Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/31/26 Jeff Deist on Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard and the Triumphs and Shortcomings of Austro-Libertarians

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Scott interviews Jeff Deist about the significance of Ron Paul, who Deist used to work for, as well as Murray Rothbard. They then discuss the challenges and opportunities that the movement both men helped create and lead faces going forward. Discussed on the show: The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David A. Stockman Rothbard at 100 “Appreciating Rothbard’s Political Genius” (The Property and Freedom Society) I Hate Max Lerner by Murray Rothbard Jeff Deist is General Counsel of Monetary Metals. He previously worked as President of the Mises Institute, where he serves as a writer, public speaker, and advocate for property, markets, and civil society and as a longtime advisor and chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, for whom he wrote hundreds of articles and speeches. Follow him on X @jeffdeist.  Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/scott; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, guys, let me take a second to tell you about expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. It's a guy named Mikkel Thorup. He's a great guy. I've met him. And he's been an expat for many years and knows the rules and regulations all around the world about buying property and or other investments, how to protect your neck, even get citizenship and passports from other countries and everything you need to know

to be an expat, whether you're afraid of the coming collapse or just fighting. modern day price inflation, find out what you need to know about how to protect your neck at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest, reporting to the American people what's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show, libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president doesn't, that means that it is not only...

We're going to take out seven countries. They don't know what the fuck. Stand doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Jeff Diced. Back when I met him, he was the chief of staff for Congressman Dr. Ron Paul back in the W. Bush years.

And then, of course, he was the director or the, yeah, the director of the Mises Institute for many years. and now he is at Monetary Metals, which I believe is Monetary Metals.com, and we're bringing them on at the Libertarian Institute, in fact. Good to see. Jeff, how you don't? Scott, I'm trying to think of when I met you. Early 2000s, somewhere in there, it's got to be 20-plus years. Yeah, 2020, sorry, I can't even say it right.

2004 was when we first met in person, and I interviewed Dr. Paul at the LP Convention in Atlanta. And I remember you sitting there going wrap it up, wrap it up. Come on. That was great, though. Good old Ron. So, yeah, I want to talk to you about a lot of things, but might as well talk to you about that, the greatest American who ever lived, Dr. Ron Paul, you got to work for him.

And I don't say that lightly. I mean, I really like the guy, but to me, it's a quantitative thing. He's the one who taught liberty to more people than anybody ever. And that's sort of an all-encompassing thing. terms of like his, his natural rights theory, his theories of constitutional limited government, his, you know, deep understanding of Austrian economic theory and, you know, severe education in history and in foreign policy and all of these things. Even his experience in the Air Force, traips and all around the world, luckily he didn't have to go to Vietnam. But he is such a great

guy and you got to work so closely with him for so long. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what that meant to you then? And, And why'd you ever quit even? Well, I mean, let's not forget. He also delivered a couple of babies. He had a day job during all this. That's what's so remarkable. I'll tell you a funny story about that, by the way.

So his older brother, Wayne, married, I'm 99% sure, smacked me if I'm wrong, Donna, his nurse, his head nurse. And so she told me that I met them and they're both great. And she told me, yeah, when you hear that Ron Paul delivered 4,000 babies, Well, I did too. Yeah. And I delivered every one of them with them. Well, and I've been out and about in Ron's hometown of Blake Jackson

and had people come up to Ron and say, hey, you delivered me or you delivered my son, which, by the way, didn't hurt politically. You're trying to portray this really sweet guy who's an OBJN with an incredible bedside manner and you're trying to paint him as some radical who wants to legalize drugs or wants to let Iran bomb us. You know, it gets a little tougher when you, when the actual target is such a good-hearted person. And the thing about Ron versus almost everybody on Capitol Hill is he's just genuine. What he is, what he looks like is what you actually get.

It's not a fake. And that's awfully hard to, to, it's hard to fake, not being a fake. It's hard to fake being genuine. And people forget, you know, he was born in 35. So he's not a boomer. He's not a World War II. He's what they call the silent generation. So he's a little squeezed in there,

a little too young for World War II. Carol is the same year. But, you know, he's, that's, that's a while now. He turned 90 last year, born senior's Elvis, by the way. And still active, still doing the Liberty Report with Daniel McAdams. Every day, I believe at 11 Central, live on YouTube. And I actually owe him a phone call. He's a great guy.

and look at his kids. I mean, three out of his five kids were MDs and just he's got, I think, already eight or ten great-grandchildren. He's got maybe 30-something grandchildren. I mean, wow, that's talked about planning a flag. So incredible family. Yeah, absolutely.

I met people who were delivered by Dr. Paul, like here and there. They're, oh, you're a wrong-Paul guy. I was delivered by him. Yeah. This is great. I don't know if people can tell. In the intro to this show, in the old clip of me where I still got long hair,

and I'm going, oh, yeah, it's Dr. Paul's who I'm talking to. He's kind of stepping down off the stage there, and that was at an event at UT, right up in the run-up to the war. It must have been late 2002 or early 03. He came and gave a speech at UT and, you know, opposing the war in Iraq, of course. He even gave a speech to the graduating medical school class at UT.

Oh, wow. This is not so well known. And I believe I can find that speech either in written or video form. But Ron basically gave a bit of a cautionary tale to these graduating MDs saying, you know, warning them about insurance and government and privacy and other things. So it's pretty remarkable life, really. Yeah. Yeah, he is great.

