Judging Freedom - A Conversation with Lew Rockwell

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

A Conversation with Lew Rockwell - founder of the Mises Institute.How far can totalitarianism spread?#Trudeau #RussiaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. hello there everyone judge andrew napolitano here with judging freedom today is monday february 28 2022 my very special guest is lou rockwell those of you who agree with what I have been saying for many years, for those of you who agree, Lou is no stranger. Lou is the foremost freedom thinker in the country today. He is the founder and the chair of the Mises Institute, and I'm a member of the faculty of the Mises Institute. Lou and I have not only been colleagues for the past 24 years, he has been my mentor, and we have been friends. Lou, I really appreciate you joining us today. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Judge, it's great to be with you. Thank you. How close are we in America to a totalitarian government today? I think we're probably pretty close. Certainly, as things go on, if we look at what is happening now with the war propaganda, it goes right along with that.

And I think everybody in the US government was looking at Canada and thinking, gee, we can do that too. And so I'm afraid that we're close. We're already very close to totalitarianism. Will we actually get there? Perhaps. If you and I have our way, we won't, of course. but we just have to fight. We have to do everything we can to avoid that. But boy, it looks like we're on the precipice. I'm going to guess you were not surprised. In fact, I know you were not surprised from what you've written about it. But how appalled were you at the declaration of emergency and the confiscation of civil liberties by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Canada over the truckers protesting the invasion of their civil liberties by the Canadian government?

I was astonished and outraged. I have a special interest in Canada because all four of my grandparents were from Canada, two from Nova Scotia, two from Quebec. And so I've always paid a lot of attention to Canada. And probably for the last two years, Trudeau has been getting worse and worse. And I think he's not the smartest guy in the world. He may be a complete boob. I think other people are running him, but he sure loves being the dictator

and it could easily happen here. I mean, that's all I could think about when that was going on in Canada and what they did to people's bank accounts. And although what happened with the bank accounts is actually kind of interesting because once they started telling everybody that they could take your money out of your bank

without a judge ruling on it, they could just grab it. And everybody in Canada thought, holy smokes. And they started to take all their money out of the banks in canada and so that uh uh that actually is the reason that they get rid of the the rid of the uh emergency powers because uh trudeau was involved in negocia he's a disciple of of uh the creeps in uh davos sw Switzerland, who in many ways wanted to destroy freedom in the entire world, and they're working on it right now. I think the fact that he was making the banks,

every one of the banks had a tremendous bank run going on. And I think that stopped them, because the banks are going to do set up the digital currency and get rid of privacy in Canada. So I think the banks asked him to not do it, because they were all the money was being taken out. Right. And it's interesting, these these banks, they're huge back Canada has a few great big banks, just as they did during the Great Depression. And right and it's interesting these these banks they're huge but canada has a few great big banks just as they did during the great depression and uh uh that's they they were none of them none of them went broke during the great depression because they were so big uh but

the mayor well all the american banks of course were going out of business so uh it's just interesting that they were for for the first time, threatened with bank runs that could actually destroy them by their own people because of what the evil government and the evil prime minister had done. I mean, when you think about it, how contrary to reason, how contrary to the idea that government exists by the consent of the governed,

how contrary to the moral view that our rights come from our humanity is this emergency decree nonsense that the government can on its own give itself more power, so much power that it can seize property and stifle human liberty. And it's fascinating the way individuals responded to it. But when you think about this logically, it's utter totalitarianism that the government could do this on its own. Yeah, no, I agree. And I think everybody in Canada, except the communists, or maybe Trudeau falls in that category too, although he wouldn't call himself that, but he sure loved Fidel Castro and other communist politicians, so could be.

But yeah, no, this is just happened so fast. The cops beating people up for daring to protest. It was a peaceful protest. No violence. And initially the cops who could speak at that point the truth said they'd never seen a big demonstration like this with no trouble. Right. No, no, no. Nobody did anything wrong. Did you see that YouTube piece that went viral

where an elderly gentleman, this guy's in his 80s, in a small car, passed a sign that said, honk if you agree with us. He honked, the police stopped, they yanked him out of the car, and they handcuffed him behind his back because he beeped his horn in support of the protesters. I fear that that kind of stuff can happen here, Lou. Oh, sure.

Sure it can. And it certainly has happened in many, many countries on Earth. So it definitely could happen here. Biden, the people around Biden, that's what they love that stuff to happen here. So we all have to be ready to fight. I mean, we have to be ready to resist. And I hope there was a report today with some video of the people in the American trucking protest.

And there are thousands and thousands of them. And along the streets, along the highways, the local people are cheering them. They're on the bridges. They're on the sides of the highway. And they're just thousands of trucks. And I hear that they're not actually going to go into D.C., which would be a good thing.

