisted on was that Obama had somehow or another sacrificed our great gains in Iraq. I looked at him and said, "You can’t be serious." He said, "What do you mean?" He seemed to be completely unaware, as many Americans are, that Iraq is effectively a satellite for Iran. That the United States Army and it’s generals did a brilliant job of consolidating the power and influence of Iran inside Iraq, by backing Mr. Maliki who is always Tehran’s chosen candidate and utterly destroying the Sunni Arab population’s influence and power. He was stunned and he said, "I don’t understand what you are talking about." I said, "Of course you don’t but consider this. If you think we were successful in any way in Iraq, then why did our columns of troops leave at 2:00 in the morning in the dead of night, along a road that was more secured than any penitentiary in the United States? And why, once we arrived in Kuwait, did we celebrate the fact that no one had been killed during the withdrawal in the middle of the night?" I said, "If that is evidence for victory then you certainly define victory very differently from me." I think Afghanistan will be perhaps even worse.

Daily Bell: You are a supporter of Ron Paul. Why … and how?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: What appeals to me about Ron Paul can be summed up by one of his performances during the debates. He was asked a question by someone, after they had criticized Romney, Gingrich and Santorum for lobbying activities that characterized them to a greater or lesser extent as having behaved or acted like lobbyists. When they got to Ron Paul they asked him about lobbyists and he said, "You know, I don’t know any lobbyists. I won’t meet with them."

Now, for your readers who may not be Americans it is important that they understand that lobbying is an enormously important and influential industry inside Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by both foreign powers as well as corporate entities inside the United States and various private organizations to shape and influence legislation. The fact that Ron Paul knew no lobbyists and wouldn’t meet with them is a measure of the man’s integrity. And frankly, a demonstration to the extent that he is not corrupt. He is there not only to represent his district but as Edmund Burke suggested, to also think clearly about what is in the interest of the American people and try and act in accordance with that larger national interest as well as the interest of his constituents. So I think that is more than anything else what appeals to me about Ron Paul.

Daily Bell: How have your politics changed?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: I like to think of myself as a politically conservative person not in the sense that I am interested in using big government to shove my views down other people’s throats. Again, that is something that appeals to me about Ron Paul. He sees government as something that needs to shrink because it’s too intrusive, and so do I. Again, I see the traditional English-speaking paradigm in the United States where the best decisions are made at the local level, inside people’s families, in their communities, towns, cities and states – not in Washington. So I have great confidence in the ability of the majority of Americans to make good decisions if they are allowed to do so. I am not interested in legislation on the federal level. It is designed to re-engineer how people think, how they live, where they go to school, what they eat and so forth in the United States.

Daily Bell: What about areas such as globalization and the so-called new world order?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: These terms you just used are really Trojan Horses for the socialist elite that dominates both western Europe and North America, to essentially re-engineer society to suit themselves. And as you can imagine, like all ruling elite they are corrupt. This also goes to the issue of the central bank and the origins of not only the Federal Reserve System but the central banking system in Europe. These things have turned out to be destructive because not only do they seek to socialize losses by shifting the burden by compensating the losses to the taxpayers in both Europe and North America, but it also allows them to manipulate countries and states into conflicts with each other that otherwise would probably not occur. That, again, is another reason I have been very supportive of Ron Paul because I think central banking has turned out to be a disaster.

But again, the socialist is very beguiling in his approach promising vast numbers of people in countries if only they will surrender their influence, surrender their rights for all intents and purposes to the socialist ruling elite, that somehow the ruling socialist elite will postpone or eliminate entirely the business cycle, that no one need ever suffer again. I think this is the thing that appeals to me about Ron Paul. Ron Paul wants to live in a world where we are not sedated consumers ready to make ourselves dependent on the whims of the ruling elite that masquerade as democrats – and I am using democrats with a small d. In fact, the ruling elite is like the ruling elite in any society. It’s about itself. It’s about abridging itself, maintaining and controlling everyone that it can in order to stay in power.

I don’t want to live in that world, Ron Paul doesn’t want to live in it and I don’t think most Americans really want to live in that world. But again, the catharsis is coming, the fight is coming and we are going to have to sort this out and decide just what do we want, just where we want to live, what kind of America do we want? And this economic crisis is going to compel us to answer those questions.

Daily Bell: Are you helping to organize veterans’ marches for Ron Paul?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: No, I haven’t organized any of that. That’s being done by an entirely different group of people. They asked me to be a spokesperson for them. I have to tell you I grew so angry over time. Going to the funerals for young people, soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants and captains. People I knew in active duty. People I taught at West Point. I was very, very willing to speak on their behalf because these are veterans and they’re an enormous number, well over 100,000. These are people who’ve actually served and done something. They not only showed up and did their duty as Americans as they were asked to; they have done more than that. They’ve seen action, they’ve been under fire as I have, and they understand what combat means and what warfare means. And they understand what devastating impact these colonial expeditions that we call Iraq and Afghanistan have had on the Americans in uniform and on the people in these countries who are caught in the middle. They know that we have killed, wounded or incarcerated hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Afghans and we have done so unnecessarily and pointlessly, in pursuit of this Utopian notion that we can transform millions of Muslims and Afghans into Anglo-Saxon democrats. It’s absurd nonsense. It needs to die once and for all but in the meantime the damage we have done to ourselves, between the 4 trillion dollars at least that we have lost indirectly and trillions more that we’ll lose as a consequence of trying to help the damaged human beings that are trying to emerge from these conflicts, then you have the human toll, which we occasionally read about and we pay lip service to but really people don’t understand. This sort of thing is why I was drawn to the veterans’ thing for Ron Paul and that is why I am happy to speak for them.

Daily Bell: What happens if he drops out?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: First of all, those of us who support the man never thought that Ron Paul was the sort of candidate in the current environment that would win the nomination. We always understood that his campaign was about a great deal more than this particular electoral contest and a great deal more than just this nomination. Ron Paul has been making these arguments about the criticality of reform and reorganization of our government, the way we do business, restoring the free market or Austrian economics for a very long time. He has also warned against the damage that these interventions are causing here at home and he’s pointed to the link between the large intrusive government domestically and the large intrusive government that leads us to intervene in other people’s countries overseas. Those are the things that he has been talking about.

We are now at that point where these things are going to be thrown into very short release. In the next two to three years everything that Ron Paul has warned against will come to fruition. I think that Ron Paul’s great contribution at that point will be to act as a beacon of light in this very dark period of our nation’s history. Ultimately he will illuminate the way out of this by espousing the principals that he has. So I think that’s what we’re all about, that’s why we support him and that’s why we don’t regard the failure of the Republican Party, which has strayed very, very far from it’s underlying principals and ideas. I don’t think we’re too worried about the failure of the Party at this point because this party has strayed very far from its ideals, and it’s going to be compelled to regain its old position inside our American society or it will be replaced.

Daily Bell: Will you support another GOP candidate – perhaps Mitt Romney?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: I think there are many people running for office in the Republican Party, in the House and the Senate, who agree with Ron Paul. What I think is very interesting in this current electoral contest is both Gingrich and Santorum, who continue to espouse silliness overseas, in a domestic sense, largely adopted the Ron Paul economic agenda. They adopted his view of the business world, the private sector and the kinds of things that can be done in terms of legislation and change to reinvigorate prosperity in the United States. I think that’s a glimpse of where we’re headed. They might not want to admit that publicly, although I think Newt Gingrich objectively has and so did Santorum. The problem for us, of course, is the status quo individuals like Mitt Romney and the people that surround him who aren’t very different than the people surrounding Obama and none of this will last. At this point, they are nearing the end of their tenure. The coming economic catharsis is going to sweep them away. I think there are lots of people who know Ron Paul is right, most of them Republicans, and I will certainly support them for office in the United States.

Daily Bell: On your website you speak about the Japanese striking Pearl Harbor. Did Roosevelt know about the strike in advance? Did he help facilitate it?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Well, what I will tell you is this. As with most things in history, the truth really begins to emerge 40 or 50 years after the event. That’s not because no one told the truth at the time but because it simply becomes very difficult to break through the status quo. One of the things that I say about Ron Paul is one of the things that George Orwell said: When deceit is universal, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act. Ron Paul has been speaking the truth for years and that in itself is a revolutionary act. The things that I am saying are viewed by the status quo in the mainstream media and in the government as revolutionary, but really aren’t.