And I'm glad that you emphasize the is, like absolutely present. people say Ron Paul was right. Tune in daily. Ron Paul is right still about everything. And we should be specific about all the things he was right. Because people like to say that even as they continue to do exactly what he has warned and still warns against, especially when it comes to foreign policy and that kind of thing. Republicans like to pretend they're wrong Paul, but none of them really are.

And that's really our political dilemma, right? If only we had a House and a Senate full of Paul's, we'd be fine. Well, again, with these other members of Congress, or at least most of them, there's two versions of that. The fake and the real. And here's an apocryphal story, but true, actually. During the 08 crisis, the worst of it, the worst days of it, when they were holding emergency meetings,

David Stockman recounts this three or four days in his book, The Great Defamation. They were holding backdoor meetings and citing who would be bailed out, AIG, would they let Lehman Brothers fail? Would they let Countrywide fail? No, they forced Bank of America to buy it. So there are these really incredible back and machinations. And at least ostensibly, the party line and the GOP was we have to intervene with capitalism, save capitalism.

That's paraphrasing W. And there was an emergency meeting one night of the GOP caucus, I guess the entirety of not just the financial service members, but the whole caucus, all of the GOP members over at one of the larger rooms at the Capitol Hill Club, if people know Washington, D.C. and know the Hill. And one of the committee chairman in the subcommittee chairman

in the Financial Services Committee is a guy named Spencer Baucus, who is a retired congressman from my state of Alabama. And he stood up in front of that whole room to his credit. And this was, you know, Paul Ryan would have been a young member at the time, that sort of thing. He sat up in front of that whole room and said,

you know, Ron Paul's been talking about this. He's been talking about this day will come. And now it's come. And Rob Paul was right. And a lot of people in that room, according to our late, great friend, Congressman Walter Jones, a great and humble man from North Carolina.

He said a lot of those Republicans agreed. So I think Ron's impact is greater than people think. It's just subtle sometimes, but it's out there. Yeah. Well, and, you know, Donald Trump has, you know, sucked up, I guess, a lot of the attention of the entire anti-establishmentarian right of all different descriptions. That maybe if Ron had been 25 years younger and still, you know, rocking in his prime, in Washington for the last, you know, 20 years instead of Donald Trump. It would have been something different. But then again, a lot of people are realizing a little belatedly, but constructively

that Donald Trump ain't Ron Paul. He's just Rudy Giuliani. And it's really too bad because what we needed was Dr. Paul or somebody very much like him to bring us real return to normalcy. In fact, Trump is such a character that when Biden was elected in 20, they were able to portray that as a return to normalcy, as though Biden's insanity and, you know, absolute, you know, inane recklessness was normalcy

compared to the caricature of himself that Donald Trump, you know, I mean, they sure did it to him, but he did it to himself too. When what we really needed was to abandon, you know, I guess as Murray Rothbard would say, repeal the 20th century, the 21st and then get to work on the 20th. that would be a return to normalcy. Stop doing all the crazy stuff that we've been doing lately,

at least for starters. And instead, we got this. But, but, sorry, there's a, I'm leading towards the question, because it's a generational shift going on now too. And there are a lot of young men who, maybe they voted for Trump or they, you know,

look to him, but they're already jaded from there. And they need to know what's right. And, but what's right hasn't changed. Right. and starting with hard money. And, you know, this is my obsession. I know it's yours too.

But it just seems to me, and whatever, I'm a libertarian nut. So maybe I'm just confirmation bias all the way down on this. But I just look at every social problem is central bankings ball or, you know, inflationary money. If it wasn't for inflation,

it seems like so many of these social problems wouldn't be the problems that they are. Even when people complain about, like these hedge funds and financial capital coming and buying up these companies and running them into the ground and all those things, you know, and the immigration and the crime and the everything, it's all because of the funny money.

If they only couldn't do that, they wouldn't be able to do the rest of this terrible stuff. And it's never too late for people to get that straight, right? Well, incentives matter and our monetary policy creates a bunch of terrible incentives. And the thing is, and here's where I think libertarians and Austrians drop the ball, is that It's cultural and ethical and social. It's not just economics. How we organize our lives around cheaper money, let's say, money that costs less to borrow and that is worth a lot less a year from now than it is today, makes us worse people.

If you look at the late era of Paul Volcker, around 1981, 82, all the way to 2022 with Biden and Jerome Powell, in those 40 years, basically interest rates went down and down and down and down. Now, not straight down, you know, they jigged and jagged, but they mostly went down. So for 40 years, which is most of our lives, saving money became increasingly for chumps and borrowing money became increasingly the rational play. And so there's two ways to borrow money. One is to just be an idiot and go live beyond your means and go bankrupt or whatever that might be. The other is to be crafty with money and like private equity people and go out and borrow it in smart ways and basically use other people's money to finance deals and enrich oneself.

But either way, whether you're ruining your personal life or you're prospering in your nefarious hedge fund life or whatever it might be, it's because of distorted incentives. There's no doubt about that. And so we have this incredible populist issue that we're failing to grab. You can go up to any kind of normie in your life, your family, friends, whatever, and you can just feel it. Right. And Trump was able to attack this a little bit, but you can just feel it. You go to RVs and you get, let's say, two sandwiches and a drink, it's $23 or something.

And you just drive, you literally like, you almost do a double take of driving. And so, you know, you take that across broad society, stuff people actually buy. Not CPI or whatever bullshit they're trying to give us. But some people actually buy it, which is, you know, you go to Costco and look at stakes. You go pay your kids college, whatever it might be, especially medical and education. Two areas, by the way, where government's most involved. And people smell a rat. they know something's wrong.

