Authors Forum: Nullification! & Rollback

0:00First of all, let me just start out by saying something that runs exactly contrary to everything that every publisher and marketing department tells you, and that is I'm going to praise other people's books. You're supposed to just focus entirely on yourself to heck with everybody else, the dog-eat-dog world out there, but you can't go wrong with any of these books. And to me, it's an honor to be on a panel with people I've learned from over the years. And I don't actually mean to say that they're old when I say that, but honestly, I've been reading a lot of these people for years and years and years, and even people I've gotten to know only over the past six or seven, like Professor Casey, whom you've just heard from, I've learned a tremendous amount from, so I'm thrilled to be able to be here with them.

0:45But oddly enough, I actually have three books that have come out since the last time. The third one is just a collection of essays. And I don't mean just a collection of essays, but it's not like three original books. But the third one is actually going to be arriving at the Institute, 20 or so copies, I think, tomorrow. And it's called Back on the Road to Serfdom. And I want to at least mention that, because that was published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which is kind of a conservative outfit, but which has some libertarian deviations that force their way I was the big deviation of the year with Back on the Road to Serfdom. I was able to choose most of the contributors, so I basically chose all Misesians and a few of them are even presenting papers to this conference.

1:34Professor Casey you just met, Per Beeland is here, Professor Mark Brandley also contributed, Paul Cantor who wrote about the path to cultural serfdom, about the culture czars in this country. in this country. So I think it's a useful contribution and I was glad to be able to take part in it and give it a kind of Misesian imprint. But what I'm going to focus on in my time are these other books. So let's start with the one from last year, came out the middle of that last year, called Nullification. And so my most recent two books, they both have Obama on the cover. This is how right-wing publishers think. You know, like, everybody dislikes Obama, so we'll slap him. Now, the problem is that for the audiobook, you know, so all right, so here we've got Obama and the word nullification is stamped on what they're all doing.

2:26So even if you don't know what nullification is, you kind of figure, well, if it's stamped over these people, I mean, I guess I probably support it. But in the audiobook version for the cover there, it's just the picture of them. With nullification at the top, so it's kind of like, nullification, it's what Obama does. This is exactly the wrong, alright so forget it, you know too bad, but basically to make a long story short, particularly for the Europeans in the audience who might not be familiar with this concept, basically it boils down to discussing Thomas Jefferson's idea from 1798, but that really goes back even further in history that the states have to have some kind of constitutional role as protectors of the liberties of the people. I realize we all come from you know and the idea that they're going to be the protectors of the liberties of the people is a bit laughable.

3:17But the argument is that the peoples of the states are the primordial political units of the United States. And I defend that statement. They are the units that gave life to the Union in the first place. So obviously then, just in the nature of the system, the structure of that system demands that in the last resort, the principles to the compact have to be able to have the final say Regarding Whether Their Own Agent Was Intended to Have Such and Such Power. It's just a logical argument, but one that can be buttressed with arguments from history, and that's what I do in here. I think that the argument for this, again, not just the moral argument, which I think is just clearly a home run, obviously if the federal government is committing violence against you, you have the right to resist that, is that, but I think you can also make a very strong historical and constitutional argument using history that has completely, and I mean completely, fallen down the Orwellian memory

4:13hole. And I'm resurrecting a lot of that, and I think that the argument for it is just overwhelming. It's actually much stronger than I thought it was when I started working on the project. Now why should this matter to me or to any of us? Because for a lot of us, the idea of state nullification of federal laws that are unconstitutional seems, if anything, shockingly tame and timid. This is the very, very least we should be thinking about doing. And plus with me, Constitution's sponstitution, really. We would be better off if the federal government did limit itself to this thing, but it has I like solving puzzles. I like doing dorky things. I like beating people at their own game.

5:15When it comes to the Constitution, I want to show them that even from their own premise, I can still somehow carve out some kind of resistance mechanism. And this has driven people crazy. It's gotten quite a few Straussians up in arms and all the usual bad guys just are beside themselves with this. How dare we make arguments like this? To me, though, the real value of the book is not just its contribution to our understanding, whatever contribution that may be, but really that it's getting a lot of Americans thinking forbidden thoughts. And to me, that's an end in itself because we are stuck in this country inside this suffocating box in which all of our views are supposed to run from Joe Biden to Bob Dole, like somewhere in there.