So when you talk about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and you point to the obvious decisions that were made in the lead-up to that unfortunate tragedy that involved the embargo, that left the Japanese very little choice and made it abundantly clear that we were their enemies, then you begin to reach the conclusion that perhaps, in fact, this was something the FDR administration wanted to bring on, because they saw it as a means to extricating us from the economic depression, which I am sure as many of your readers know was very bad in 1939 and 1940. It made matters worse than it had been previously. One of the reasons that FDR implemented the draft in 1939 was to reduce unemployment. The universal draft meant that you took large numbers of people off the street that otherwise had no employment. So you see in retrospect there is a systematic approach that leads to an inevitable conclusion.

But yes, war was a means to an end, and having said that, it would be a mistake to argue that FDR necessarily wanted to go to war in Europe. Some people will assert that but the truth of the matter is that in 1941, if Adolf Hitler had renounced his treaty with the Japanese on the grounds that he would not go to war with the United States, we would not have gone to war with Nazi Germany because there was very little support in the United States for war with Germany. Our experience in WWI was still very fresh in everybody’s minds and everyone concluded that we had no business going to war in 1917, that we rescued British and French imperialism, that the Germans, the Austrians and the Hungarians were never our enemies and we should never have involved ourselves. Remember, we suffered 310,000 casualties in about five months of fighting. That’s worse than any other conflict that we have ever been involved with. That had a huge impact. I can tell you from my own family and from others whose relatives were in the First World War, everybody came back and made the decision to vote Republican and that never again will American forces be used on behalf of another nation’s interests, which in 1917 was the British Empire.

Daily Bell: You write, "Today, the same voices that advocated war with Iraq on specious grounds are urging an attack on Iran." Who are these voices? Why do they want a war?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: This is a different set of circumstances. Iraq was the unfinished war. As I point out in my book, our failure in 1991 to accomplish our mission, which was to destroy or capture the Republican Guard thus making it impossible for Saddam Hussein and his regime to survive in power, was the reason we went back in 2003. All this business about weapons of mass destruction was subterfuge and utter nonsense. Lots of people lied to do that. The real reason was to finish the war, remove Saddam and restore Iraq’s oil to the world market.

All of that could have been done very easily, with relatively few forces and very little damage to Iraq, had we stuck to the original plan, which was not to dismantle the army, the state, effectively try to make Iraqi society into something it could never be. But the neocons, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, Cheney and others, managed to prevail upon George Bush to do something that we shouldn’t have done, which was adopt this position that we could turn Iraq into the Middle East’s first liberal democracy and make this Arab liberal democracy in Iraq friendly to Israel. Once we adopted that particular goal in the aftermath of Bagdad’s fall, then we started down this road to disaster. The lesson in history in the Middle East is very simple. Muslims will not tolerate government and administration from Christians – European Christians, any Christians. We knew that and we did it anyway, supposedly for Utopian reasons. Serious mistake and we paid a terrible price for it.

Afghanistan was a little different. We initially went in there with a white footprint, which made sense. We tried to work with the locals. We capitalized on brilliant intelligence provided to us by Iran and Russia and we were successful until we were unsuccessful in Tora Bora and we allowed Osama bin Laden to escape. Having allowed them to escape we had to maintain a presence in the country and then, of course, this same group of people, the same kinds of mentality that admired us in Iraq, pursued us to do something similarly stupid in Afghanistan.

So you have this influence of over 100,000 conventional combat forces as we embark upon a nation-building mission and, of course, we declare the Taliban and a host of others to be our enemies when, in fact, they were irrelevant to us. We were only interested in Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is not and was not in the country yet. Al-Qaeda is extremely unpopular with the Taliban and I dare say once the Taliban reasserts it’s control over the country, anyone who shows up who is a foreigner from Al-Qaeda won’t likely be welcomed.

Again, we are saddled with ideology and the same ideology in the foreign policy arm that thinks that we can transform the world into a replica of the United States and can export English speaking liberal democracy and its underlying values to peoples where the conditions to these things don’t exist for reasons of culture and economics. They are also responsible for the Utopian dream that we can simply print or borrow money in perpetuity, the Keynesian illusion. That illusion is going to die very hard with very terrible consequences for all of us and it’s unfortunate but this is usually the case with Utopian ideologies. They have to be destroyed before people will abandon them.

Daily Bell: Where does Israel fit into all this?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: I think the Israeli thing has to be understood in the following sense. It is a mistake to insist, as I increasingly hear from people, that "all Jews are somehow or another unconditional supporters of whatever the Israeli state wants to do regardless of what is in American interest." That’s simply not true. What you have are numbers of people who call themselves neocons. They operate in a variety of settings in the government and in the media, and they support or advocate, for all intents and purposes, unconditional support for whatever the Israeli government wants to do. They are no means the majority and they are by no means representative of what I would call Americans who happen to be Jewish.

I say that because I fear anti-Semitism. I fear it because I think there is growing discontent with this sense that we have people making decisions in Washington that in their minds are beneficial to a foreign power and are not necessarily good for the American people or the United States. That’s a bad thing and I don’t think it’s unique because we have been down this road before. What will happen in the future? I don’t know. What will happen with Iran? I don’t know. They are a nation of 78 million people that spends less on defense than Greece, a nation of 11 million. The Iranians cannot project any military power beyond their border. They are very weak. Currently they are very fragmented as a society. There is great discontent. The economy is in serious trouble. The living standards are poor and there is a growing awareness inside that country that things could be very different and much better.

At the same time, Iran’s trump card is subversion, it’s ability to operate through Shia populations in adjoining or neighboring countries. That’s what’s happening in Iraq, that’s what goes on in Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia. In that sense, the Iranians do present a real security challenge to those countries except in Iraq where Shia’s are a majority and they have now established themselves so that’s why effectively Iraq is an Iranian satellite. But other than that, Iran’s ability to take material like enriched uranium and turn it into a warhead and make it work or subsequently integrate to a missile or an aircraft to deliver it, those are much more challenging things that more people are aware of, as we have seen recently with North Korea, which is more confident technically than the Iranians. This is the second attempt to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile, which has been a dismal failure. Iranians are looking at inter-ballistic missiles, for use inside their own region, because they feel threatened.

We continue to quote them out of context and often quote them inaccurately. We’ve got this bandwagon that’s trying to drag us into yet another conflict with them on the assumption that doing so will be good for us and Israel. I don’t think either is the case. I think it’s a very short-term view and a very misleading one. Iran is evolving. It’s going to continue to do that over the decade. We could wake up to discover that we are dealing with a very different state of the future than the one we see today. There are lots of reasons to look forward to the time when we can work with as opposed to work against Iran.

On the other hand, the evolution in the Sunni Muslim world is very different. The Turks have retreated dramatically from the secular state that he created and you now have an Islamist Turkish government with a perfectly nationalistic population and that also, in contrast to Iran, has a very proper military establishment and a very strong martial tradition. Turkey is in a position over the next ten years to become the leading Muslim power that not only dominates on the basis of its military power but is recognized as the de facto leader of the Sunni Muslim world in the Middle East and North Africa. You could see over the next several years an alliance emerge in the region, a Sunni Muslim alliance that is anti-western, anti-European and anti-Israel. That, I think, is more prominently our concerns for the future than anything in Iran. But then again, I am a minority on that point right now in the United States.

Daily Bell: Is a military dictatorship in the cards for the US?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: A military dictatorship in the United States is not going to happen. There’s no danger of that and there never has been. Most of the people in the military are like myself; the last thing they want to be involved with after what they have been dragged into for the last 20 years is civil administration. That destroys military establishments. It’s one of the reasons that the US Army and Marines, in my judgment, are in very serious trouble right now because they have been involved in everything other than war fighting. There is no appetite for it at all and I think that is the least of everyone’s concerns.

Daily Bell: What kind of military would you like to see in the US?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: What we need is a military establishment with a unified military command structure. That is, a joint integrated command structure. We have too many single-service headquarters, massively bloated bureaucratic overhead that we don’t need and we need to change that. Then we need to go into the services and reduce the rank structures, reduce the echelons of commanding control, consolidate many of the activities much as the British have done and the United Kingdom where they have created joint integrated acquisition and procurement and so forth. All of these things will allow us to preserve critical military capabilities that we need to defend the United States and its interests while at the same doing so much more inexpensively and economically.

But again, that’s not a popular approach. Reducing overhead, bloat and the way you do business, ensuring that there are no proprietary systems, and systems that are all compelled to talk to each other, work with each other and collaborate with each other. These things threaten interests and they threaten people who make a great deal of money from proprietary systems. Through acquisition they threaten huge bureaucracy employing large numbers of flag officers. And all of this will have to go away but, again, I think we have the opportunity for all this because of the economic downturn that will come as a result of the fiscal meltdown.