And we failed to capitalize on that. We failed to step into that breach and explain it because we like to turn up our noses a little bit of populism. We like to be a little academic-y. And we like theory and we like debate and we like conferences and books and podcasts. But that's not where most normies are. They do absolutely sense something's wrong.

But if we don't have a better story than a really facile, a theater kid story like Mandami, yeah, might win the day. Check it out, you guys. I'm a Tuttle Twin. I'm really so proud of this. And I love these guys. Connor Boyack and Elijah Stanfield, they write and draw the great Tuttle Twins books, teaching kids about real principles of liberty so that your kids don't have to grow up,

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You know, so I thought like around the time of the Mesa Skok has taken over the Libertarian Party, I said to the guys, listen, let's just focus on foreign policy and central banking. That's the Ron Paul way. These are the worst things about our society. We tackle these first, and we prove that consistently this is who we are. We want hard money and peace, and we're pissed off. We really mean it. And I hear people out in society, they go, oh, you're anti-war.

What are you a libertarian, right? As opposed to what are you some kind of stinking hippie? It's, oh, what are you one of those free market guys? That's why you hate war so much. Yeah, right, exactly. And it's just the most crucial thing in the world to me that people, really get that message. But I was probably sleeping on a little bit the culture war,

which I don't think it's in libertarians' interests to move too far to the right necessarily. But my idea at the time was central banking and war, these are eternal issues. They're the worst things. They're the things that we are the best on. No one knows inflation like the Austrians. The Chicago school guys might as well be communist when it comes inflation. They don't know anything about it.

Only Austrians are good on this stuff. This is what we should be focusing on. And I thought woke was sort of such a cheap fad that it was just going to come and go. Like I didn't really see the whole importance in the thing. But now I see like really how harmful a lot of that stuff got and how harmful a lot of the backlash and everything and all the hurt feelings and everything from it and all that. So I think, you know, I might. But the rest of the Mesa caucus didn't listen to me on that, by the way. They were all good on basically trying to stay away from all of that stuff at least or, I mean, you know, fight it in their own ways, in the best ways.

But so really it goes to, you know, really the legacy of Justin Romando and anti-war.com and everything ultimately is to appeal to the right, the wrong poll voters, because that's who matters. Nobody cares if a bunch of liberals are anti-war. First of all, they're not reliably anti-war. And even when they're pro-war, they're no good in a fight anyway. Right-wing or support for the war state is the only thing that makes it possible. And it's on very shaky ground. I'm sure you've seen the poll.

that our counsel plus the absolute, you know, blatant folly of American foreign policies proving our case in front of everyone right now in a really important say, I think. And Trump never tried to portray yourself or lie about being a free market guy. He's never been one and he's never claimed to be one. He's a trade protectionist, fine. But what he did lie about was being in America first anti-eastern. interventionist foreign policy guy. That turns out to not be the case and he folded like a cheap suit on that. Okay. So that's where we are. That brings the opportunity sort of back to us and takes

it away from the populist Trumpian right, right? Because the war weariness is still a thing in America. And as the economic conditions deteriorate, I think it's going to get worse. Americans are, you know, when they're fat and happy, they might say, yeah, get the Iran. But when they're unemployed at home, their interest in Iran is going to be minuscule. I guarantee you that much. And let's hope we don't have another huge jobs crash like 2008. But I do think the culture matters. I think it's not just a Justin Romando goal or effect of making the right anti-war.

It's Pat Buchanan. It's Ron Paul. It's Paul Gottfried. It's Sam Francis. Lou Rockwell. It's just sobering because right now, for the first time of my life, the reactionaries are on the left. There's one thing you can give Trump credit for.

He's made the left reactionary. They're the ones who have to flip out at every new crazy gambit or trial balloon that Trump floats. Like, we're going to buy Greenland. You know, whatever? It's just who does that? I mean, it just sends them into absolute hysterics. And so, you know, we have to get rid of this idea that populism is a dirty word. It's not.

I mean, populism is entirely justified that we have terrible elites. We don't have natural elites. We have the worst possible people think, you know, the Tony Blair's of the world. And then they're secretive backers, the Soros is or whatever. These are the worst people. And so we have every right to be anti-elite. And moreover, it works. I mean, whether you think these are astroturfed fake revolutions or not, I mean, Trump was an earthquake.

You can't deny that. Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Brexit was an earthquake. Alternative for Deutschland is an earthquake. There are real elements of frustration to this. And so we shouldn't be afraid to tap that. And I can distinctly recall in the early 90s, mid-90s maybe, a good friend of mine, Joe Becker, relating to me that Murray Rothbard was supporting Pat Buchanan for president.

And I remember being so puzzled by that because, you know, my, by bare bones understanding of Pat Buchanan at the time was that he was trade protectionist. And that was about the extent of it. And I was like, well, why could, why would Rahabhar ever support a guy like that? And, of course, now, contextually, I understand it perfectly well as opposed to the alternatives at the time. And so we have to understand the reactionary nature of what we believe. If you're afraid of if you try to deny it, I mean, we're talking about peeling a mindset of the entire 20th century. They created two vast world wars that created, you know, police states, that created unbelievable growth in the entitlement and welfare state.

