Rothbard's Protest Against Left and Right

0:00Well, first of all, ladies and gentlemen, I could not be happier to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Mises Institute. I have never been prouder to be associated with any organization. And I happen to think Lew Rockwell is not only an organizational and entrepreneurial genius, but I also think he is one of the most creative minds of our day, that I read his take on something. He's one of the few people who can make me feel like a complete idiot for not having thought this way already. Well, we're all having a wonderful time so far. I mean, last night I was eating shrimp the size of my head. This is just wonderful. And it's great to be in New York for a few days where I used to live. But I'd like to say a few words about Murray Rothbard today. And actually the title of my talk was changed online but didn't make it into the print program. Jeff Tucker changed it to

0:59Rothbard's protest against left and right. And of course I don't mean Rothbard's protest against his own periodical called left and right. I mean against the left and the right. And I want to bring to your attention, in case you're not aware of this, that just this year, in fact just a matter of months ago, the Mises Institute has published a new book by Murray Rothbard. Now how is this possible? Have we been having seances at the Institute? How is this possible? Well, this book has been around for some time in manuscript form and for one reason or another, logistical or otherwise, it never saw the light of day. It's called The Betrayal of the American Right and in a way it's kind of an autobiographical statement by Murray Rothbard about his own life in politics and so on and so forth.

1:46And it's very interesting and compelling because what it has to say to us is, I think, going to sound eerily familiar. Now it's been said that today in the United States we are saddled with two parties, the stupid party and the evil party. Well, I can't figure out which is which anymore, but I do know that once in a while the two parties will get together and do something that's both stupid and evil, and this is called bipartisanship.

2:23An old conservative wag once said that, and I think it's still, of course, true. And this is in large part what Murray was getting at when toward the end of his book he says this. Now this book was finished in the early 70s, and then later he added a later chapter bringing it up to the early 1990s, but we've been unable to find that chapter, so he's really concluding in the early 70s. Here's what Murray says,

3:16Militaryism and Conscription at Home, Intimate Partnership between Big Business and Leviathan Government And he goes on to ask, where then can disaffected liberals turn, not to the current right, which offers them only more of the same? Well, I don't know if it's comforting to know that Murray endured the same thing we're enduring or incredibly depressing that we're still enduring it. But that's sort of the theme of my remarks. And what I'd like to do is give a couple of examples of the continuing relevance of Murray's analysis. As I think there are conservatives out there who claim to have some kind of affinity for the Constitution and say that, well, what's been happening is that we've had all these crazy liberal judges with all their crazy theories who have taken our Constitution away.

4:03Well, let me submit for your consideration a gentleman who would be considered a conservative by today's standards. And I want to look at what he's had to say in recent years. And the gentleman I have in mind is named John Yu, Y-O-O. Is anybody familiar with John Yu? Okay, there's a smattering of people, that's good. John Yu, who is currently a professor at the law school at Berkeley, has had a fairly distinguished career, But his most significant years, perhaps, were spent in the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush Administration serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Now you think, how could that be influential? Deputy Assistant Attorney General, that's like the assistant to the assistant to the assistant to the administrative assistant.

4:48How can this guy be influential? But he took this office and somehow transformed it into some kind of a fiefdom or something or something, because the memos he wrote helped to rationalize a lot of the decisions that the Bush administration had every intention of taking anyway. The Office of Legal Counsel's purpose, by the way, is to sort of analyze constitutionally the actions of the executive. And it calls to mind what H.L. Mencken said when he wrote his Constitution for the New Deal, which is a satirical rewrite of the Constitution in light of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, in the way he described the attorney general in that satirical constitution. Mencken said that it shall be the job of the attorney general to attest to the constitutionality of all actions taken by the president.

5:34And that, in effect, is what the Office of Legal Counsel does. Well, John Yoo was up to the task because you may realize, having read a little something about American history, The Founding Fathers were concerned about having one individual having the authority to bring the country into war. They had a lot of choice words for monarchs. They believed that monarchs had sometimes taken their people into wars that were ruinous and that involved nothing of substance. They wanted to deprive the American president of this power. They were concerned about executive power and they were concerned about war powers. War Powers. And the evidence for this, I mean there's just an avalanche of evidence and I'll just mention that I too, it's not just Murray Rothbard who has a new book, if I could have as many books as Murray I'd be very happy, especially after I'm deceased 12 years, but I actually have this book this year called 33 Questions about American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, and one of them involves this War Powers question. But the fact is the evidence, there's so much of it, as I say it is an avalanche of evidence supporting what I'm saying and what