Daily Bell: Any final thoughts?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: I would like to say to your readers, don’t be misled. There are lots of men in uniform who feel the way I do. I am just willing to speak publicly and I have written books and so forth and that’s not something most people do. I think you would be surprised at the attitudes of people in uniform. Again, remember that many of them are worried. If you are on active duty you can’t say anything about these things or you risk everything. If you are retired and you are dependant for income on what you referred to earlier, the military-industrial complex, those jobs and access to them are controlled by retired flag officers who will quickly move to remove you if you say things that, in their view, undermine the income stream, the revenue stream. Bottom line is, there are lots of people who share these views but, for the reasons I have outlined, are not going to go public with it.

Daily Bell: Any other points you want to make? Any websites you want to mention for readers to look at?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Just thank you for talking to me and your efforts to inform the public. We need every alternative we can find to the mainstream media, which is simply not interested in information. As we discussed, they are in the business of preserving the status quo and they support the self-appointed ruling elite that we have been discussing. That’s the problem.

Readers might have a look at www.warriorsrage.com, www.douglasmacgregor.com, and our YOUTUBE channel.

Daily Bell: Thanks for sitting down with us.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Thank you.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

Colonel Douglas Macgregor is one of a few military men willing to speak out at what is surely a dark time for America’s military. If you read between the lines, he is intimating, in our view, a good deal more than he is saying. We are, in fact, sensitive to that because of our views on the subject.

The wars in which the US is now engaged are, in our opinion, part of a power elite drive toward global government; they are not wars of "American defense" but offensive efforts designed to create certain globalist outcomes supervised by interests that promote internationalism.

The American government, from a military perspective, has been engaged in the support of this elite element for at least a century. Macgregor himself makes the point that World War I was a war fought by Americans to support British interests. However, British interests in this case were synonymous with international ones.

A significant result of World War I was the League of Nations. When the League foundered, it seems to us that World War II was launched in part to continue the globalist impetus. Germany’s military buildup was funded partially by Western interests and the post World War II structure implemented the current globalist paradigm that includes the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.

The dual function of the American military, whereby it supposedly serves the interest of an American nation but actually supports the interests of globalism, continues to this day. Macgregor obviously recognizes it, as does Ron Paul. So do 100,000 veteran soldiers who are willing to march in support of Ron Paul and his views on limiting American military involvement to engagements that actually affect US interests and the people who are citizens of what once was a US republic.

We are sure the elites are worried about the discontent in the US military but ongoing, endless wars have certainly been responsible for growing anti-war sentiment among many who have served in these wars and have grown tired of them. The wars have caused untold overseas suffering for both US soldiers and civilian populations caught up in the violence. They have supposedly come about as a result of 9/11, but this too is a questionable matter, with some on the 9/11 committee itself distancing themselves from the current narrative of the attacks.

Macgregor has now decided to speak up. Readers may believe he has not gone far enough, or made his sentiments clear enough, but from our point of view there is no doubt Colonel Macgregor is sending a message, just as the vets supporting Ron Paul are sending a message … that wars without cause and without end are simply not tolerable. We hope this message gathers force and resonates.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

The United States Congress is steadily headed to a place where those who owe money to the US government shall be treated criminally.

This phenomenon is advancing domestically and now, increasingly, internationally. The first shot in this latest campaign took place in 2010 when US President Barack Obama signed into law The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It demanded, basically, that foreign banks withhold up to 30 percent of the income that an American abroad might earn.

This bill isn’t working so well because overseas banks are not cooperating (a state of affairs that was certainly expected). Thus, there is a need for something else: Senate Bill 1813, recently introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). This bill, in part, states that taxpayers with unpaid taxes over US$50,000 may find their passports confiscated.

This isn’t criminal per se, but the IRS has recently made noises about "sharing" information with police authorities. The last time it was an institutionalized crime to owe money within the context of the Anglosphere was during the British industrial revolution when there were such things as debtors prisons. Those were eventually disbanded as it was seen as counterproductive (and even inhuman) to put a man in prison for a debt he could not pay.

But both in the US and in Europe, the concept of imprisoning an individual over debt is making a comeback. In the US it is especially clear. There are plenty of people, mostly men, who are behind bars for falling behind on their child support payments.

Current US incarceration for debts takes place mostly at the state level. But the IRS – and other taxing facilities throughout the Western world – are increasingly putting people in prison for falling behind on their taxes.

From my point of view, this is not a coincidence. It is part of a gradual process of increasing global control by using money as a weapon to control middle classes.

The arguments over just why the US instituted its controversial income tax back in 1913 is gradually fading away as the lineaments of the New World Order are becoming increasingly evident. Taxes are a method of government control. They force people to reveal intimate details of their personal lives and make it difficult for entrepreneurial activity as well.

This conclusion is only available to those who discern, as we do, a malign intelligence behind the world’s woes, one gathering a coming storm that is supposed to transform the West and the rest of the world into a globalist plantation.

What’s going on can’t be overemphasized for those who have long given up on the idea that the nefarious trends now afflicting our life and times are mere coincidence, however grim.

For those who can bear to look, the patterns are evident and obvious. There is a power elite: It certainly seems so. These dynastic families want to run the world and use their apparent control over 150 central banks around the world as a kind of war chest.

These families and their enablers and associates use dominant social themes to frighten the masses into giving up wealth and power to specially created globalist facilities: The UN, IMF, WHO, etc.

The nexus of this elite seems to be located in the City of London with proximate facilities in Washington DC, Tel Aviv, the Vatican and Brussels, among other places.

It works like a crime family, using various locations for various functions. Israel may be used for Intel operations but the US without a doubt is this entity’s "muscle."

That’s the reason so much of the current "new world" enforcement activity is coming out of the US. The US, on behalf of the elites, is the cop-on-the-beat, the international enforcer of the increasingly evident globalist paradigm.

NATO is basically the US military writ large, and it travels to wherever the elite wishes it to. The US FBI has now expanded to 90 countries. (The FBI’s brief – illegal to begin with – has not yet been challenged by the US Congress.) The CIA has long committed murder and mayhem around the world.

In fact, the US and its evolving global interference is simply the ever-elongating arm of the coming formal, global empire – if the power elite has its way. The current fiscal encumbrances emerging from the bowels of Washington DC should simply be seen as an extension of ongoing trends.

How the elites believe that they will be able to pursue their agenda to fruition in the era of what we call the Internet Reformation is a mystery to me. This passport bill is yet one more evidence that they will try. But like debtors prisons and other such schemes, it is likely fated not to work over time …

What barbarity can be greater than for gaolers (without provocation) to load prisoners with irons, and thrust them into dungeons, and manacle them, and deny their friends to visit them, and force them to pay excessive fines for their chamber rent, their victuals and drinks; to open their letters and seize the charity that is sent to them! And when debtors have succeeded in arranging with their creditors, hundreds are detained in prison for chamber-rent and other unjust demands put forward by their gaolers, so that at last, in their despair, many are driven to commit suicide… gaolers should be paid a fixed salary and forbidden, under pain of instant dismissal, to accept bribe, fee or reward of any kind… law of imprisonment for debts inflicts a greater loss on the country, in the way of wasted power and energies, than do monasteries and nunneries in foreign lands, and among Roman-Catholic peoples… Holland, the most unpolite country in the world, uses debtors with mildness and malefactors with rigour; England, on the other hand, shows mercy to murderers and robbers, but of poor debtors impossibilities are demanded… ~ Letter from Samuel Byrom to the Duke of Dorset (mid-1700s).

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

Introduction: Brett Veinotte has worked in private education for the last 10 years, in a variety of activities. As host of the School Sucks Podcast, every week Brett shares his discoveries about American schooling with thousands of listeners. He is also now the vice president of a tutoring and educational consulting company in New Hampshire. Brett worked as an Outdoor Education Leader at a boarding school lin Vermont in 2000, then taught at the Great Expectations school in Manchester, Vermont from 2004 to 2006, where he designed new curricula for all classes he taught, including American History, World History, Media Ethics, Film History and a variety of mathematics courses. While teaching at Great Expectations, he completed masters level coursework in educational leadership, and the secondary education certification program at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. After leaving Great Expectations in 2006, Brett began to work exclusively as a private tutor in the greater Boston area. Much of this work was related to standardized test prep but also included providing essay writing support to college applicants, leading training sessions for prospective teachers planning to take state certification exams and serving as a liaison between parents and public schools to address student needs and parent concerns. He also worked as writing consultant to a London School of Economics graduate student, advising on foreign policy issues and Austrian School Economics.

Daily Bell: Give us some background on School Sucks Podcast. How did it start? What does it do now?