It created unbelievable diminutions of freedom and property rights. It created central banking that, I mean, central banking proceeds the 20th century, but still, I mean, this is not for the faint of heart. And when you look at who is not faint of heart, the last period of American politics, that's been all at the new right, the alt-right, whatever it is, the populist right. And I mean, if we can't learn from them

or practically better understand them, then I think we're not doing our job. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And I'm not scared of populism. In fact, this was, in my early experience with libertarianism, all I understood it to be was sort of reason magazine, Cato White Libertarianism, where it's sort of maybe even kind of the Randian idea that, oh, poor big business, they're the last persecuted minority. Those poor billionaires, I saw the

tweets today. Poor rich people, they're the only ones to pay income taxes. Like every single working person in this country is getting soaked in their payroll taxes all year long, FICA and Social Security plus their income tax, and then maybe they'll get a bit of a rebate back and part you're without interest and whatever. Give me that stuff. Um, And so what I've never been interested in is libertarianism as an apology for corrupt power that gain their money through favoritism, which is almost everybody. But it's sort of like, well, what are you going to do? You can't throw out capitalism.

So you're going to have to throw out the state because where the jurisdiction is where all the corruption lies. And of course, you have that property rights and trade and prices. the problem is the Congress that created the central bank that then can pass out and from there, all the income taxation, all the regulation, all the favoritism, the ability of the government to pick winners and losers and corrupt everything, which is really the emergency of our time, right?

It's because they still call this capitalism, despite all the your or my quibbles, which is why people are turning more and more to socialism because this isn't working. And they think that is the opposite. Well, and capitalism properly understood is definitely anti-war because war is the ultimate expression of politics. We say politics is war by other means. Well, war is when politics are taken to its natural conclusion, right?

we stop fighting over policy or voting and we just shoot each other instead. But it's the same basic thing. It's conflict. It's not, it's resolving conflict in a zero sum or even negative sum matter, right? So war by definition is inherently destructive of capital. So in my eyes, capitalism is anti-war, because, it always seeks to preserve and to expand and to accumulate capital. And so there's never a good capitalist reason to blow a bunch of shit up to, to, you know,

rearrange the politics between two countries, let's say. There's always, there's always a better way. And so I think Mises made a mistake when he assumed that economic liberalism, which is win-win, right, mutually benefit official exchange, that somehow there could be win-win in liberal politics. especially with democracy, liberal democracy. And Mises was a real Democrat at the end of the day. He believed that democracy was a mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power

from one, you know, state leaders to the next. Now, it's easy for us to say, given the hindsight of the full 20th century, now the 21st, that, well, gee whiz, Mises was wrong about that. But at the time, you know, he was coming out of, of old Vienna.

He was coming out of pre-war Vienna. He was coming out of a Europe that had coalesced from a patchwork. I mean, think of Germany as all these duchies and principalities, you know, as late as the 1860s, not that long ago and becoming one state or the 1870s, becoming one state.

You know, so he was viewing liberalism as, hey, there's been so much conflict in Europe. And he had been an artillery officer in World War I. Imagine what that was. Imagine the deafening sounds of those things. Imagine, and of course, he was a quiet, a taciturn man and never really wrote or spoke much about this.

But imagine that. And so I think we have to give him a hell of a lot of latitude in saying, hey, look, there's a way to have sort of liberal nationalism between states and liberal international relations. We don't have to solve everything with Moors. and ultimately, if you can't solve everything, there ought to be an exit. There ought to be the, you know,

subsidiarity or the ability for states to break away and form new ones. And we've seen that. We saw the former Yugoslavia is now, but six or seven states. But the problem is, is that it just didn't work. I mean, you can't apply liberalism to politics or the government. It's not, government and politics are not win-win.

They're necessarily, you know, us, that there is necessarily a zero sum to that. And so we have this whole 20th century of trying to create liberal democracy, which is like trying to create a virgin whore, right? It's one and the it. Well, and what about though? You know, here we are. Okay, you know who doesn't have a self-evident, unalienable right to live? flies. You know, they defecate and puke every time they land on everything they touch. So,

what you should do is get yourself a bug assault gun and then use it to kill them when they're trespassing on your property. That's what I do. I shoot them dead. And what you do in order to get one of these things is just follow the link in the right hand margin, a very top link in the right hand margin at Scott Horton.org. And in fact, what you might consider would be stopping by that link every time you go shopping on Amazon.com. And that way, the Scott Horton show gets a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale. Your price does not go up one penny.

And so check it out at scotthornton.org. My mom always told me, you keep drinking that much coffee. You're going to turn into some. Well, look, it's true. Now, I'm a coffee. Scott Horton Show flavored coffee. It tastes just like my show. It's great.

Sort of. Well, no, it's Ethiopian. and some matron coffees blended for your mornings. It's the first thing I do when I get up is for myself a pot of coffee and then I drink it. That's why this mug is almost empty. And the deal is it's so good. You never go back to your grocery store coffee again. And it's Mundo's artisan coffees.

Get it because they hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports the war party. but Moondos artisan coffees. They support peace. And all you got to do to get some is go to Scotthorton.org slash coffee. That's Scotthorton.org slash coffee. What about, you know, libertarian right-wing populism? Because right-wing populists can get pretty damn socialist on things sometimes.

And I love them because at least they're anti-war. They're sick and tired of this war stuff now, man. Yeah, I mean, look, on my list of things that keep me up at night, tariffs are pretty low. I think tariffs are stupid. I think they're counterproductive. I would get rid of them if I could. But tariffs are just a symptom, right?

