Judging Freedom - Government's Total Control Over Our Lives with Brian Wilson

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Name the two things you come in contact with every day that is not taxed, regulated, embargoed, licensed, restricted, or prohibited by the government. Radio host Brian Wilson joins Judge Andrew Napolitano on today's Judging Freedom to discuss and reveal the answer. #JudgeNapolitano #Libertarian #GovernmentControlSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Judge Andrew Napolitano here, my new podcast. You're watching us now so you know how to find us, but of course we're available everywhere, Spotify, Apple, Google, wherever you get your podcasts. And we're available at judgenap.com. Today, Brian Wilson, my dear friend, formerly nationally syndicated radio host, great thinker, great defender of personal freedom. And, of course, I give him credit for naming this show Judging Freedom, which was years ago the name of the segment that Brian and I did together on Brian's radio show. Brian, it's always a pleasure to have you here. You wrote a piece. Now, you and I talk and email and text all the time, but I woke up the other day and I saw your piece at lewrockwell.com. Lew is, of course, the founder and chair of the Mises Institute and one of the great libertarian thinkers of our day.

And the title of your piece caught my attention. Well, the author's name caught my attention. Name two things. Now, what you are about to tell us, I tried once on air in a studio on live television at Fox. But I'm going to let you tell the story first. What is this name two things that you did when you had your radio show, and how does it manifest that big government is even more of a leviathan than we have feared? Well, I think the genesis of the idea came from, as we all know, from at least we being people who've done talk radio, talk television, whatever, especially in dealing in the political vein, to speak with callers about the status of things as respects, well, how did the constitution work out for us out of the declaration where how the founding fathers how's all this really wonderful stuff that you've done a lot of conversation with

natural law and uh where do our rights come from all the rest of that and that's great but you know so many times i was hearing people wanting to speak more to the specific issue of the day wherever that issue was new york los angeles, Washington, Toledo, wherever it happened to be. And it bothered me, quite frankly, that people were more inclined to be continually looking to the government for solutions. The deification of the president, congressmen that stand you up on shows, things along that order. These are things that were starting to bother me in the sense that, especially since when you, if we and I, for example, were to discuss the Second Amendment right now, and the recent information about the Dutch Department putting together the 4473s, possibly creating a gun registry and all the rest of it just popped up in the news,

that'd be a great topic for you and me because we're interested in the Constitution and defenders and defend ourselves and gun owners and all the rest of that. But for someone who doesn't own a gun and doesn't give a damn and all the rest of that, it'd be a yawner. So all that is to say I was trying to come up with a way to get people to focus on government. And what the government regulates and controls. Government is not your friend.

Government is not the place to go for solutions to problems because government causes the problems. So I came up with the idea to ask the audience to name two things, name the two things. Two, just two. Two things, two things that you come in contact with on a daily basis that are not taxed, regulated, embargoed, limited, outlawed, whatever, by the government. Two things. Just done two things. Well, invariably, you know,

so the phones would ring like crazy and people would call. How many times did you do this, Brian? Well, probably a couple of hundred. Because, as you know, I'd be in different markets, and I would do it in New York. And then I would do it in New York in a different time slot on a different station, WABC, WOR, whatever. Or out in San Francisco on KSFO or PLJ, whatever. And invariably, the people would start a regularity, started to build up. People would call up and say, well, my children, air, sunrise, sunset, things like that. They're straining at the bit to find something that the government hasn't touched. Yeah, because actually, now that I'm thinking about it, since you asked the question,

I remember having a conversation that started the thought process. I said, when you get up in the morning, before you walk out the door, you've already not necessarily violated laws, as Ayn Rand has pointed out, but the fact that you've already, you get out of bed, you're lying on sheets, the manufacturing of which, you know, is under some auspices of the government. The tax on the purchase of those sheets, a little label there that says you can't turn them off. The ink or the dye that colored the sheets or the bleach that whitened them, those manufacturing processes are all controlled. I want to stop you here for a minute and tell you my experience