Brett Veinotte: School Sucks Podcast began in 2009, and it was intended to be a sharp, comical and pop-culture-friendly exploration into something that most people couldn’t care less about. Unfortunately, it’s something that significantly affects us, in ways that most folks never even realize.

Our aim is to take the word "education" back from the state. Today that word is a euphemism for compulsory indoctrination funded by threats of force against property owners, designed to serve the needs of the power elite. What education really is: a lifelong pursuit of self-directed, intrinsically motivated and purposeful knowledge acquisition. Public school and education are more antonymous than synonymous.

Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself and where you were born and grew up.

Brett Veinotte: I was born in Pennsylvania, in a town I later discovered was run by the mafia. I used to really like sharing what I thought was an exciting fact. So imagine my disappointment when I eventually realized that all towns, cities, counties, states and countries are controlled by some form of organized crime.

I grew up near the New Hampshire seacoast. After some moving around for college and career, I came back to NH. I highly recommend it as a place to settle down.

Daily Bell: You had ten years in education. Tell us about that.

Brett Veinotte: I was once on track to be a certified public school teacher in the state of Massachusetts. Despite my original career goals, I managed to avoid teaching in public school. However, I was trained to teach with public school teachers. My student teaching experience was in a public high school, and in even private school I was introduced to the burden of "state standards." When I left private school, I found that the system had followed me into private tutoring (grades, college pressures, student apathy, etc.)

At some point, around 2005, I began exploring the so-called "failure" of the public education system, how and why it "failed" and the subsequent widespread implications. Once I came to understand the history and intentions of government schooling, I realized that it is only a failure for those who believe its purpose was enlightenment. When we come to understand that the intentions were conditioning, handicapping indoctrination and control we have to acknowledge its success.

That being said, not only did I want to stop participating in the problem, I also wanted to find some means of evaluation and action that would be a dramatic departure from any previous educational reform debate. Those desires, after a few failures, eventually manifested in my tutoring company and School Sucks Podcast.

Daily Bell: When did you decide that education wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do?

Brett Veinotte: It’s an interesting question because what I eventually realized is that government school is doing exactly what is was supposed to do. I think many libertarians reach a point, probably early in their development, where they ask some variation of this question: "Is our society managed by the dumbest and most myopic people on the planet? Or is there just some other agenda we’re not being told about?"

Up to this point, human history is basically playing in a loop. It’s a continuous story of how a small group of people controls a large group of people, by fear or by force. And this is achieved by keeping most of the large group relatively ignorant and hopelessly dependent on the supposed leadership of the smaller group. It’s predators and prey, and government school is just one of the predators’ newer tools. And in 21st century America, if people don’t believe this applies to them, they are simply the latest dupes in this cycle.

Daily Bell: When did public schools get their start — in Germany?

Brett Veinotte: While there are sparse examples of compulsory schooling going all the way back to ancient Greece, the pre-German-Unification Kingdom of Prussia is probably the most significant step. However, the system in Prussia was simply a new method of perpetuating a practice that was already thousands of years old, and that was the science of turning human beings into controllable and predictable resources. In Prussia, the goals were militaristic; the rulers and elites wanted a reliable fighting force, with soldiers who wouldn’t be made less efficient by annoying habits like the exercises of volition and self-preservation.

Daily Bell: Tell us more about the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.

Brett Veinotte: Bismarck was a Prussian aristocrat, credited with masterminding the German Unification under Prussian rule in the latter half of the 1800s. He was like a brilliant chess player; he thought way ahead. However, like Hitler many generations later, he was able utilize an already existing momentum of German thought to ultimately achieve his goals.

Key to Bismarck’s plan was a popular embrace of nationalism and a strong ethnic identity. At the time Bismarck began to implement his plans, the schools had been building that momentum for at least two generations. The success of his "Blood and Iron" speech speaks to the impact the schools were already having. In this speech, he criticized the ideas of diplomacy and multilateral decision-making, and argued instead for concentrated power and military aggression. And the people, who were ultimately the victims of this agenda, happily embraced it.

Daily Bell: Didn’t he plan for Gymnasiums to educate children by grade to bond them for eventual warfare?

Brett Veinotte: Yes. And this is the genesis of the age-based sorting system we still see in schools today. Like I said, he thought way ahead.

Daily Bell: How did Bismarck’s horrid system expand around the world?

Brett Veinotte: The Prussian system was imported to the United States in the mid-19th century by a Massachusetts politician named Horace Mann. He praised the system for its efficiency and regimentation but he was also forced to acknowledge the abusive nature of the Prussian model. Amazingly, he simply dismissed this concern by claiming that such a control structure could be used for good ("the perpetuation of republican institutions") in the United States.

Daily Bell: Didn’t it get a foothold in America because of Irish prejudice?

Brett Veinotte: As early as the 1860s it was a factor. It was no coincidence that a system formed in Prussia to instill a sense of ethnic superiority and the mystical idea of nationalism would have the same effect in the United States.

Catholics and immigrants were big targets. There was a strong xenophobic desire to stamp out diversity in general, and the school system was even embraced by the KKK for that potential molding function.

From Massachusetts, it expanded quickly around the country. As a simple and general rule, when one government observes another devising a clever and subtle new way to control its subjects, the observer will imitate the doer.

Daily Bell: Give us some insight into John Dewey. What was his impact on modern education?

Brett Veinotte: Dewey was a so-called educational reformer who came along roughly two generations after the system’s implementation. In retrospect, we could say that Dewey’s reform was actually an acceleration of the existing system’s worst features. In a nutshell, Dewey asserted that an individual’s mind was essentially property of the larger society.

I believe that he believed he had the best of intentions but the actual results of his ideas were monstrous. Dewey believed in the eventual emergence of what he might have called a ‘humanistic society based on the principle of interdependence.’ Or state socialism, if you strip out all the euphemisms.

While Dewey helped introduce the look-say method of teaching literacy, or teaching illiteracy if again we strip out the euphemisms, that was not his most significant contribution. Dewey seemed to understand that the schools were a profound power for indoctrination in nationalism and ethnic superiority, and he wanted to use this power for an even ‘greater good’: the inculcation of collectivism. And to achieve this, individualism had to be significantly downgraded.

John Dewey was all about the greater good. That sounds nice. But what is it, who decides it and how many smaller goods should be sacrificed to achieve or maintain it? He once wrote: "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth." Okay, so who defines "proper" social "order" and "right" social "growth" for all? Moral, mentally healthy people don’t seek that kind of power.

Daily Bell: What is your mission going forward at the podcast?

Brett Veinotte: Simply put…expansion, empowerment and exposure. For the last few months I’ve been working very hard to tap into YouTube, where I believe there is a huge group of young people ready to embrace our message. In every podcast and video, I try to include a strong message about how demented and philosophically corrupt government schooling actually is. So no matter where a person starts, they get some introduction to this message. I hope that this realization helps rebellious or labeled (ODD, ADHD) students realize that it’s the system that is defective. Not them.

Daily Bell: What are some of the big issues you will continue to cover?

Brett Veinotte: That’s where the exposure comes in. One of the aims from the beginning of the show was to encourage critical thought. I want young people to have the tools to detect and deflect government and corporate propaganda. And they won’t get these tools in school.

We recently began a series on logical fallacies, where we take a critical look at intellectually insulting ruses like Mitt Romney and the viral video, KONY 2012. I want to help young people built their intellectual self-defense, so they can identify and expose dangerous frauds. Between the schools, the mainstream media and politics there is no shortage of new dangerous frauds in need of exposing.

Daily Bell: How should people feel who work in the current system?

Brett Veinotte: That depends on how much they’ve discovered about it. I remember how I felt at different stages in my career, even in private school. From my own experience, it’s a gradual process that begins with denial and rationalization. My only advice for these people is to be honest with themselves. However, they should also be realistic about what they can do.

Daily Bell: What should they do?

Brett Veinotte: People used to tell me: "if you want to change the system, you have to work within the system." And that is the world’s worst advice. People who believe in that idea should try the following: Pick a place you really want to visit. Take a picture of that place and put it up on the wall. Set up a treadmill in front of the picture and then get on and start walking towards your destination. Call me when you arrive there and then I’ll consider your advice.

First, a government, or government program, really can’t change for the better. It simply grows and rots until it collapses on top of its dependents. It is designed to stay the same for the people who are benefiting from its current state – unions, service contractors and politicians in the case of the schools.

Second, considering the powers that such individuals would be up against, they should ask themselves: "How small and non-efficacious do I want to feel?" The whole work-within-the-system suggestion came right out of the system and is designed to make people feel worn down and powerless, so they will eventually give up and begrudgingly accept the status quo.