They're a symptom of economic ignorance. And it's a symptom of what I guess what we call the bad kind of nationalist and jingoistic kind. I'm less and less hostile to nationalism as I get older, crankier. This is, I think, something that's really separated me from all. a lot of libertarians. I think a lot of definitely moving. Because of the immigration issue, you know, I mean, sure you saw the footage today,

or I don't know if you have seen the footage today, this, you know, massive move with thousands and thousands of Moroccans into Spain because the court said that they can and whatever. And the cops are just standing down and letting them come in. And, you know, the estimates are 10,000, no, pardon me, 10 million people came in in the Biden years.

And so that's not immigration. Whatever argument about immigration, that's mass migration of peoples right when we still have a giant welfare state, which means, and I used to say, well, that's your fault for being a communist, get rid of the welfare state. But the fact is, we do have this welfare state. And for every immigrant, illegal or illegal, that comes in and gets on welfare, that's a gun to the head of everybody from here who's having a hard enough time making it on their own.

And I bet probably a super majority of Democrats agree with that at this point, Jeff. And me as a libertarian, I'm moving toward you and Lou on that one for sure. Well, it's not just welfare. I mean, well, there's plenty of native-born welfare basket cases, but it's resources more general. I mean, there's a huge taxpayer provided and private provided infrastructure. I believe in natural right to leave a place, because otherwise you're not talking about basically false imprisonment or slaves.

but I'm not sure I believe in a natural right to enter in place. That may sound pedantic, but nonetheless, you know, a lot of people have provided a lot of capital to make this place what it is. So if being an immigration restrictionist is ill-libertarian or ill-liberal, then I'm okay with that. Then I'm ill-libertarian or ill-liberal on that issue. Well, you know, I mean, when I was

advising, attemptedly advising a former friend of ours running for a thing, I says, look, Mitt, I mean, it's just you got to admit that there's a difference between the border between Texas and New Mexico and the border between Texas and Mexico. Like, obviously, nobody's saying we're going to start putting up borders between the 50 states.

But you can't just sit here and tell me that every state on the planet is a state in the union with just much right to travel across these borders. It just makes no sense. And no one else agrees with that. It just makes no sense. Well, I'm actually building a wall here in Alabama, Scott. I'm going to say, yeah, I shouldn't speak too soon. I'd like to kick the Californians all out of Texas if I could.

Yeah, too late. Even though I was once a Texan in California, so that'd be pretty hypocritical of me. Anyways, I'm going to ask about Murray Rothbard more. You wrote this cool thing, and unfortunately I can't put it up on the screen because it's got a certificate issue. It worked on my phone, but it won't work on my Firefox. But anyway, it was this interesting article that you wrote for Liberty Something about Mr. Rothbard, Professor Rothbard, as J. Andrew Griffin called him, who would have turned 100 this year, I understand, and is probably the most important libertarian writer, kind of foundational libertarian writer from the second half of the American 20th

century, well, not exclusively, but mostly. And, you know, mentor to so many of our, you know, contemporaries now, including Justin and Eric and Lou and Dr. Paul and many others. I don't know if you knew him or how well you knew him, but, and, well, whatever, you write about him in this great essay, and you described him way better than I could about, for starters, about all of the different things that he was an expert in, that if he'd just been an economist, he'd have been a damn good one, but he decided to be a historian and a movie critic and a whatever else too. So can you just tell us a little bit about the guy first here? Well, I'm trying to figure out his output of words in the 20th century. Now, he didn't live

through the entirety of it. He died in the 90s, as you know, but... 95. I've actually done a little research in the hoot, you know, which author wrote the most words in the 20th century. And you can't just have some self-published person who was just rambling all day log and writing and writing but actually published selling authors and there's a bunch people to consider i mean believe it or not uh obviously agatha christie was what you know word for word was one of the top and um the the scientology creator guy um herrond hubbard believe it or not with his sci-fi was very prolific louis lemur if you know him he wrote those western novels which were unbelievable,

but I would contend that Murray Rothbott was right up there with the most words written in the 20th century. I mean, we're still finding, stumbling upon unpublished or private articles by him that are 30,000 words, you know, just absolutely incredible stuff. There's a whole bunch of archives that are still untapped, but he was just so incredibly prolific. And really, I think it's his period,

in the 50s and 60s where he was enamored of the old right thinkers, especially Albert J. Knotch, I think that period of his life gave him this pugnacious, almost literary or journalistic style, as opposed to an academic-y style, you know what I mean, which really shines through in his writing. And he also made a conscious choice at some point that he was going to write for popular and lay audiences, which, you know, at the time, gee whiz, you're a Columbia PhD, why aren't you provided a nice comfy tenure spot at a major, maybe even an Ivy League university. Well, I think part of that's political that he was ostracized for some various reasons,

but also it's just he wouldn't bend the knee. And as a result, if his writing for popular audience, I think he's going to be much more, much more remembered. I mean, who's going to remember the chair? of the Columbia econ department 10 years from now 100 years now, 30 years now

I mean who's gonna 30 years from now is anyone going to be talking much about Ben Bernaki I don't really think so is anyone going to be talking about his memoir it's some self-serving title like man in the arena

or something just something unbelievable you know no I think the answer is no And Rothbard has this in his very quality. I actually think it's growing. I mean, he's got a ton of younger fans. And so his, the 100th anniversary of his birth is this year.

And so Hans Hoppa and Sevent Kuteli got together and decided to put together an anthology of essays from people who knew him and, you know, just his effect on the world and some, some predicament. about the future of his influence and that sort of thing. So I just wrote an article about what I consider for that book, what I consider his underappreciated political changes.