before I ask you if anybody ever came up with the right answer. So I was seated on the set of my late, if I may, because you've used this word, great show, Freedom Watch. And I had five of my Fox News and Fox Business colleagues with me. And I just threw this out at them. Look, we're on live national television. We're in a studio that's used four or five times a day for various different shows. Can any of you guys look at anything in this studio that is not regulated by the government and try as they did they couldn't find anything now that's a highly regulated environment but they couldn't find anybody somebody tried judge your necktie i said oh no no no no it's taxed

and the dye that was used to color it is, okay, all right, they couldn't find anything. The lights that were illuminating our faces, the brightness, the manufacturing of the filaments, all controlled by the federal government. It started a little bit of a buzz at Fox. You know, Judge is pretty seriously libertarian, but for once he's onto something. And people emailed me, colleagues of mine, even off-air colleagues emailed me, and nobody could really come up with anything. What did somebody in North Carolina finally tell you? Well, he called, and we're going through it. He called her, called her, called her, called her.

I remember his name was Bill. I said, Bill in Charlotte, go ahead, take your best shot. He said, the answer is nothing. It's a very sad answer. You are absolutely right. You and I know, and everybody watching and listening to us now knows that that's the truth. But I always found it interesting that people, not only how far people would reach in desperation to try and come up with an answer, but unfortunately that desperation a lot of times led to, I think, a breakdown in awareness. For example, after that article appeared in the New Rockwell,

I got an email from a gentleman in Brooklyn who said that he submitted for my consideration the fact is that there are two things the government does not control, when he goes to bed and when he gets up so i pointed out to him in my least diplomatic terms uh first of all you missed the point the question wasn't wasn't what government controls you know it's a taxed embargoed restricted you know etc number one. Number one, number two. And I said, as I also pointed out in the article, which apparently you failed to note, the government does have daylight savings time. There you go. And they regulate that.

And I suspect that unless you've got some strange, weird schedule you follow, that determines when you go to bed and when you get up. There actually are a couple of counties in Indiana and in Arizona that basically tell the feds to go take a hike. Now, I don't know if they're on so-called saving time or standard time, but whatever it is, they don't change the clocks there. But you're right. And I thought of that immediately. So this leads in my mind to two questions or two observations that I want you to weigh in on. One is the Ayn Rand one. You have a great, you know, I'm a big fan of Ayn Rand. You have a great quote here, if I may.

Now, I'm reading from your piece and you're quoting Ayn Rand. Here's what she said. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Now, she said that in 1956. Here we are in 2021. Brian, we have 4,400 federal statutes. It's nearly impossible to read all of them. It's nearly impossible even for a lawyer and a judge to understand all of them.

We had fewer when she wrote that. So this leads to my question. Why do we tolerate all this? Are we a nation of sheep? Has it happened so slowly and incrementally that we didn't realize it? Is this the government that Jefferson and Madison gave us? Well, I got to tell you, Judge, it's a question that I've been spending quite a bit of time with, you know, on just exactly how how this goes about i think we talked last time about the um a piece that i wrote a long time ago about contagious apathy and aggressive

ignorance and narcissism and so on all these things that have stultified limited stunted whatever you want to call it these these kind of self-imposed lobotomies uh that people have had so as long as they've got the bread and circuses of football and concerts and things along that order, the reality of how hot that water is getting and the pot that's boiling, the frog, if you don't mind mixing the analogy, metaphors there. That's what's giving to it. And I think that was part of the point, getting back to the point of the game, was to try and raise the awareness level, not just of the intrusiveness and the power and the creeping tentacles and growth of government.

But as you just mentioned, so you have over 4,000 statutes. You have God knows how many regulations from all the different agencies and so on. And this all is authority authority over us and authority when combines with power equals force and force doesn't require reason it just requires a means government is forced as washington pointed out and we're seeing now with mandates and edicts for vaccinations and so on regardless of our individual choice our freedom of freedom of vaccinations and so on, regardless of our individual choice, our freedom of choice and so on. It just doesn't seem to, it doesn't seem,

I don't understand, I don't know why you got- Brian, of the hundreds- Your policy yesterday, your, I'm sorry, your article yesterday, or today rather, I'm sorry, your article today, Rockwell, you end with that question. How long are we gonna tolerate this? Why do we tolerate this? Right, right.