I can’t tell others exactly what they should do but I can say that what I’ve done has been very rewarding and empowering for me personally. I got out.

Daily Bell: What kind of advice do you give to parents and children?

Brett Veinotte: To young people: Please don’t take what I say as the final word on any of these topics. Please do you own research and carefully consider any course of action before you take it. Act in accordance with reason and individual purpose.

However, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. My advice would vary greatly on an individual-to-individual basis. One of the most frustrating encounters is with the people who want to me to talk to them like I’m a politician. They’ll ask, "So what’s the solution?" as if such a person exists who knows what is right for millions of strangers. People who ask questions like that seem to have absorbed all of school’s most destructive messages: obedience to authority, trust for those in power and conformity to a single way of doing or thinking about something.

Here’s something that I have in common with Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum: I don’t know how to solve complex social problems and I don’t know exactly what is best for millions of unique individuals with a wide variety of needs, concerns and desires.

And here’s the difference: I won’t pretend that I do. I won’t lie to you, promise you things, insult your intelligence and delude myself into believing I could have such wisdom or power. I’m not a politician.

Daily Bell: What kind of advisory services are you involved in?

Brett Veinotte: That’s the perfect follow-up question. I am the vice president of a company that provides tutoring and college consulting services. In my work, I meet with people one-on-one, analyze needs and then make suggestions or take action based on those unique needs and goals. I try to present a wide spectrum of choices, to show young people that they have a myriad of options.

I have been shying away from college consulting in the last few years, because I was realizing it was more of a service for parents. I feel like a more accurate name would be "Let me present you to my son or daughter as an expert and then I’ll pay you to tell them why they have to go to college…" consulting.

Daily Bell: Do you think this growing anti-public school movement you participate in is turning into a full-fledged power?

Brett Veinotte: First, I don’t wish to present myself as anti-public school. I try to express my philosophy in the affirmative. I favor and value individualism, curiosity, critical thought and voluntary interactions. And school is a widely accepted institution that honors none of these things, and yes, that needs to be pointed out.

I’m also unsure about the word movement. I have identified many other individuals and projects working with a similar philosophy and towards similar ends. We are allies but we certainly do not speak with one voice.

Daily Bell: Who do you consider your colleagues?

Brett Veinotte: Accessibility is one of my favorite features of the new media; people you once admired from afar can quickly become your friends and collaborators. I have made some really meaningful connections with people like Richard Grove, Wes Bertrand, Gardner Goldsmith, Jason Osborne, Stefan Molyneux and Laurette Lynn. If I needed a cohost for a show, those names would be at the top of my list.

Daily Bell: Are there plans for a larger coalition?

Brett Veinotte: Not specifically. The only purpose of any cohesion would be to spread the message faster, further and more efficiently. However, I accept that any meaningful philosophic and social evolution is a very gradual process.

Whenever I hear the word coalition I picture political action. So I shy away from that because I do not believe the government is in any way legitimate. And according to government school textbooks it would appear that any complex social, economic or cultural problem can be solved quickly and efficiently by simply involving the state. That is fiction. There are zero major problems in this country today that were caused by not-enough-government-involvement.

Daily Bell: How are you making a difference?

Brett Veinotte: Most importantly, what I do makes a major positive difference in my life. That’s the number one reason why I do it. Beyond that, I recognize that my impact has been modest as far as its reach. The show has millions of downloads but I know very little about what the results of those downloads are for the individuals on the other end. I have received roughly 1000 emails and comments from people who claim the show had a profound impact on their lives. It might not seem like too many but it’s more than I ever could have reached if I had confined myself to a classroom.

Daily Bell: How can parents and children make a difference?

Brett Veinotte: I would suggest focusing on actions that can make a direct difference in their personal lives. For parents, offer your children alternatives to these government indoctrination centers. For students who are stuck there, ask questions. Questions are what can stop ridiculous and corrupt ideas from becoming world religions and political ideologies. Curiosity is very powerful if it’s being practiced by enough people simultaneously.

Daily Bell: What kind of education SHOULD children have?

Brett Veinotte: The kind they would have without government school: a natural, intrinsically motivated, personalized and rewarding one. And that would mean a thousand different things for a thousand different learners.

Daily Bell: Where do you stand on home schooling?

Brett Veinotte: It depends. If it is used for the purposes I just described, it’s great. That’s unschooling. That’s natural and respectful to the child. However, if it’s used for Rick Santorum purposes – to shield children from reason and reality – I strongly oppose that.

Daily Bell: What do you think of higher education?

Brett Veinotte: I have mixed feelings. It depends on a person’s goals. College is not the 13th grade, and it a very expensive place to figure out what you want to do.

In the last two generations, there have also been some hints of a scam. In school and society, we see all of this pressure for students to attend college, regardless of their long-term goals, or lack thereof. In government, we see heavy subsidies being shoveled into higher education – easy money that students who learned nothing about debt can get their hands on. These subsidies send a signal to the colleges that they can raise tuition. So now we have a situation where more graduates are finding themselves $150,000 in debt in an economy with no jobs.

Daily Bell: What is the real function of education? Isn’t it to make somebody an autodidact?

Brett Veinotte: Education is a natural process, not a synthetic one; curiosity is the real teacher. We are all autodidacts until institutionalized schooling interferes.

Daily Bell: How does the US as an empire fit into public education?

Brett Veinotte: Everywhere. The schools produce obedient conformists who rarely question authority – the perfect fighting force. The curriculum is stocked with subtle but consistent messages of nationalism (we call it patriotism), just war (making the world safe for democracy) and geopolitical superiority (America is the best) – three rationalizations for military aggression.

Daily Bell: Do you have any thoughts on why education ended up like this?

Brett Veinotte: Because it’s run by government. Because it is based on the threat of force. There was no other way for it to end up, and I believe it is exactly what it was intended to be. Education has too much potential a control tool to be left to individuals, families and markets.

Open oppression usually has a very finite life. When prisons are built everywhere and filled with people, revolution becomes inevitable. However, oppression can continue indefinitely when the prisons are built somewhere they can’t be seen, like in the minds of people. And that’s government school.

Everybody understands that there are aggressive and predatory criminals in this world. Some use myopic brut force to carry out their crimes – guns, knives or fists. But the smartest and most resourceful have always used government. It’s the best place to hide criminality in plain sight.

Daily Bell: Is there a power elite pushing the world toward global governance?

Brett Veinotte: I’m not sure if it’s one group or several but as a student of history I know what people in power want: more power. And we can certainly see evidence of that push in institutions like The UN, The Council On Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, The EU, IMF and the World Bank.

Daily Bell: Where does public schooling fit into this larger globalist focus? Aren’t children being brainwashed into globalism?

Brett Veinotte: Even though there might be some messages that lead to an embrace of globalism, this indoctrination wouldn’t have to be so direct. Because public schooling inculcates obedience, intellectual apathy and conformity, most people can be tricked into accepting or even embracing any agenda that powerful elites wish to pursue – welfare, warfare, corporate bailouts, fiat currency, progressive taxation, property seizure, the drug war, Homeland Security, etc. Globalism would just be one example of many.

Daily Bell: Websites and resources you recommend?

Brett Veinotte:

• John Taylor Gatto’s body of work, especially the Underground History of American Education
• Any John Holt book
• FreeDomainRadio.com
• CompleteLiberty.com
• TriviumEducation.com
• TragedyandHope.com
• Schoolsucksproject.com

Daily Bell: Thanks for your time and keep up the good work.

Daily Bell After Thoughts

This is a really interesting interview for those who want to confront the horror of public schools squarely. There is probably not a person alive in the Western hemisphere who has not been damaged in some way by state-run education or its ramifications. The segregation of children by grade over a long period of time guarantees certain pathologies.

Increasingly via standard tests and other measurements, the powers-that-be apparently want to cull the "top performers" as soon as possible and send them on alternative tracks, through Harvard, Yale and Oxford, from where they are thence seeded in various globalist institutions around the world.

Those who participate in this program may not actually know they are culled. In fact, that is the beauty of the current system. Those who are participative may rise as high as they want to and come, eventually, to realize the full parameters of what they are involved in … or they may distance themselves or remove themselves entirely. In this way the current sociopolitical and economic system is self-selecting, with sociopaths who are the most willing to participate rising the fastest and going the farthest.

This gets into the larger issue that we have often discussed regarding the lack of authenticity that modern society inflicts on even its most successful individuals. If one accepts the reality of, say, a dynastic power elite with arms in London’s City, Washington DC, the Vatican, Tel Aviv, etc., then one likely also accepts that elite’s world-spanning agenda.