In other words, he was, among other things, he was a huge sports fan. He could give you all these sports stats about some team or some baseball team and how they were doing and the batting averages. You're crazy memory like that. And, Jeff, to be clear, you're saying that was what I read was your chapter in that upcoming book?

Yes. Oh, okay, great. I didn't realize. Go ahead. It's a book published by Safegi, Amos's book publishing company. But, you know, he loved handicapping political races. And he would talk about and have a deep understanding

of political, you know, congressional race in some other state, you know, in Wisconsin or something, just because he really loved having a pulse on that. And he wrote about political figures a ton of, I mean, he wrote about the Clintons. He wrote about Ed Koch in New York. He wrote about, you know, the red scare. He wrote about the hearings in Congress.

He wrote a lot about Joseph McCarthy. Just unbelievably prolific political writer. And a lot of that is barely remembered and barely read since it was towards the end of his life in the Rothbard Rockwell report, which was back then, and then, you know, late 80s, early 90s, he's at print publication. You may have been a subscriber of that, Scott. Yeah, I came a little bit late.

Yeah, but, I mean, he's really a pretty serious political genius, I think. He could have been a practitioner of the dark arts of political punditry or political, you know, what do you call it? Advising. It could have been a political advisor. It could have been about it. So I was following wrong in 1997, but I didn't start reading LRC until probably 02.

Okay. So a little out of that loop. But he really understood the paleo right. And he understood the old right in its traditions and its writers and its influences. And he really deeply understood how and why the Buckleyite of conservatism came along, he really altered it

into something that was unrecognizable and how the Cold War became the animated focus of the right and then neoconservatives rose out at that saying, hey, you know, we can live with this welfare home, whatever it takes to keep the little people quiet while we do the big, important, grandiose things like fighting, fending off the Soviet bear, you know. And so they pictured themselves these brave Cold Wars.

But in fact, they were a bunch of pencil-necked, you know, Leonard Peacoff types in New York salons with Bill Buckley and really, really sickening. And their stain, you know, this comes from Harry Jaffa, this comes from Bill Buckley. This comes from, you know, neoconservatives like Irvin Crystal. And their stain still influences the right wing and the GOP, especially in America today. So we ought to understand that. Yeah. And nobody understood it and steward them, I think, better than Murray. You know, I was just talking with a friend last night about he was asking, like, how it was that Justin, Justin Romando, knew who the neocons were so well and was able to nail down exactly what was happening in the early part of the W. Bush era.

And I said, oh, because of long-term vendettas that Justin had inherited from Murray. where these guys were sort of, like I don't know exactly who all wrote for whose magazine at which time and whatever. I know there's a lot of internal gossip there that you know you couldn't keep track of. But essentially like when the neocons started moving right against the new left kind of hippies

of the late 60s and early 70s, that they had some things in common with the libertarians. For one thing, a lot of them were Catholics and Jews rather than like rich kind of old money. They were like middle-class guys who were wealthy enough to go to college and be intellectuals, but they weren't welcome in the real circles of power at that time. And they were also against, especially like the most obvious excesses of the great society of the Johnson era and all the welfare and the affirmative action and this and that.

So you had sort of a kissing cousin relationship between the neocons and the libertarians a little bit in the 70s, but then they turned into this insane cult of mass murder and the libertarian. I'll move to Auburn to write about gold and just, you know, had that big bifurcation. But they knew each other really well. And I guess, you know, Murray was from Brooklyn and all of that. So, like, I don't know how well they knew each other personally. But I remember Lou ran an article years ago, a reprint of an old Murray Rothbard article called I hate Max Lerner. And then it begins, I hated him when he was a Stalinist. And I hate him when he was a Trotskyite. And I hated him when he was a Schockmanite. And now I hate him now that he's hanging around with

Norman Pod Horitz or whatever it was. You know what I mean? And I don't even know who the hell Max Lerner is. Just a first-generation neo-conservative, right? And so Murray just hates his guts and rights and all things. So this was my first exposure to Romando. I was very up to date on all of like the Rockefeller foreign policy and the Council on Foreign Relations and the oil men and all of that.

But Justin's writing about all these neocons I'd never heard of before. And that was my, how does he know all this stuff? And it's because he inherited these grudges, you know, from Murray especially. But that's kind of at the core of the libertarian movement is, you know, our opposition to the neocons where they're the anti-matter to our matter. Right. And there's always factions. That's just the nature of movements. And there are, I think, huge factions within the libertarian end of things.

And I think in part those were driven by. a focus on the two things you mentioned earlier that you wanted the Mises Caucus to focus on that came out of Ron Paul's campaigns, which was war and sound money. I mean, these things weren't all that interesting, the reasoning Cato types, right? They wanted to talk about culture and self-actualization and, you know, stadium franchise subsidies and the drug war and things like that. They didn't want to talk about war in peace, right? Because D.C. runs on war.

And that's how everyone gets to go have stakes at night at the Occidental or wherever they go in B.C. So it's just nobody ever got rich opposing intervention in foreign policy. It's just, but plenty of people got rich promoting intervention in forward policy. That's just a fact. Yep, no doubt about it. You know, Jim Lowe wrote years ago about how neoconservatism isn't even really an ideology as it's just a mindset. It's just a cult of power and a cult of, I listen, someone, I did an interview yesterday where the guy played me old clips of Richard Pearl. And he just sounds very bossy.