I don't know why we tolerate this. How many would it take to not tolerate it? You and I have had hundreds, maybe thousands of conversations. Yeah. Professionally and personally. I don't know if I've ever asked you this. How do you see this end? Do you see the United States federal government going out of business

because it can't pay its debts and people won't loan it money anymore? Will Chuck Schumer be looking for a job? Does the country break apart into separate countries? Does some strong man sap all of the power and make things even more authoritarian than they are now? What does Brian Wilson think? Because we're going in one direction, and the direction is more regulation, more power, more government, less freedom. Jefferson predicted this in 1826, shortly before he died. Well, I guess part of my problem in answering your question is the, I don't know that I've got a condensed answer. I think what happens is you start, so it's as if we're driving down the road, you know, well, I'm going to come up to your place in Sussex County, you know, and I live right next door in Passaic County. You know, my folks farm was over there.

Well, there's a lot of different ways to get to your house. I suppose that new interstate gets closed, and then there's the back roads through Stokes State Forest. So in answer to your question, how is it going to end? Well, there are enough ingredients in society today and current events in the news that would indicate very strongly that it's going to end this way. It's going to be violent and bloody, and it's going to tear the country apart and so on. On the other hand, you look at the economic situation that exists today with our indebtedness and trillions and trillions, numbers that can't even be fathomed, now approaching the point where the interest on the debt can't be fathomed either. So that would have to mean that somewhere along the line, the dollar, the petrodollar,

the world's default currency is going to collapse. And we're going to be the Weimar Republic only on a government level. We're going to be thinking, instead of wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks going down to the bakery, we're going to have freight trains of dollars going to the ports to send over to China or whoever's underwriting our debt at the time, and if they'll even accept them. And if I'm China and Russia, any country that's got an idea of taking over the world, I'd soon let you sit there and float around in your own Greece and watch people not agree to take your dollars and your debt doesn't get paid and bankruptcy comes upon the country, whether you like it or not, whether you go to court or not, whether it just stops. And people will respond to that by bartering, you know,

and I'll trade you, you know, a round of a couple of boxes of ammo for a gallon of your famous maple syrup. When the federal government's debt was about $2 trillion, not the $29 trillion it is today, Nikita Khrushchev said, you're going to fall like an overripe apple. You know, we all laughed at him and thought he was mocking freedom and mocking the Western world. He was smarter than we gave him credit for. I don't know how this ends. I see dark days ahead.

I don't know if there's light at the end of the darkness. And you and I have been around long enough that we might not be around long enough to see the light, but I think the dark days are coming. It is remarkable that you can't find anything, whatever room you're in and wherever you go, that the government hasn't touched. And you might even make it a little sharper. You might modify the word government with the word federal. I mean, the states are not saints in any of this.

But the heavy lifting of regulation comes from Washington. And what the feds can't regulate under the Constitution, they will bribe the states into regulating. Oh, you want money to repave Route 80 going from the George Washington Bridge out to San Francisco? We'll give money to all those states, but they got to lower their speed limits and they got to lower the minimum alcohol level before the DWI prosecutions kick in. And the court said, you want the money, you take the strings. The feds never give money without strings. And the strings is always something that they can't independently regulate. So they have to buy the regulation.

Another way of saying this is bribe the states to regulate. So if Brian Wilson went to the legislature of Georgia, or I went to the legislature of New Jersey and said, here's $100 million. If you enact certain legislation, we'd be arrested for bribery or attempted bribery. Not when you're the Congress. You can bribe away and they'll take your money and give you what you want in return for it in the form of legislation. Now it's even worse, as you pointed out. Now we have mandates which aren't even legislation. It isn't even a law enacted by Congress. It wasn't debated on. There's no transparency. Just something Joe Biden woke up some morning and decided to tell Marty Walsh, the Secretary of the Treasury, have OSHA do this. 100 people or more