6:08And what I'm trying to do with nullification and rollback is to crush that box into the ground and then set it on fire. and what's been going on with this book is that a lot of ordinary Americans have gotten interested in this and they want as soon as they hear this idea they think great you know gee what should we get started with it's an embarrassment of riches where do we begin applying this idea it's wonderful and the reason this is so encouraging to me is that there has been in effect a blackout about the subject and about this book I mean just no you know after meltdown I got a lot of Media for that, and that went very well, but nobody will touch this with a 10-foot pole, especially the right-wing media. They don't want to have anything to do with this because this is not respectable.

6:56It's not between Biden and Romney. So how could it be? So no mention, we're not going to pretend it's not happening, we're going to pretend this doesn't exist. And so what impresses me is that we've been doing a tour, the 10th Amendment Center and WeRefuse.com and a bunch of organizations have been doing a tour of the country called Nullify Now. It's like, okay, you don't want to talk about it, we're going to bring it to your city and just get right in your face about it, you know? What are you going to do about that? And a lot of people who are showing up at these events are people who are not in the traditional Mises Institute circles. A lot of these are just regular Americans, usually older, and they've never heard these ideas before, but they hear them and they jump right on board, even though all their I find that incredibly encouraging. They're willing to take a position that is not even on the radar, that they know they're going to be condemned and smeared for by all a fashionable opinion, and yet they're adopting it anyway.

7:52And so I thought, okay, look, if I can get them thinking of one forbidden thought, then rollback comes along. I've got a whole bunch more where that came from. I think once I got your attention, let's move on. But let me just say a couple quick other things about nullification. First, I did a little video as a kind of promo for the book. And some of you may have seen it, but if you haven't, I want to direct you to the page for it. for it and even if you have I would still like you to go to type in this URL because you can watch the blooper tape also which is much funnier than the original video it turns out and the video is called interview with a zombie and the idea of it is that a zombie has his own television talk show how different that is from our normal television of course and he's going to interview me about my book now of course the zombie is actually Mises Institute

8:48Adjunct Scholar Bob Murphy, who obviously has no dignity whatsoever, which is great for me. All right Bob, go ahead and degrade yourself. That's fantastic. But the idea of it is that he's interviewing me about my book, but every time I make a substantive argument and I have a lot of things to say that are relevant to the subject, all he can do is come back with a one-word response, I patiently explain nullification was never used on behalf of slavery. Why would it be? What anti-slavery federal laws would they have needed to nullify? To the contrary, it was used to fight against slavery as when a number of states, but Wisconsin more spectacularly than any other, nullified the federal fugitive slave laws.

9:40But of course, he can't compute this, so he just keeps calling the name. So in other words, no substance is discussed. And the point of this was to illustrate this is exactly, of course, we all know that's what's going to happen with a book like this. I mean, everybody knows that. That's the charade we all go through. And that's indeed what has happened. When the left has taken notice of this, I'm sorry to say the left has not seen the progressive potential of nullification, which is obvious to me, seems obvious to me. If you believe small is beautiful, that should apply to politics too. How come 309 million people governed infallibly from one city is just the right size? Don't you believe smallies be like, why do they not see the progressive potential for this, but they don't? Or, you know, when they're incarcerating the Japanese Americans during World War II, wouldn't it have been nice to nullify that? Like, why do we assume nationalism is a progressive force?

10:26I don't know, I can't seem to get them to go along with this. But basically, the progressive response has not been to go through this book and critique the arguments. I knew that wasn't going to happen. To the contrary, what happens? Well, Woods is a bad guy, and oh gosh, he's outside the Biden to Romney box, so everybody block your ears. You better not listen to this. Really, it's like living in a society. These are people who would fit in perfectly at Pravda. They would have no problem. They would assimilate perfectly well into that type of line of work. of Work. So what we've managed to do though, very successfully, is begin to push back against this version of the narrative. My friend Michael Bolden, who runs the much more radical 10th Amendment Center, you think of it as kind of a lame mainstreamy group, it's a much more radical center than you think, he goes around, he's from California, I'll just leave that at that, and Bolden goes around

11:23and they'll say to him, you know, tell us about this nullification thing that's going on. I think we can sum it all up in one word. And they all go, what's that one word? Weed. What? He says, look, he says we got more than a dozen states that are actively defying the federal government on medical marijuana. And in LA County, we still got all these dispensaries going, even though the courts are against us and the executive branch is against us. And they're still doing it. So Bolden will go to these events where it's all conservative tea party people. And he'll get up there and say, do you And they honestly don't know how to answer that question, but this has got to be a trick of some kind.