You know, he doesn't sound like he's especially knowledgeable about it. anything, just certain. Well, the only ideology really is American hegemony, right? And everything follows from that. It's like, well, that's, and that's not even something that's earned or warranted. It's more that it's just assumed. It's presumed, right? It's just in the water.

Like, clearly now that we've defeated the Soviets, America, it's just a unipolar thing. Well, that's, that's a recipe for, you know, bankruptcy. I mean, that's talk about grandiose thinking that that's the opposite of conservatism in every way. I mean, conservatism is the idea that we should cherish past traditions and we should make big changes and use government power judiciously live at all. And that's just the opposite of these guys. These guys are like, yeah, we're going to go remake Iraq, which was basically three countries cobbled together by the British. We're going to, we're going to blow that up. And it's going to be fine.

And we're going to be welcomed. And now, even today, even today is 2026. What year did we roll finally into, oh, was that 04? 03. 03 that we finally rolling rocks. So that's more than 20 years later. There is still dangerous stuff happens in the so-called green zones. Oh, yeah.

Well, we're being attacked by the guys we put in power there. It's just unbelievable. Yeah. Absolutely right. All right, you guys, me here for tax attorney Matt Cursley at agoristtaxadvice.com. And he is just a real hawk. He serves small businesses and high income professionals who are on the run from the revenues. And his job is making sure that you don't have to pay those sons of bitches one penny more than you absolutely have to. That's Matt Sersley,

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Well, so speaking to that $40 trillion debt, you know, you're a pretty reactionary, populist type of a libertarian sort of anti-government guy like me, Jeff. And so I know you got your biases, but you're also, I know you to be a very, you know, realistic, if not realist school guy. You know, you're very well-grounded. guy.

And so I wonder what you think, you know, might be worst case scenario if they finally did listen to me and just bring the troops home from the Middle East, but Europe and Asia, too, and just call off the whole project of Vegemany, you know, make a magic wish that England, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, you guys are going to have to figure out how to be friends because we're leaving and hope for the best. maybe I'm crazy. They say they're holding the whole world together. If you ask Washington, D.C., why they're doing this.

They might say to you, Jeff, you're right about Iraq. That was stupid. We shouldn't have done that. But don't say we should just let go of the whole world because the thing is just going to unzip. The whole damn thing is going to fall apart. And so we can't. And if it ain't that, then it'll be dominated by the Russians of the Chinese

and then they'll come for us too and whatever. Well, never mind the most hyperbolic part of that. Just what do you make of those arguments at this point? Well, I think they're ludicrous. First and foremost, I mean, Russia, I heard Elon Musk the other day said, Russia's got the GDP of Belgium. It's 285 million people. Its population is shrinking rate.

Excuse me, it's 185 million people, April. Population is shrinking rapidly. They've got a very low birth rate. They've got a very early average death rate for life, expectancy. And they're being encroached on all sides by China, by Muslims. The idea that they are some expansionary threat to resurrect the war. They're going to roll tanks into Poland or Hungary or something, the evil Putin is so preposterous that it almost works, right? The bigger, the lie, the easier it goes down. So that, you know, this, since the, since the Ukraine war started,

that this is the new neocon position, is that they want to resurrect the old, or begin to resurrect the old wars, or utterly false. Now, China is too big of a subject for me to speak coherently on or knowledgeably on, but I do think it's the sheer size of China and its economy and its population

means that we probably don't have as much power to make them do or not do things that we think. I remember maybe a year ago now, maybe a little more a crazy person, a lunatic who was apparently had escaped his asylum. His name is Tom Cotton. Oh, yeah. I mean, so absolutely preposterous, like preposterous cartoon characters become sitting U.S. senators of which last time I took, there's only 100 on earth. You'd think these would be intelligent, accomplished people, but here we are.

And so he was basically saying, you know, we need to send a permanent aircraft, aircraft carrier group to the South China Sea. We need to park it there to defend Taiwan. And I thought to my God, my God, why don't, how about the Chinese park an aircraft carrier group in the Gulf of Mexico, you know? And then he proceeded to say that we also need to send one to the Mediterranean permanent to be able to strike against Putin. So basically, not only do we need a brand new World War III with China, but we need to resurrect World War II. But this time we'll actually fight the Russians instead of our unholy alliance with them.

So it's pretty remarkable that this stuff gets said with a straight face. And the difference between America and a lot of the world is I think that the incredulity of the population with respect to this stuff, because we tend to believe we're a democracy and that we actually run the government or have some say over the government and that our government is not totally corrupt and lying the way, let's say, the authoritarian Chinese government done, the way the authoritarian Putin does. But places that know their authoritarian actually believe their government's less. Like after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, they bring out the old emperor to tell everyone,

the authority figure, to tell all the Japanese people that, you know, everything's fine. Don't worry, don't panic. We've got the nuclear contamination that's coming out of the Fukushima plant. We've got it under control. There's no reason to be concerned. And so in Japanese culture, you respect that elder, you sort of bow, you agree with them not. And that was the signal for all Japanese to know that it was absolutely not contained, and there was a really big problem, right?

So they just sort of get it. It's like they just understand in a lot of parts of the world that their government is not telling them the truth. But here, there's something about the American culture where Tom Cotton says something that crazy. And we also, we sort of nod and look at you. You know, he's got a point. Maybe we need one of these territories. You know, we've got the best, this and that. It's like, it's just, you know, we got our work cut out for us on this one, Scott.