in all employees, all places that employ 100 people or more have to be vaccinated. So if you employ 99 or fewer, is there a danger for those people to be unvaccinated? Come on, Joe, where is this coming from? Well, that whole pattern, like with the alcohol levels and seatbelts and all that business where the government did not have the authority to step in, I came to know it as greenmail as opposed to blackmail using those federal dollars. But maybe you can help me clarify one thing. I see this bandied about an awful lot. There's a lot of little pockets around the country. I know one in South Carolina, there's a couple here in Georgia, there's one in Texas, California. And people are struggling with some of these things because they don't have an accurate

knowledge of exactly how it works. I and some other folks are trying to help out in that regard. For example, there is a large energy system in South Carolina that the employees there, thousands of them, have been told that their employment is predicated on getting stabbed. And they don't see how that's how that's possible if they don't have a religious exemption they don't something else they they're going to lose their jobs and how could that possibly happen and they don't understand how that works and and some people you know try to explain that you this is this is contract this is green mail via contract the government gives this kind of this this contract this is green mail via contract the government

gives this kind of this this corporation an awful lot of money and they're the ones that have and even though they're this was back before the mandate actually took verbal form it was just by innuendo and the company the corporations are stepping in and making this mandate of the employees the employees but how can you do you can't tell me how to run oh yes you can and become a part of the contract of employment. If you want to work here, this is what you have to do. You have to wear these green uniforms and a hard hat, and you've got to get vaccinated.

You don't have to be here. You've got free choice. You can go take a job at Clippenburg or someplace. They're hiring like crazy. But when the government, you know, I was on a plane the other day, and I saw somebody yanked off. A professional, appeared to be a professional woman. She showed everybody her vaccine card.

She had three vaccines. She didn't want to wear a mask. It wasn't violent. She left with them. And I thought, okay, her seat is empty. The airline's returning her fare. So the airline is losing money. The airline doesn't want to take her off.

The airline is just doing what the federal government is telling them to do. So we, for 100 years, have had in society a federal government that doesn't have the resources to enforce its laws. It forces the states to help enforce federal laws. Now it's conscripting private industry to enforce its own mandates, like these workers at this power plant in South Carolina and the employees of this airline. I don't want to mention the name, but it's a big national American airline based in America, that the feds are forcing them to enforce their own, not legislation, because Congress has never authorized this, and Congress never will, which is why Joe Biden wouldn't ask them to do it.

He wouldn't get the votes in either house, enough votes to do the government's bidding. In my opinion, profoundly unconstitutional because the Supreme Court has ruled countless times and most state Supreme Courts have ruled a sick person can refuse life-saving medication. Certainly a healthy person can refuse medication. Supreme Court has also ruled, you decide, not the government, what goes into your body. You don't want your kids to be smallpox vaccinated. Fine. They're not going to come and force vaccinate them. They may not let them in the school, but they're not going to force vaccinate them. Can't do this to an adult. You can't do it to a child. Now, when I say that, people watch it, like the folks watching and listening to us now, take great solace in that, but they are also filled with a lot of fear that

they might actually lose their jobs or suffer because of the primacy of their well-formed consciences. Well, therein lies another aspect of the problem. It's the old cliche, well, the operation was a success, but the patient died. Right. So you've got the courts and the courts and the courts and the edicts and the precedents and all the rest, but the courts can't enforce the law. They can only make the judgment. And Biden's doing that right now, for example, with the supreme court telling him about the immigration situation down in mexico and by just saying oh gotcha and

keeps right on doing it and and that brings me to a consideration of the uh of the i was uh of i was john adams i believe who said that the constitution our constitution is made for a moral and righteous people well if we're fresh out of moral and righteous people, and you sure as hell can have a hard time finding out of them in the swamp in Washington or in government period, then being up on the constitution and all that it promises and guarantees and stipulates and restricts and all the rest of it really isn't worth the parchment it's written on unless there are individuals in the three branches of government that it created. They're going to do the legislation, going to enforce the legislation

and do what has to be done. Well, if nobody's doing it, Supreme Court's throwing up their hands, the legislature's going to sleep, the president doesn't give a damn. What do we got? Brian, I couldn't have said it better. We're going to end with that. It's always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Until the next time, my friends, on Judging Freedom.