The ambition to create a so-called New World Order involves an entire program of destabilization and propaganda. In order to move the mass of people, especially in the West, toward this goal, constant manipulation is required. Almost everybody involved in "mainstream" professions is somehow entangled in this web. Doctors end up dispensing deadly pharmaceutical concoctions; lawyers end up ensnared in the judicial-penitentiary complex; teachers labor in school systems that poison the minds of children and cripple their spirits.

Gradually, we’d like to think, the Internet Reformation is changing all that. Increasingly, as people discover their own manipulation, they seek a way to overcome it. That’s just what we think Brett Veinotte is doing. Here’s a fellow who has traveled through the indoctrination of the current pedagogy and figured out a way to make a living that doesn’t stifle his voice or sense of fair play. That’s an accomplishment of itself.

Thus, even though parts of this interview may seem gloomy or unpromising, we’d like to think the overall message is uplifting. Like so many other elite promotions, state-run education is under attack and people like Veinotte are courageously leading the way to a less compulsory future without so much formalized mind control.

This is a big problem for the elites. As people discover they CAN lead authentic lives within the larger matrix of elite domination, they begin to try to do so, and it is highly improbable that they will voluntarily return to their old lives and lies. Again, this is a process, not an episode, and it is one that here at the Daily Bell we spend a good deal of time analyzing.

Veinotte is someone, in our view, who epitomizes this trend and we thank him for the good work he is doing. Every child salvaged from the viciousness of state-run schooling is a victory for decency and the potential of the human spirit.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile

We track dominant social themes here at the Daily Bell, and the spectacular implosion of the "Stop Kony 2012" campaign is a further example of how these memes are disintegrating under the pressure of what we call the Internet Reformation.

We commented on this in this past week, in "Kony 2012 Debunking Shows How Far Alternative Media Has Come." But we wrote that article before the spectacular implosion of the "artistic creator" of the video, who apparently had a nervous breakdown due to the reception of the video and was sent to a psychiatric facility.

I am not one to rejoice at this sort of thing. In fact, it is a personal and familial tragedy for the person involved, obviously. On the other hand, the video itself was fairly despicable, in my view, and obviously and evidently the intention was to create a power elite meme.

This is not idle speculation. Alternative media reports may have firmly fixed the producers of the video, "Invisible Children," within the larger framework of the State Department and its infamous AYM sponsorship.

The "youth movements" that the power elite has assiduously cultivated over the past decade or more are responsible for destabilizing numerous countries around the world now.

The Invisible Children non-profit seems to me to be firmly entrenched within this Intel paradigm. No doubt, if their funding stream is analyzed closely it will emerge that various strands of support lead back to elite foundations and personalities.

What was the meme? It was to create a groundswell of support for a kind of neo-colonialist attack on Africa. Some of what is intended has been clearly elucidated now by alternative media and some has not.

The alternative media, as we have pointed out previously, has been superb in rising up to denounce the video and the intentions behind it. Alex Jones led the charge with a hundred – maybe a thousand – websites and blog-sites all focusing on the true disinformation inherent in the "Invisible Children" effort.

Many facets of what the video was intended to do have been analyzed by now. But let me try to sum up in a few sentences:

The video may be part of a larger power elite plan to take control of the Middle East and Africa more directly. In the Middle East and upper Africa, as we’ve reported many times, the power elite has destroyed a number of secular regimes (Egypt, Tunisia and Libya) on their way to installing what seems to be a region-wide Caliphate.

The idea seems to be to create a wider war on terror by building a Muslim-oriented Caliphate using the Trojan Horse of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is apparently CIA connected at the very top. The Kony video is obviously aimed at providing a wider justification for more African military involvement by the West.

All the above actions are CONTROL oriented. There are other reasons, as well, having to do with gold, with the world’s next reserve currency and, of course, natural resources. Some of these we’ve pointed out in the past. But the larger issue is the one-world government that elites are continuing to pursue.

The moves in the Middle East and Africa and even the Kony video itself needs to be looked at within that context. And seen in that context, I think we can come to certain conclusions.

The main conclusion we can come to is that the elites’ dominant social themes are really in a kind of free fall now. The elites RELY on these dominant social themes to organize society and instill belief systems that allow for the gradual implementation of what has been called a New World Order.

The idea of a consolidated global government run by the current elite – and at the top it is apparently composed of dynastic banking families – ought to be scary to anyone. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A one-world government cannot be anything other than tyrannical.

But these dominant social themes, having worked so well in 20th century and even earlier, have certainly been undermined by the availability of ‘Net information. One by one, they are toppling, or at least losing credibility. I’d like to think we’ve contributed to this trend.

Whether it’s global warming, the so-called "war on terror" or various scarcity memes having to do with food, water and oil, people are a lot less likely to take what they read and hear from the mainstream media at face value anymore. There are too many other outlets via the Internet.

As we’ve often pointed out, this is a big problem for the power elite. Lacking the ability to propagandize the masses, the elites have turned to more brutal techniques. They are trying to accomplish via the brute force of law and regulation what they cannot accomplish via the propagation of memes.

Even worse, the elites have increasingly turned toward and encouraged, in my mind, economic disintegration. The idea is to make people so miserable and insecure via "austerity" and various wars that we will simply cry out for "order" at any cost. At that point, world government will start to become a reality.

But wait just a minute. As far as I’m concerned, however, "Kony 2012" and the pushback it has received mark a kind of watershed moment for the Internet. There have been several I recall.

One was when Dan Rather was fired after the Internet exposed the phony documents he was trying to use to attack then US President George Bush. I have no admiration for Bush, who was a deliberate war-monger, but Rather was rightfully caught.

Another watershed moment, in my view, was the "ClimateGate" exposure of emails that showed fairly convincingly that global warming was a contrived hoax. The "movement" has never recovered from this setback.

And another, very recent, watershed moment has been the unraveling of the case against Dr. Andrew Wakefield who first identified a potential link between autism and the MMR vaccine. One of Dr. Wakefield’s colleagues just had disbarment from the British medical establishment reversed.

But the rapid and seemingly complete collapse of the Kony gambit must rank as the most astonishing yet in my view. The anger of seemingly the entire alternative media community is palpable and the "nervous breakdown" of the man who made the video when see in this light is perhaps no accident. They’re under enormous pressure.

The elites will continue to do what they do. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years apparently, and the exposure of their thematic mechanisms won’t stop them from trying to achieve their goals.

But above all the elites seek justification for what they do, and the Internet regularly strips these self-serving and manufactured justifications away from them.

This leaves the brutality of planned depressions, manufactured wars and unjust laws supported by crony favoritism. How long they can manufacture consent via fear rather than conviction remains to be seen.

There is a reason that the elites counted on the dissemination of their memes in the 20th century. There are a lot fewer of them than us.

Maybe at some point, as the Internet Reformation rolls onward, the top tier of elites – the powerful banking families themselves – will see fit to take a step backward. This won’t be something done within a vacuum, of course. They will have to be convinced it is in their own self-interest to keep a lower profile.

It could happen, in my view. Perhaps it already is.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

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With the attacks on Internet websites Megaupload and Bodog we find what we call the Internet Reformation is providing us with a good look at the evolving face of Western-style civil and criminal justice.

Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, a file-sharing facility, and Calvin Ayre, the founder of ‘Net gambling operation Bodog, have both been indicted by US federal prosecutors.

There are other prosecutions on the way, apparently, that are even more tenuous than the ones leveled at Megaupload and Bodog. But no doubt they will be pushed forward as well.

The attack on Bodog is sad for me personally as I know Calvin Ayre and have admired him as a courageous entrepreneur – someone who has created new business models using the power of the ‘Net.

Sure, his businesses involved gaming and sports contests but he didn’t coerce anyone into participating. He offered a service – as a technology pioneer – and people spent their money willingly. This is not the mark of a criminal enterprise. And yet US officials want to arrest him.

We’ve predicted this for a long time, here at the Daily Bell. As the Internet Reformation gathers force (as it is, in my opinion), those who oppose it and want to sustain the status quo are using increasingly obvious methods of repression.

They are being forced to show their collective hand, in other words, because technology is overwhelming their previous methodologies of control. One of the basic methods of control has to do with what we call elite dominant social themes, the fear-based promotions that frighten people into giving up wealth and power to global enterprises.

But these promotions are seemingly foundering now as the Internet exposes them one by one. Global warming, the European Union, central banking, mass vaccination campaigns, "Peak Oil," electric cars – one by one the themes and sub themes of the power elite have come under serious attack.