6:43John Paul is saying about the powers of the president and war. Well, John Yoo comes along. In 1996, he writes an article in the California Law Review. And John Yoo says this, the founding fathers, in fact, the framers of the Constitution, gave us a system that he said, in his words, would encourage presidential initiative in war. I wonder how he ever got the job in the Office of Legal Counsel. He went on to say, the Constitution gives the president the initiative in war. So he repeats this. He says the framers were not excessively worried by the prospect of unilateral executive action. In 2002 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which by the way should have a gong at it, you know like the gong show for a guy like John Yoo, he said this, the president has the constitutional authority to introduce the U.S. armed forces into hostilities, when appropriate, with or without specific Congressional authorization.

7:41But in a September 25th, 2001 memo, which is notorious, two weeks after September 11th, you said, the President has the constitutional power not only to retaliate against any person, organization or state suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks on the United States, but also against foreign states suspected of harboring or supporting such organizations. The President may deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the states that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific events of September 11th. He went on to say that no congressional statute can place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response.

8:29These decisions under our Constitution are for the President alone to make. In the exercise of his plenary power to use military force, the President's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable. Obviously this man is not giving us the exegesis of any Constitution from this planet. There's no point even in bothering to respond to this. If you'd like a response, there is my book chapter, of course, but next summer I'm working We're going to be working on a project, one chapter of which will be taking apart John Yu, but how much effort does this require? In fact, one legal scholar said, it's no wonder that all these theories about presidential powers and war, that John Yu began spinning out in these memos for the White House, all these theories, of course, came from his time when he was a legal scholar, and a lot of them were summarized in that California Law Review article in 1996.

9:28It's interesting to note, by the way, that in these memos when he makes these outrageous claims for the president, what is his citation for this? How does he defend it? Well, his 1996 California Law Review article, of course, that's the citation. And there was one legal scholar who said that it's no wonder you had this article published in a law review, because alone among professional journals they don't have peer review. Law reviews are run by law students, none of whom have any particular expertise in the areas that are covered by the articles that are submitted to them. So by and large, you sometimes will see law students who want to raise the visibility of their journal. So they will be very impressed by an article that debunks the conventional wisdom and bucks the tide and comes in at nearly 140 pages with over 600 footnotes.

10:18What's a law student to do if not print that? Well, there it is, but of course it's... So in other words, no matter how hair-brained your article is, you might have a chance getting it into a law review. But why do I raise John Yoo? Because I want to show that right now liberals, of course, have had a field day with John Yoo because he's also responsible for other notorious aspects of the Bush administration. But what I want to show is that when liberals, so-called, were in power, They had their people offering defenses of executive power in exactly the same way. In 1950 when Harry Truman went to war in Korea to repel the North Korean invasion of the South, Truman did so, of course, without a declaration of war, and it was Senator Robert Taft in the Senate Robert, who is known as Mr. Republican, who stood up and said, well this is obviously unconstitutional, it's obviously at odds with unbroken American practice, and you can

11:20read it in the congressional record, he's got a very long speech devoted to this. Well what did liberal establishment historians have to say about Robert Taft in those days? Well, Henry Steele Commager, who's an absolutely mainstream, typical liberal, you can predict everything he's going to say, there's no need ever to read anything he ever wrote, The Taft is just being unreasonable. Why? This is perfectly normal for the president to do this, sending countless hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans overseas. Of course that's perfectly normal. He said the Taft has no support in law or history for his crazy ravings. He said there is no basis in our own history for the distrust of the executive authority. This is a liberal. So again, remember Murray's warning about, well here's what we face, they're two sides of the same stinking coin.

12:11Well likewise, then you have Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who says that Taft's remarks were demonstratively irresponsible and that Taft and his friends were rewriting American history according to their own specifications. So when it comes to a democratic president launching a war and not consulting Congress, Well, we can't rush to his defense fast enough, coming up with contrived historical examples to support him. Well, by the 1960s, I'm at least happy to say these two historians had the honesty in the midst of the Vietnam War to start saying, gee, maybe Congress should have some authority over war. Well, duh. Thanks for being 15 years late on this one. I appreciate that. I mean, I always like seeing people rethinking their views, but not 15 years after it might have done any good.

