Judging Freedom - The Cost of Freedom, the Ukraine Invasion w/ Austin Peterson

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

#Biden #Putin #UkraineSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, March 15th, 2022. My guest is Austin Peterson, a longtime friend of mine, a major radio personality in the Midwest out of Jefferson City, Missouri. And of course, the right side of my brain for the two years that we worked together at the Fox News Channel when we produced a show called Freedom Watch. Austin, what a pleasure. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Thanks for the kind words and thank you for the invitation, Judge. Good to be here. Of course. And many of us watching now know that you send me an invitation every Wednesday, and it's a joy for me to be on your radio show Wednesday morning, particularly when we have what

you like to call big brain conversations. So since we are both dyed in the wool, true North libertarians, let's start with one. What government, if any, is moral and licit to we libertarians without the consent of the governed? It's a trick question because the true answer is that self-governance is the only true governance that is allowable if we do not have a government that comes about from a community sense of the governed. But personal responsibility is required to have liberty. That's why so many people fear it, Judge, because, of course, in order to be personally responsible, that requires a great amount of self-discipline. It also requires the courage that comes from having to go through the trials and tribulations of freedom, because freedom does not come without pain.

It does not come without a cost, and it does not come without some input. Even self-government requires the individual to step beyond their own circumstances and to struggle against, you know, even the entropy of the universe to put food on the table, clothes on your back, so that of your family. So, you know, the true government, that government which is moral, is self-government. Well, you and I believe that the individual is sovereign, not the state, that our rights come from our humanity, whether you're going to make a property rights-based argument for our rights or a natural rights-based argument for our rights. But I would argue that even without the consent of the governed, the government can enforce natural rights. So even if I don't consent to the government, if I steal your cow off of your back pasture, a government could come and take the cow away from me and give it back to you because the government would simply be the agent of natural rights.

That doesn't let the government take money from me and redistribute it, but it does make sure that I comply with the natural rights of everybody that the government is governing in that geographical area. Agree or disagree? I think I agree in large sense, but in my mind, because I'm always looking for the counterfactual to one of these arguments to make sure that I'm being logical. I wonder if this, and maybe you'll disagree with this, Judge. I wonder if that would then justify the actions of the federal government in the Civil War in freeing the slaves. In a sense, does that then take Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and make it a valid and moral act of a governmental body to free the slaves in that sense. So if the government doesn't need the consent of the Southern aristocrats to free the slaves, to bring about, to protect the individual liberty of those slaves, does that then make Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Declaration moral, legal, or constitutional?

Man, that presumes that the purpose of the North in the Civil War was to free the slaves, which, of course, it wasn't. It was just to keep more territory in the country, particularly the states that had seaports from which the North could continue to extract its tariffs. But it is a fascinating almost how many angels are on the head of a pin argument about what government can do. Theoretically, Jefferson was right. No government is moral without the consent of the governed. With 330 million people, even in this little town that I live in, in northwest New Jersey, which is 26 square miles and only 4,000 people, where there's no organized Democratic Party, there still isn't the consent of the governed.

I still sometimes refer to the local government as the local criminal gang because they're still taking money from me and giving me no services. I take care of my own garbage. I don't send anybody to the schools. We don't even have a local police department. So I don't know where these arguments are going to go, but I know you and I both love having them. Was Jefferson right when he argued for the consent of the governed, or was this just a one-liner used to rally the troops, sort of like taxation with extra presentations. They didn't want to be represented in Parliament. They just wanted the king in Parliament. God. Not big D. Does this make us small D Democrats in the sense, right? Do we reject the concept of a monarchy? There are many, even right-wingers, Judge, and you probably know some who think a

monarchy would be superior to this because as C.S. Lewis talked about, it's better to be ruled by a robber baron or a king than the armies of moral busybodies which plague us now. Would it be better to have one man with all the power if he was, let's say he was a libertarian king? Would it be better to be ruled by a libertarian king than to be ruled by the moral busybodies of the Pelosi's? Well, I would rather be ruled by Ron Brown. So there's another quandary or counterfactual that you have to ask yourself, is democracy itself moral? And, you know, many libertarians, Judge, I think you know, argue democracy is the god that failed. They don't believe in a government that's under the consent

of the governed. And, you know, that leads us into our sort of our hopper argumentation versus a Hayek or, you know, a Jefferson, as you've explained. So I actually, I'd like to turn that on you, Judge. Do you hold that a democratically elected government is superior to a monarchical government? Or is it really the policies that matter? Depends who the monarch is. If the monarch is Ron Paul, I would accept every decision that came out of his mouth as opposed to the House of Representatives. On the other hand, if the House of Representatives were filled with Thomas Massys and the Senate were filled with Rand Pauls,

I'm not just saying this because I agree with them. I'm saying this because they believe in the primacy of the individual over the state. They believe that government is the negation of liberty. They believe that government is just organized force in a geographical area and should be used to an absolute minimum, minimal state possible. Again, these arguments are fanciful and everybody wants to know why we're smiling because we spent two years taunting each other with these arguments every day. I have one more theoretical, Judge, that I've been dying to ask you actually for years and I've always wondered what you thought about this. But one of the things that we as libertarians tend to, you know, get rattled by is the people who believe in a one world government.