The result has been a forcible return to authoritarianism. If people cannot be scared into willingly complying with a New World Order, then they will be FORCED into compliance.

This is just what happened after the Gutenberg Press began to have an impact in Europe. People began to find out the way THEIR world Really Worked and the result was the emergent Renaissance.

Now, people can make the argument that the Renaissance and the Gutenberg Press were two entirely distinct and separate evolutions but I would argue that to view them discretely is a mistake.

There may have been certain evolutions leading to the Renaissance that were not directly involved with the dissemination of mass-produced information but obviously, the one was influenced by the other. The result was two-fold. People became aware, increasingly, of their manipulation, and the power elite of the day – uncomfortable with this growing knowledge base – struck back as best it could.

Two of the tools that the elites used at the time were wars and legal maneuvers. There were so many wars, in fact, that eventually the Treaty of Westphalia was convened to try to stop them.

Now, granted, this is a particular point of view. Another one is that the past 1,000 years have simply marked the ascension of one ethnic type at the expense of others – the Dark Forces, so to speak, at the expense of the Good.

But that seems a bit simplistic to me – blaming one group alone for history’s complexity and leaving aside other equally important forces. To be clear: It seems the Gutenberg Press threatened the elites of the day, and, partially anyway, they responded as best they could.

The Reformation and Glorious Revolution did not arise in a vacuum. No matter how manipulated they were initially by a power elite desperate to retain its influence, the ramifications ultimately seem to have outrun the intentions of the founders.

In other words, once launched, these socio-political occurrences had ramifications far beyond what was perhaps planned. And in my view they were likely launched to help blunt the impacts of the Gutenberg Press itself.

We can arrive at this conclusion simply by asking if those who may have been behind the Reformation intended that the schism create the New World (and eventually the United States) with a thousand thriving, separate sects.

The answer is, of course, no. The elites did not foresee all that came from their maneuverings – nor do they ever.

It may be argued that they are "in charge." But anyone following what has occurred in the past ten years would have to come to a different conclusion. There are distinctly "reactive" elements involved. Anyone with an open mind can see them.

As it is today, so it likely was then. Whatever the reasons for the Reformation and events like the Glorious Revolution, one can see from today’s vantage point that they were probably a reaction, at least in part, to the advent of increasingly available information via books and periodicals, courtesy of the Gutenberg Press.

And the reaction is continuing. Watch as the Motion Picture Association of America, having successfully targeted Megaupload, is now taking aim at a company called Hotfile. In fact, the MPAA has filed a lawsuit against Hotfile and recently filed for summary judgment as well. Here’s how Techdirt described the argument:

The more you read, the more you shake your head. The MPAA’s circular arguments can basically be summarized as "We shall prove that this tool is illegal. Exhibit A: People use this illegal tool." Very large segments of the motion are basically this tautology over and over again. "Oh my goodness, this is illegal, and our proof is that it’s designed so people use it!"

For example, the motion focuses on Hotfile’s affiliate program for uploaders, which is quite similar to Megaupload’s. However, the MPAA interprets this in a bizarre way suggesting that it was designed to encourage infringement. Why? Because it was designed to encourage usage. Really. The affiliate program pays people more if more of their content is downloaded. According to the MPAA that alone is evidence of encouraging infringement.

That seems crazy. As we pointed out, plenty of artists used such services themselves to distribute their own works free to consumers, while still getting paid for it at the same time. This is a business model that cuts out the legacy gatekeepers … but does that make it against the law? In the eyes of the MPAA, absolutely.

It is this sort of abuse of power and legal authority that marks the second stage of the elites’ battle against the Internet Reformation. But history tells us that this stage, generally, was not especially successful.

It might, in fact, be compared to the migration of Protestant sects to the New World to escape prejudice and oppression. Migration need not be merely physical; it can be electronic, too. ABC News tells us that after the "take down [of] Megaupload, other file sharing sites will look for countries where they can base their websites and remain safely exempt from U.S. prosecution. A new file sharing site titled Anonyupload.com is purportedly based in Russia and the Ukraine. It is soliciting donations to buy servers and other equipment."

I don’t know what will happen to my friend Calvin but I do know that what he’s done is NOT illegal in many countries and that his business continues to operate outside the US – as do others of the same kind.

Such actions are surely not winning the US any friends and may eventually cause a backlash. That’s something the MPAA ought to be worried about, even if it isn’t.

It took the elites a number of centuries to control the damage done by the Gutenberg Press. These massive technological changes are not merely dealt with by flicking a "kill switch."

The Internet, as we often point out, is a process not an episode. Many of its ramifications are yet to unfold. Simply making up new criminal law and trying to arrest people will not likely stem the tide, or not in the short run.

In the long run, technology will evolve along with "law." The idea that the elites can simply shut down the free-flow of information now that they’ve put their collective mind to it is doubtful, from my point of view, and perhaps even simplistic.

So what’s the "real reason" for this outright attack on business and entrepreneurial freedom? The elites want to control information and make sure that gambling, which is a most prosperous business, is kept as much as possible under government purview.

The power elite isn’t using legal force on a whim. I would argue the escalations they have made recently provide us with insights into their collective psyche. And I would argue what we can see there is … fear.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

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Robert Kagan has published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Why the World Needs America." Kagan is a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and the article is adapted from The World America Made, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

The article, in my view, is a good example of how the Internet – and what we call the Internet Reformation – is changing the context of elite dominant social themes. These themes, enunciated throughout the mainstream media, are intended to separate middle classes from wealth and power while supporting globalist institutions.

Kagan’s article contains nothing new; the alternative Internet media has rebutted it thoroughly with historical facts that are available to anyone who wants to look. This is a big problem for elite narratives.

When the messaging is easily rebutted in myriad forums it loses its persuasiveness. The top elite families – the ones that apparently control central banking trillions – also evidently and obviously want to create world government. They need people to believe in their narrative structure.

The primary elite meme within this context would be that over the past century freedom has triumphed over authoritarianism and free markets have triumphed over socialism. Kagan uses historical examples to support his thesis.

The end of Roman rule destroyed Western civilization for centuries, he claims. Likewise, British control of the seas and the balance of great powers on the European continent provided relative security and prosperity during the 18th and 19th centuries. Here’s some more from the article:

The present world order was largely shaped by American power and reflects American interests and preferences. If the balance of power shifts in the direction of other nations, the world order will change to suit their interests and preferences. Nor can we assume that all the great powers in a post-American world would agree on the benefits of preserving the present order, or have the capacity to preserve it, even if they wanted to …

But international order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others – in America’s case, the domination of free-market and democratic principles, together with an international system that supports them. The present order will last only as long as those who favor it and benefit from it retain the will and capacity to defend it.

There was nothing inevitable about the world that was created after World War II. No divine providence or unfolding Hegelian dialectic required the triumph of democracy and capitalism, and there is no guarantee that their success will outlast the powerful nations that have fought for them …

If and when American power declines, the institutions and norms that American power has supported will decline, too. Or more likely, if history is a guide, they may collapse altogether as we make a transition to another kind of world order, or to disorder. We may discover then that the U.S. was essential to keeping the present world order together and that the alternative to American power was not peace and harmony but chaos and catastrophe – which is what the world looked like right before the American order came into being.

Kagan, by the way, is an advisor to the Mitt Romney campaign, and this sort of perspective (above) is probably a good reason why even Republicans have a hard time getting enthusiastic about Romney.

It’s a mish-mosh of half-truths and historical evasions that one could compare to a Romney stump speech – especially the ones where he blasts "Obamacare" while omitting that as governor of Massachusetts he implemented something similar.

I’m not going to unpack Kagan’s entire article, but I’ll try to give a quick summary of "alternative (directed) history" to show that Kagan’s ideas are in some sense a neatly packaged promotion, a kind of history-at-a-glance that bears little resemblance to the reality that the blogosphere has uncovered over the past decade.

One of Kagan’s fundamental inaccuracies is to argue that Roman Empire created a peace and prosperity throughout the Western world. As we’ve now pointed out in numerous articles, the fulcrum of civilized societies lies in competing centers of power.

Greece during the Golden Age, Italy during the Renaissance, the US during the colonial period – each of these eras of peaceful creativity were developed when municipalities competed and people could move to other regions speaking the same language if governments became oppressive.

It is a fundamental misunderstanding of history to claim that the CONSOLIDATION of these municipalities created a vibrant and entrepreneurial society. It was the initial COMPETITION that created the foundation for prosperity and civil society.

The Roman Empire, therefore, can be looked on as a degradation of what made Rome great – the disparate municipalities located on each of Rome’s seven hills. Again, it was the initial cultural competition that apparently built up the social structure that empire would degrade.