I know, it's true. Although, you know, I don't know anybody really believes in their congressmen or their senator. It's the presidents that they love so much because they personify the state and all that. You know, I had a government school teacher. So we'd be better off with the kind of monarchy that the Brits have. where the monarch doesn't have any real power, but they absorb all of the people's need for a symbolic head of state.

And then you just let the prime minister be a plain old guy in a suit doing business without being semi-deified as the leader of the country. Right. Kier-Starmor is not being, you know, people aren't buying him pints. Right. Yeah, he's quite the opposite.

The guy probably needs bodyguards. Which, by the way, I'm not endorsing a royal monarchy. I'm just saying the point being made was that you separate the ceremonial role of the head of state away from the chief executive. And so that your chief executive is not bounded with so much extra authority. But also, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily mind a more parliamentary system in the U.S. where we could change governments more frequently and where we could have coalitions come together on issues. I think if we had more of a parliamentary-style government, I think we would have, you know,

eight or ten parties made represented in parliament, you know, and very much for smaller congressional districts. I think New Hampshire, on a per capita basis, has the most state reps of any state. And I'd like to see, this is one place where I deviate maybe, I'd like to see maybe 10,000 U.S. reps. in the U.S. House, something like that, certainly, certainly, you know, 2,000 or 5,000. And with a, we're of a parliamentary system where we did, what we have now is we have two parties.

And whichever one of them has a bare majority ends up controlling virtually everything that happens in that chamber. Right. They control the rules committee. They control the floor proceedings. They control the committee chairs, and the committee chairs control. what comes to that committee, what even gets voted on in that committee. So we have this really sort of strange two-party system, which doesn't really come out of our constitution at all.

Yet it feels like we're stuck with it. So sometimes I look at the debate in Britain or something. I think, wow, these people can actually talk. They can actually stand up on their feet and say coherent things. and they have the Labor Party and they have the Greens and they have this and that, not the worst things. Yeah. It sure would be nice in this current circumstance, for example,

if we could just call no confidence in our current leadership and get a new guy up there to end this war, because we have this terrible public choice theory type paradox thing here where Trump is the one who started it. So how can he end it in a way that doesn't look favorable for him? That would be better for him. There's Congress, by the way. Yeah, I mean, well, but I mean, in order to remove him,

which actually, they did vote the war powers resolution to try to force him to stop. But the only thing is now, all they can do now is impeach him and remove him for the high crime with a super majority in the Senate, for the high crime for the felony of ignoring their war powers resolution, which they're not going to do. That's the war power. You can't take that from anyone who might want it one day on the other side or whatever. He would have to. they could get them on a Bitcoin scam, right? Or not Bitcoin, but one of these shit coins that his family's been pushing,

that the UAE dumped all a billion dollars into or whatever it is. Maybe they could get them on something like that. But it has to be a legit, like penal code violation. It can't be because he lied us into a stupid idiot war that he lost, but he can't quite lose all the way because he'll look funny. And so we have to stay in the thing, which is the position that we're in now, which is absurd. Yeah, very tough.

I think this is your typical second term president, isn't it? They always just a tremendous decline from any perspective in their second term. And it's, I don't know. I don't know where this Iraq war goes. And I don't know. I mean, this even extends to places like UAE and Bahrain and Kuwait are involved. Saudi and Yemen now? Yeah.

So it's going the wrong direction. It's escalating. Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, I like what you say about that. In fact, one more question along those lines, then. This has been a perennial debate. I first learned about this reading the John Burtcher stuff in the 90s, was they were like, Patriot, beware,

we must come together to stop the constitutional convention. They were only like two states away from having the requirement. The number of states is three quarters of the states necessary to call a constitutional convention. And they were just a couple of states away. And the Burchers launched this huge concerted effort to roll that back and have some of the states rescind those resolutions to bring the account back down again because we're getting so close there. And by the way, from people not familiar, the John Birchers, they're friends of

ours. They're like Buchananite, conservative American patriotic right-wing types. And they're just terrified that this would be the end of George Washington's constitution, the end of our Bill of Rights, the end of any semblance on restrictions of these people's power. I mean, there's not a single fact, I mean, you and I are the only faction that we could trust in a constitutional convention. Jeff, everybody else in there is going to be for full communism for them at everyone else's expense, right? It would be the positive rights constitution. Yeah. And it would be, can you imagine it would be bogged down?

Like when you look at these meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America or something, first they have to open with a land acknowledgement and then they have to talk about, well, wait a minute, where's the deaf interpreter? And, you know, it's just like it would be, I think it would be slow going. I bet, yeah, that might be the best thing about it is it'd be such a train wreck. It would be like an SNL skit when SNL skits were good.

Yeah, that was a long time ago. I used to watch them back then. Good old Phil Hartman, man, right? All right, let's leave it there. Jeff Dice, welcome to the Institute, man. I'm so glad to have you, libertarian institute.org for Jeff's future stuff. and of course, monetary metals. You want to talk about monetary metals real quick

before I let you go? What's monetary metals? It's my all-consuming day job. It's where I left the Meese Institute to go back to lawyering and we're trying to take all the gold that's sitting around all over the world, which is $20 trillion worth

and actually start using it. If you had $20 trillion of real estate, do you think people would borrow against it? Do you think they pledge it as class? You think they would find ways to pull economic value out of it instead of letting it sit with no buildings on it and no rent. And yeah, they would. So that's what we're trying to bring gold back into productive use. Awesome.

All right. Everybody check out, Monetary Mills.com. And thank you again, Jeff. Good talk to you. Thanks, Scott. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts and Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books. Fools Aaroned, enough already, and my latest, Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.

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