But here's a hypothetical for you. Would you rather live in a world where it is a one world government that is governed by the laws of the United States Constitution, or would you rather have separated republics, hundreds of governments, but they're all governed under the laws of North Korea? Would you prefer the one world global government then, or would you prefer the republican governments, but they're all North Korea? Well, I would prefer a government from which I could secede when they failed to protect individual liberty. I mean, the theory of the Declaration of Independence is even a government that has unanimous consent, even a liberal democracy, lowercase l in liberal, if it fails to protect our natural rights, we have the duty to alter or abolish it, because the tyranny of the majority

is often worse than the tyranny of a madman. The madman will sleep, the madman will forget, but a tyranny of 435 AOCs presided over by Mrs. Pelosi would drive us mad until it extracted all of our assets and all of our liberties to distribute as it saw fit. Switching gears, do you see the same danger that I see with howls coming from Republican senators about wanting more and more American involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war? Yes, I do, Judge. It troubles me deeply because if there's one thing that unites the two major political parties in the United States, it is their lust for war. The desire for war amongst the corporate elites, the international corporations, especially the banks, which you and I well know, Judge, will finance both sides and profiteer from both sides of the war. If the United States and Russia were to take each other head on,

it could involve multiple other countries, not just the United States versus Russia. The problem is that the war propaganda machines are already up and running every single day. Daily, we are propagated with videos and tweets and accounts of atrocities that are not confirmable to the average person. You and I, we have access perhaps to sources because of our background in journalism, but most people, Judge, are seeing things on the internet and believing them because most people do read headlines and they don't read beyond headlines. Or if they see a video on the internet, they believe it's true. So what I'm really most concerned about is not just the warmongers and the war profiteers at the top, but our fellow American citizens, Judge, who are being lulled, you know, driven, you know, sort of the Pied Piper, taking them to the cliff, walking them towards the cliff of war,

you know, the hatred that's being generated towards Russians and the destruction of their shops and the removal of Russian artifacts. I mean, people just don't understand how to separate these concepts, right? And, you know, in the laws of war, the strategies of war, Judge, which I've studied, you know, it's quite a profound argument when you consider that in order to generate a successful war, countries always reach down into the pits of bigotry and immoral hatred, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did versus the Japanese in order to have the excuses to put them in camps. And we're seeing these kinds of signs happening right now. We're seeing the beginnings of those kinds of bigotries and hatreds being brought out by the public.

It's the public we should be afraid of. They're the ones who will consent to this kind of a governance. They will be the ones who will democratically consent to war. And that's what I fear most. I could not agree with you more. And the government uses hatred as a weapon, and the government has always used hatred as a weapon, whether it's hatred of blacks during slavery or hatred of blacks during Jim Crow or Woodrow Wilson segregating the federal government and segregating the military or hatred of Germans and Japanese. You're right. The federal government-inspired racial hatred of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II is some of the most immoral, despicable, vicious hatred ever spewed forth by a government supposedly from a liberal

democracy. And then we were told to hate the Soviet Union, and then we were told to hate Iran, and then we just finished two years of hatred of COVID and Fauci, and now we're supposed to hate Putin. Because Orwell was right. The government loves to have the physical representation of a person or thing or group to hate. And that is said every night on television. The only good that's coming from television, in my opinion today, is the right to keep and bear arms. So if a friend says to me,

Judge, why do you need an AR-15? Why do we need an AR-15? Turn on Fox News or CNN and watch what's going on in the streets of Kiev. And now you'll know why we need AR-15s in our basements. But the flip side of that is the acclimation of the American public towards the hatred of all things Russian. You're exactly right, Austin. I don't know where it's going to go. What did you think of Lindsey Graham saying Putin should be assassinated? You know what, Judge? That's a good question. Remember when Ron Paul called for a letter of mark and reprisal against Osama bin Laden after 9-11? Yes. In that sense, he was calling then for an assassination, correct?

Yes. Now, a letter of mark and reprisal is the federal government hiring private military people to go and perform one discreet military task. It's not only lawful, it's expressly authorized in the Constitution. It hasn't been done since the 1830s. So then my question is, would it then be moral or lawful if Lindsey Graham asked for a letter of mark and reprisal rather than an assassination, would you have patted him on the back? Well, if Lindsey Graham ever read the Constitution, I would pat him on the back.

I mean, wouldn't hundreds of millions of people on the planet be more free if Vladimir Putin were to go to purgatory? Yes. Six Semper Tyrannis, thus always to tyrants. I think Vladimir Putin not having the consent of the governed, Vladimir Putin in murdering reporters and journalists, Vladimir Putin, the poisoner and the man who irradiated a man with polonium and caused him to die and suffer horribly a death after a week long, the man deserves due process. But a letter of mark and reprisal, in my view, would be due process. It would be constitutional, be moral. And yes, I do believe that that tyrant has earned that

because of his behaviors and actions, you know, just like any other tyrant, thus always. I think we'll end with that. I look forward to our time tomorrow. You will talk about whatever you want, because it's the highlight of the week for me. Austin Peterson, what a pleasure. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Judge. Judge Andrew Napolitano, judging freedom.