Unintended Consequences of NSA Spying

0:00Dr. Mark Thornton is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the World Research and Education Center for the Austrian School of Economics. Dr., good morning. Good morning, Stephen, Joanne. It's great to be with you. Good morning, Michigan. Well, good morning to you, my friend. Good morning. Let's talk about unintended consequences of this whole PRISM program. I mean, there's a lot of discussion, obviously, as to whether it was the right thing to do, the wrong thing to do, who's in charge, where's the command and control and the oversight, Well, it's just a bad sign for the country. I mean, it's a sign that the Democrats and the Republicans are in league with one another, you know, not just on expanding the budget, not just on expanding the national debt, but also expanding government's reach into our privacy. And, you know, companies don't like that kind of thing. Yahoo! and a lot of these other companies have sued the government to prevent them from spying on their customers.

0:58And you know, when companies like that, the biggest employers with the best jobs, start getting kicked off at the government and what they're doing to our privacy, they're going to locate elsewhere and they're going to go elsewhere with those jobs. Internet jobs and technology jobs can go anywhere on the planet, basically. And this kind of intrusive behavior on the part of the federal government is the type of thing that drives people, not just Snowden out of the country, but companies and jobs out of the country. So it's just a bad, bad policy that's ineffective, of course, as in, you know, all of what the government does is ineffective, and it chews up a lot of resources. The NSA is getting at least $10 billion a year, and, you know, so it's a losing proposition for Americans across the board, besides being unconstitutional.

1:45You know, I guess for a lot of Americans, though, I think when they look at, you know, the prison program, I think that they're thinking, is prison really helping to prevent terrorist Attacks, and we heard about the New York incident, but we don't hear a lot about much else. Do you think that program is effective in protecting us? Absolutely not. It's not even designed to protect us against attack. It's more designed to apprehend the terrorist after the attacks because with all the computers that they can use, they're not going to be able to take every record, every phone call and email in the country and be able to spot terrorists in advance. So it wasn't really even designed to stop terrorism. is designed to clean up the mess afterwards, and so, you know, the whole idea that it has any effect, and who can we trust?

2:33I mean, at one point the NSA said, well, we've prevented dozens of attacks, and then in Senate testimony they said they've only prevented a few attacks, and some of these attacks are things that the FBI and the CIA have set up, you know, they set people up with fake bombs to, you know...

3:24Telling us what we are supposed to think, and I don't, frankly, trust any of them. No, you shouldn't. Absolutely not. You should not trust the mainstream media and the mainstream pundits and the mainstream politicians. They're, you know, they're basically, they have an agenda, as you suggest, and it's an agenda of, you know, the big government, basically, and that they're living off of that government. They're getting all the power, and, you know, you and me are paying the bill, basically. So people have to pay attention to media such as yourself, and our website is mises.org. We give an alternative opinion. The Keynesian economists line up in favor of government programs no matter what it is, basically. Despite failure. Yeah, despite continuing failure.

4:11Ben Bernanke with his green shoots and Paul Krugman with his massive deficit spending, You know, going along with things like spying on the American people, you know, these people can't be trusted. I mean, they're in it for themselves, and they are selling the story of big government, big brother, and, you know, we just have to look elsewhere. We only have about 15 seconds left, but you know, the Boston Marathon bombing, we had a suspect identified by a foreign government, we had websites being viewed that were problematic, and yet we had to go to the public to try to identify these guys through videotape. How effective is PRISM, then, in even cleaning up after the fact? Absolutely. It's totally ineffective. If you look at these cases, you know, these shootings and these killings, it's always some private individual or private cameras or, you know, the private system that actually solves the case, whether it's shooters, terrorists, robbers, kidnappers, it's always the private sector that solves these things.

5:09Got that right. Yet the government's bumbling on. Dr. Mark Thornton, terrific conversation today. Love to have you back sometime in the future. Much more to talk about. Really like your insights. Like you said, you can find out more at mises.org. Doctor, thank you. Thank you. I loved it.