12:57That's absolutely typical, and in fact what solidifies this point about left and right and how interchangeable the mainstream versions of them are, are these remarks by Congressman Howard Buffett from 1947. Now, Buffett was one of Murray Rothbard's favorite congressmen. He said, I would actually get the congressional record so I could read this guy's speeches. Okay, there aren't many people for whom we would get this congressional record. Congressman Buffett was talking about the Truman Doctrine, which of course amounted not simply to aid to Greece and Turkey, but to the much more ambitious program of global intervention to stop communism everywhere, and here's what Buffett said, looking around and noticing that nobody's dissenting from this.

13:49The mainstream of both parties are just rushing. They can't sign on for this fast enough. Buffett said, Mr. Speaker, the so-called Truman Doctrine is characterized by proponents as probably the most far-reaching change in American foreign policy in a hundred years. Many of its opponents contend it starts us on the road of militarism and imperialism. Whatever its consequences are, I rise to propound a solemn question. How in the existing political framework of this nation can the people of America, of America, if they so desire, effectively oppose this policy. The policy is sponsored by the Democratic Party and collaborated in by the Republican leadership. If the people disapprove of this adventure, as many polls indicate, what recourse is left them when neither party provides the vehicle for effective opposition?

14:37When the Republican leadership, without consulting the people, does a me too on decisive issues, What method do the people then have to effectively influence governmental policies? Under this situation, it would appear that the people are losing the all-important right to approve or reject decisive policies at the ballot box, for as matters now stand, neither party affords the people the opportunity to effectively oppose this global program. I respectfully urge the Republican leaders responsible for this collaboration to explain this situation fairly and forthrightly to the American people. The people are entitled to a full explanation of a political performance which apparently deprives the people of an effective voice in determining America's future.

15:23Well that's an interesting little speech isn't it? I've never heard it reproduced anywhere, right down the memory hole. But there it is, there's our dilemma, and there it is being expressed as early as 1947. Next year I have a kind of an anti-war anthology coming out that I've compiled with a gentleman on the left, but who's on the sort of real left, not the phony Hillary Clinton left, you know, I'll say whatever the rubes want me to say to get in office, but who actually does kind of believe in being opposed to slaughtering people for no good reason. I mean, he's that kind of leftist. You know, we disagree on everything else, we don't talk about anything else, but we have this fundamental sense that you should try to avoid killing hundreds of thousands of people for safe, for face-saving purposes or for no good reason. So we've come We've come together to put together some of the best anti-war writings in the American tradition,

16:14going through all the major wars and a lot of them are forgotten, a lot of these great speeches and articles and book excerpts and political cartoons, and they're from all over the spectrum and we're bringing them together. But when you read it though, again you can't tell whether you should be encouraged or depressed. Depressed, because so many of these wars are so similar to the Iraq war. We have this view that this was unusual, that the media was sort of complicit in this and they didn't give us all the information and the so-called opposition party is scratching its head, gee, we didn't know this. That's how they all are. They're all typically been that way. You always have a media that's complicit and then afterwards sometimes they apologize but it doesn't mean anything. They then go do the same thing again. I mean, going back into the 19th century you see this and so partly you think, good grief. How can we ever overturn this system if this is how it's always been?

17:02But on the other hand, perhaps we can be encouraged in that, well, apparently a lot of Americans have had to endure this. We're following in a tradition of an honorable resistance movement and I think for me, what is particularly encouraging and what has been encouraging for Ron Paul, as he has said repeatedly, is that he will go out, Ron Paul will have these big rallies and you get so many people showing up at them. When he has no media coverage, he has so many people showing up, young people, Rudy Giuliani has 17 people show up, you know, three of them are estranged wives or something, whatever. Well, the media can't give it enough coverage. Ron Paul's got 2,000 people at the University of Michigan.

17:48You can hear crickets among the media, nothing at all. But what's encouraging to me is that here's a guy who stands up, absolutely bucks the establishment, defies everything I've just covered here, asks the unaskable questions, finally asks, should we have an interventionist foreign policy at all? Should we bomb this or that one? Should we just have sanctions? Should we bomb that country? Maybe we should rethink the whole thing. And to see how many people show up and how many people this message resonates with, well, that is encouraging because I don't know how many people support us out there, but it is more than I thought. And when there are enough of us, well, perhaps something will happen. And right at the forefront, I'm absolutely convinced, as always, will be the Mises Institute and the great work of Lew Rockwell.

18:35So thank you all.