12:10He says, look, these people are just saying, okay, gee, thanks for your decision, federal government. We're going to go ahead anyway. So that's how he's been sort of selling it. We just had an event last weekend in Cincinnati, and think of the mischievousness of this. of this, we held the event in the Harriet Tubman Theater of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. So of course every progressive head exploded at this, like how, what, you mean you people are against slavery, I mean I thought, and of course nobody is stupid enough to think we support, I mean really, it's just absurd, but to be able to be there, what an extraordinary thing, and of course it's a federal boondoggle by the way, it was a $120 million project to build that thing. And then it loses money every year. So we figure we might as well put it to some use. That's how I feel about the states. They're crummy, they're crooks, they're sociopaths. So we might as well put them to some good use by getting them out

13:03there and resisting the federal government. There was an ABC report out in Idaho because Idaho was strongly pursuing this and the governor was in favor of nullification. They had all A book is having influence here in Idaho, particularly in the state legislature. Our reporter so-and-so reports, I'm not joking. So sure enough, the reporter comes on, well, this is the book right here, and I'm watching this from my own computer thinking, I can't believe it, I'm in the Twilight Zone here. This is going on. Again, total blackout and silence. I just got an invite, would you please come to our, I'm getting this all the time, would you please come to our state, so I've been doing a lot of writing, I did at statenullification.com, I put up a link with responses to criticisms so that I don't have to go to every single state, that people can answer the criticisms, but I got this thing where 44 organizations in a particular state, and these are big organizations,

14:38that yields us this budget, that, oh my gosh, if it weren't for the political class, where would we be? Oh, we'd all be wandering souls. We'd have no art. Every artist would put down his paintbrush, were it not for Joe Biden. We'd have no science, so we'd all be out there doing a rain dance fruitlessly. We'd all be ignoramuses. Exploding consumer products would be blowing all our limbs off. Our kids would be working for a dollar a day in a mine. The country would be run by short white men with mustaches, carrying around sacks of money with dollar signs on them. This is where we'd all be. That's what we all got in school. Basically I'm taking a machete to this, but I'm going step by step.

15:26I'm starting where the Tea Party people are. Obama's bad. Okay, all right, yeah, yeah, Obama's bad. But then by the time you get to the end, they have no idea what they're in for by the time I want to bring them in further. But it's not intended primarily for them. It's really for our people. What I wanted to do was to buttress people's arguments, the best I could, against all this. Let's suppose the kids were educated not by the government, but by Walmart. So every day they go into Walmart classrooms, and on the wall is all the Walmart CEOs, and they sing songs to the Walmart CEOs, and every year they have a special Special day, where the kids get off from school to honor the great contributions of the Walmart CEOs and without them, where would we be, we'd all be helpless and pathetic boobs, but now, how come when it's U.S. presidents on the wall, nobody thinks it's creepy at all, oh well sure, where would we be without presidents, so and so, so basically I'm just going through every claim the government has been making for itself, oh without the government we'd have all these financial crises, oh yeah, how different it is with government, right, so okay, so we'd have financial crises, we'd never get out of them because we wouldn't have stimulus,

16:35and the stimulus package. All of that I go after. The financial crisis was caused by deregulation. Well, I go through the actual deregulation that occurred and argue, well, what's the connection between that and the financial crisis? So we go through the Federal Reserve. Where would we be without the wise experts in charge of our money? Haven't things been more stable since we got the Fed? I mean, all these common arguments that we get. The military-industrial complex. I've got some material in there that actually comes from an ASC paper I gave a number of years ago. And then I get to a chapter called The Myth of Good Government, which I stole from a Mises Circle. That was a title of a Mises Circle event called The Myth of Good Government, where I go through some of the hard cases, again, like we'd have no science, right, wouldn't we all be dead without the regulatory apparatus, or the war on drugs, which is not something I've written

17:21about before, so I had to really get myself into that literature, so that by the end these people are being exposed to all this stuff, and then my regular readers, you know, maybe we'll find some additional arguments for their arsenal. My publisher put the first chapter of the book up at a website called rollbackbook.com, which makes it easier to say on the radio so you don't keep having to promote your own personal site and you sound like some crazy ego case. But I hope you will consider checking these and the other books on the panel out. And thank you very much.