As they put it, they're going to surround D.C. So, of course,. Of course, the government is going to still want to kill them all, but we'll just have to see. But I think the government is slightly fragile, and if people are outraged by what's going to happen to these people, to these American truckers,

who knows what we can see there? I kept thinking in Canada, gee, I wonder if there's actual patriotic members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who could arrest Trudeau. That would have been great. That would have been great that would have been that would have been fabulous yeah you you talk about the government being fragile i i think the biden administration is very fragile and i'm worried that he wants war because you you know that war is the health of the state. Let's go back a few years. Why did we join NATO and allow NATO to ring Russia with missiles aimed at Moscow? It was just, I don't know.

It's amazing that the Russians put up with it as long as they did, because, of course, that's exactly what it is. And it was a call to war. And NATO has been a terrible operation. As Ron Paul pointed out, when he quoted Senator Robert Taft, and of course, his own view, that it was a bad mistake to set up NATO, that it was nothing but a troublemaking operation. Very, very expensive, of course. And as Ron said today, and certainly my view, I'd love to see them go out of business.

It's an evil operation. Stoltenberg, the bird who's the head of it, is just horrendous. He's constantly promoting war. He's constantly poking the Russians. And it had an effect. You know, Ronald Reagan, or maybe it was George H.W., and I'm not a fan of George H.W. as I know you're not, but one of the two of them made a statement shortly after the Soviet Union fell, around the time the Berlin Wall fell, that NATO would not go eastward. It took Bill Clinton to, as you pointed out in your great piece in lewrockwell.com this morning,

it took Bill Clinton to push NATO eastward. And the Russians have been fearful of this ever since. As you pointed out, how would we react if the Russians or the Chinese had military equipment at the American-Canadian or American-Mexico border and their missiles were aimed at us? And the Russians historically have been concerned about an invasion that would run across the plains right to Moscow from Ukraine. And Napoleon was successful in it, at least initially. Hitler was successful, at least initially. And they feel themselves very much in danger. And so the U.S. has been, again, poking a stick at them

for a very long time. And when you see them putting their nuclear weapons on high alert and that kind of thing, it's very scary. But you know from your study of history that the government will use hatred and fear to whip us up in a frenzy if the government wants a war.

Now, the government may want a war for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to, in their own warped thinking, salvage the Biden presidency. Yes, I think that's exactly what they want. And it's Biden, of course, they want to hide the fact that he's wrecked the economy. And, of course, he said the other day that inflation is not actually a real thing. It's just something that's in people's heads. I mean, he's just he's too good to be true in a bad sense. Right, right. I guess he hasn't filled up a car with gas recently,

or hasn't gone shopping to a supermarket recently if he thinks inflation is just in people's heads. He probably doesn't understand that there's only one way inflation is caused, and that's by the government increasing the money supply by adding artificially zeros, Fed adding zeros to the accounts of its banks on its computer and saying, go ahead, spend the money. It doesn't exist, but go ahead, spend it anyway. That's right. And the kind of inflation we're facing is something we maybe have never faced. So everybody's going to be very angry.

He's going to say, it's not me. It's the Ruskies. It's Putin who's made it. Putin is why there's all this inflation. I don't think that'll work, but we'll have to see. Certainly the level of intensity of the propaganda i've never seen anything like it in my in my whole lifetime you you um run the misas institute which educates a lot of young people into the free market and natural law thinking i've been

blessed to be a part of that i spent spent 24 years at Fox. They put me in front of a camera 14,500 times. Almost always, sometimes it was about tabloid stuff, but almost always it was to preach the virtues of the free market and human freedom. But what do we do now that war may be at our footsteps that the government is drumming the beat first we we hated the soviet union then we hated saddam hussein now we hate putin and the government is using this hatred to uh support its militaristic actions i mean all this gear they're sending to the Ukraine, the next thing you know, they're going to say, well, we need to send people there to teach them how to use it. Then we need to send people there to actually use it for them.

It won't be boots on the ground because they'll be comfortably in silos somewhere. Blimey, it'll be a gradual introduction of American personnel and assets into this land war, whether it's proxy or real, between Russia and the Ukraine? And how do we stop it? Well, I frankly don't know. But one thing we have to do is talk about it. We have to educate people about it. My guess is that the vast majority of Americans don't want anything to do with this.

And, of course, they're right. They're right not to have anything to do with it. So I don't think the propaganda is actually working, except among the worst types, the media people and so forth. They're always happy to do anything the government tells them to do. But I don't think regular people are happy. And certainly working people, as we saw in Canada, as we're seeing here, they're not happy with the government either. So I think we need to do everything we can to teach them about economics.

They've got the guts and they've got the right intentions to really hold the government down. So we'd have to just keep working. We can read the great economists, Rothbard, Mises and so forth. And I'm actually optimistic in the long term. I know it doesn't seem right now like that's maybe the the right thing to be but i think we absolutely uh have right on our side we have truth on our side i would argue that we have god on our side as a matter of fact against these these people who are actually satanic uh they actually are uh of the devil so they can do a lot of damage. Certainly they've done a huge amount of damage in all of human history, but we can do a lot of good. And I think we're going to do it. And if we do do it,

then we won't have anything to worry from these people. If necessary, we're going to put them in jail. Lou Rockwell, what a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. I'll be seeing you soon. Great, Judge. Thank you. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.