Kagan believes that the British Empire, like the American Empire, is an expression of cultural greatness and that it is seemingly the white man’s burden to spread this greatness worldwide. He has it reversed. It is not Leviathan that provides civil prosperity but Leviathan that spells the end of it.

As for the elements of history that have led to the current Pax Americana, I’d argue that Kagan is mis-reading history here as well. From what I can tell, there is a dedicated banking elite with industrial, military and religious enablers and associates that is intent on imposing world government.

This handful of enormously powerful people has manipulated history for at least the past 100 years or maybe longer in order to create global governance. They have apparently created wars and financial crises in order to impose globalist solutions.

This is not just speculation, of course. After World War I the League of Nations came into being. And when it failed, the outcome of yet another world war was the United Nations and the various globalist enterprises that are now clustered around it including the IMF, World Bank, etc.

There is plenty of evidence that the Anglosphere banking elite funded both Hitler’s Germany and the creation of the USSR. Books and articles tracing these historical facts are available across the ‘Net.

It is not enough these days to assert, as Kagan does, that the American Leviathan is merely a fortuitous accident of history and that American military might – an empire – is necessary to uphold "modern civilization."

Modern civilization, in fact, includes billions of tortured people that live on a couple of dollars a day and numerous dictators who are supported by American military might just because they are apparently willing to aid in the erection of the Anglosphere’s New World Order.

The "civilization" that Kagan writes of is historically questionable and currently doubtful, given the number of wars that the US is involved with, the economic disruption of the dollar reserve currency and the general, expanding economic depression, worldwide, as a result.

The truth – as Internet alternative history shows us – is that there IS an elite, one that directly straddles at least three "countries" (Israel, Britain and the US) and somewhat more indirectly controls the EU, Middle East, Africa, etc., as well. It uses myriad economic and socio-political resources to build world government. This explains why the policies of so many nation-states significantly depart from the desires of the civilian populations.

Search the Internet. Read up. There’s no mystery to it anymore. The ruling elites have set up economic, military and political systems that purport to represent the views and aspirations of "citizens" but actually realize the goals of the organizing elites – which is seemingly world governance, including a global central bank and global currency.

Why would Kagan write such a book and why would a reputable publisher promote it? Well, the myth of the emergent American Empire is a powerful meme. As long as people believe they are in charge of their own societies – and that militarized empires are necessary to civil society – then the elites can continue to manage events behind the scenes.

But if people begin to believe that they are NOT in control, that it is all an elaborate charade, then the mercantilist control now exercised by the Anglosphere will gradually fail. Those in charge will have to show the real face of power, not a healthy prescription in a modern age filled with angst and anger.

And so these sorts of dominant social themes will continue to be promoted. We will continue to be informed that nation states are run by their citizens and that military might and the empires that wield it are necessary to protect "civilization."

The problem the elites have to grapple with is that this fundamental meme is increasingly unpersuasive as time goes by and more and more information emerges. Maybe that explains the current manic attacks on the Internet.

As people increasingly discover the truth, those at the top are increasingly desperate to hide it.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

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From Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS), a journal from the independent publisher Sage Publications, comes an article that has predictably seen wide distribution on the Internet. It implies that those who believe in globalist conspiracy theories are illogical – even downright nutty.

The article is entitled "Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories" and the thesis of the article is that people who believe in conspiracy theories eventually become so immersed in them and so mesmerized that they do not realize they are holding contradictory beliefs.

"Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement." (SPPS Abstract)

"Conspiratorialists" become so distrustful of "government" and "authority" that they will impute any and every kind of malevolence to them.

Thus it is that people can claim, on the one hand, that Osama bin Laden is "dead" and died years ago, while simultaneously claiming that bin Laden remains alive and that US and Pakistan government authorities are not being truthful about him and his physical state.

Of course, I’ve never run into anyone, who claims that bin Laden is ALIVE. But it’s true that here at the Daily Bell we’ve run articles explaining that bin Laden probably died years ago. See, for instance, "Osama bin Laden is Dead Again?"

The SPPS article would likely have you believe this is an outrageous conspiracy theory. But given that FOX news ran a report on bin Laden’s death in 2001, and given that Pakistan’s former president Benazir Bhutto herself claimed that bin Laden died in the early 2000s (supposedly as the result of an assassination), it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to speculate that bin Laden didn’t die as the result of a US raid in 2011.

But that’s almost minor stuff. Articles like this, despite their scientific patina, are deeply illiterate. Why so? Because invariably such articles won’t deal with the bedrock financial illiteracy of current economic and political paradigms.

Imagine if the world were based on lies. Well, unfortunately, that’s the truth. The lies go far beyond "who shot JFK" or whether the US government was directly or indirectly involved in 9/11.

When one uses the logical framework of Austrian, free-market analysis to analyze the Way the World Works in the modern age, one inevitably comes to the conclusion that modern society is built around fundamental untruths.

The first one is economic: It is the idea that central bankers can efficiently and effectively set the price of money. They cannot.

Every time central bankers decide on how much money to print or where short interest rates should be, the decisions are "fixing" prices – and price-fixing never works. Price-fixing distorts economies and causes a wealth shift from those who create it to those who don’t and may not know what to do with it. Over time, aggressively mis-priced money causes first recessions and then depressions.

The second lie is that laws and regulations are necessary and that they can save society from "anarchy." In fact, anarchy is only the absence of government. That’s the real definition. And absence of government does not necessarily imply "chaos." Just as setting interest rates fixes the price of money, so every law and regulation is a price fix as well, preventing someone from doing something within the context of the marketplace. This also constitutes a wealth transfer.

One can have a perfectly adequate and satisfying society without formal government, certainly without the kinds of intrusive and murderous governments we’ve got today. History is full of examples of societies that flourished with at least minimal government, especially societies where power truly flowed from the bottom up.

The third lie is that government is essential for purposes of defense and defending its citizens. But a quick survey of modern wars shows a disturbing tendency of governments – especially certain Western governments – to foment the very wars that citizens believe they’re being protected from.

War is the "health of the state" – the way that those in power consolidate their hold while punishing their enemies using phony pretexts having to do with "treason" and "leaking classified information." Sound familiar?

It is what we call the Internet Reformation that has gradually shed light on the fundamental untruths permeating modern society in both the developed and developing world.

The Internet, like the Gutenberg Press before it, is a revolutionary device that has allowed people access to information that was hitherto denied or covered up, especially in the 20th century when the power elite’s control over society was perhaps at its apex.

A conspiracy likely DOES exist. The Internet easily reveals not just facts that illuminate it, but also PATTERNS that show the same command-and-control strategies implemented throughout history, over and over.

It is easy, unfortunately, to mock those who believe in so-called "conspiracy theories" because the truth of what has occurred in this weary world is so extreme and shocking that most people simply cannot believe it. What truly horrifies us becomes a target for mockery. It’s a defense mechanism.

Here’s the seeming hard truth: A tiny group of Anglosphere banking families controlling most if not all of the world’s major central banks have used the trillions to which they have access in order to foment what can be called a "New World Order."

This tiny group of intergenerational plotters and their enablers and associates have apparently built a seamless matrix of control around the entire globe to implement their schemes. They are building world government and are putting in place its building blocks.

What is it about the UN, IMF, World Bank, International Criminal Court, World Health Organization and hundreds of others lesser known globalist facilities that people who deny or decry modern "conspiracy theory" don’t understand?

An entire gamut of globalist entities has been superimposed on the world in the past 75 years. Most recently – only this past week, in fact – the US military held a formal exercise over the skies of Los Angeles using the same black helicopters that conspiracy theorists were mocked for mentioning not a decade ago.

But the biggest issue by far – bigger than even the establishment of the facilities of the New World Order – is the fundamental illiteracy of those who choose to support modern society as it is today and as it has evolved over the past 100 years.

While human societies have always been based on fairly bizarre rituals, it is safe to say that the current crop of behind-the-scenes leaders have raised statist insanity to a new level.

Every part of modern society, from its basic economic building blocks to its liturgical belief in dysfunctional "laws and regulations" to its deep-seated reverence for the manipulated destruction of war, is questionable on a factual basis.

The reality of modern society is increasingly pathological – and the ones with the pathology are those who lead the rest of us along using paradigms that are evidently and obviously dishonest and dysfunctional.

Articles that mock the looniness of "conspiratorialists" need to deal with the fundamental economic and sociopolitical dishonesty of their own assumptions. They should begin by admitting the evident and obvious logical fallacies of the "modern" society they celebrate.

I’m not holding my breath.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking — a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

The Best of Anthony Wile