All Episodes
Previous Next
July 17, 1996 - Art Bell
02:54:51
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 17th, 1996.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening.
Good morning, as the case may be across all these many, many time zones.
From the Hawaiian Tahitian island, James.
All the way across this great nation to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands.
Tally-ho in St.
Thomas and the other islands this morning.
Down into South America, north to the pole worldwide on the Internet.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Coming up in a moment, the Libertarian A candidate for the presidency.
When we last interviewed him, he was a contender.
Now he is the nominee.
Harry Brown.
First, uh, you've all no doubt seen it by now.
A TWA 747 airliner with 229 on board exploded in midair.
Crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport Wednesday night.
There apparently are no survivors.
They are picking up bodies.
CWA flight 800 bound for Paris crashed 15 miles southwest of the inlet off Long Island.
A Coast Guard spokesman said the plane exploded in the air and bodies were being pulled from the water, but that no exact number of fatalities was available.
CWA said there were 212 passengers, 17 crew on board.
Local police confirmed the plane Now, I'm not an expert on aviation.
830 p.m. Eastern Time Eyewitnesses described the plane as breaking into two
pieces and that a ball of flame descended into the water
State Department spokesman Nicholas Byrne said there was no reason to expect
terrorism Now not an expert on aviation
However Think
That 747s generally explode into balls of flame and fall into
the water now So.
There has been speculation about a mid-air collision.
There, of course, is speculation about a bomb.
And there is the possibility that it was some sort of cargo, because cargo is not checked security-wise, or at least hasn't been until now, I'm sure.
As carefully as checked baggage is.
So at this hour, it is a tragedy without explanation.
I would only say that in my experience, limited 747s or big aircraft, pretty safe.
PWA's got a damn good record and they generally don't explode in midair.
It was in the climb stage out of Kennedy.
Probably headed for 30 or 40,000 feet or better toward Paris.
Took only a few seconds to reach the water.
Now, this is particularly troublesome to me, and to I'm sure a lot of you out there, because in two weeks I will be taking a 747, coincidentally TWA, Coincidentally, flight number 866 from Kennedy to Copenhagen.
So it causes a bit of inner reflection when you hear about this sort of thing and you're two weeks away from this kind of a flight.
But, life goes on.
Dear Art, from one of my listeners, going on the trip, in fact, I can appreciate your white-knuckle flying.
I always have been a white-knuckle flyer.
You know, no control.
I take a lot of Xanax.
This helps, but not totally.
This most recent crash, not counting the other crashes this year, have not helped at all.
So keep the faith.
Art, we will prevail and get to Russia and safely home again.
See you in about two weeks.
Relating to white-knuckle-ism, David and Ray.
And then this from Birmingham, Alabama.
Dear Art, our prayers are with the families and friends of the passengers and crew that were on flight 800.
And, of course, the rescue workers now that will risk their lives trying to figure out and rescue any survivors.
Nightline, which is going to run in the western time zone in about a little less than 30 minutes, apparently.
Interviewed an FAA source who reported there was no voice contact from the plane before it went down, implying obviously a catastrophic event.
This led the aviation experts and ABC to say it sounded like either an explosion or a mid-air collision.
FAA source contacted ABC again just before the end of the show and told them to stay away from the idea of a mid-air collision.
There was no indication of any other aircraft involved.
Larry Johnson, a former State Department employee who is a counter-terrorism expert, gave his opinion.
It was about 90% likely the crash was caused by an explosion or incendiary device of some sort.
There was a lot of fuel on board.
They saw two flashes.
One white flash seen from the occupant, I believe, of a C-130.
And then a large orange flash, which probably would have been the fuel on board.
It was on its way to Athens.
So, really, it is a little early to speculate about the cause of this crash.
But I repeat what I said, and that is that it's my experience 747s rarely simply explode in midair.
They're too big.
I suppose an engine catastrophic engine failure could have led to an explosion of fuel or something That's possible, but I would consider at least equally possible The possibility of terrorism nobody else is saying and I'm not afraid to say it it can obviously could obviously be one of the two choices either that or there was a catastrophic failure not a Uh, normally associated with a 747 aircraft.
It has been very reliable.
Having said all that, coming up, uh, in a moment, and there really, until you know, is not a great deal more that can be said about a crash.
It's horrible.
And when you're about to fly on, I am, as I am on the same airline, the same kind of aircraft, out of the same airport, going across the same ocean, you think about it.
In a moment, Harry Brown.
Get a new view of the world with Coast to Coast AM.
First of all, I want to just thank you for bringing everyone out here to Cornucopia.
Just phenomenal knowledge.
I don't know of anyone else that I've ever listened to at radio that just fills my brain and stimulates me.
But, you know, I was listening to the show and I thought to myself, Do you think, George, that common citizens such as you or I really have any hope towards the future of any privacy or anything else?
I think we do.
I think eventually so many people will see the light, see what you see, see what I see, that eventually they're going to say enough is enough.
And I think that we do have a future and we're going to win in the long run.
It's going to be bumpy along the way.
It's not going to be easy, but we will get there.
That's my take, and you know what?
As long as I can continue on the airwaves and tell people this, I shall.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 17th, 1996.
17th 1996 I think we're going back to uh...
let's see what area code this is Area code 212.
Harry Brown must be in New York.
Harry, hello.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning to you.
It's a pleasure to have you back on the program again.
Harry, you were one of the contenders for the nomination and I guess it wasn't much of a contest, was it?
Well, the Libertarian Party Convention was the weekend before last.
It was a very exciting experience, as people who are not on C-SPAN probably got some glimmer of.
And we really had a wonderful time, and I'm happy and proud and humbled to be the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate.
And I can tell you the media attention, the inquiries from the public, all have just been amazing since the convention.
We have just been overwhelmed by the interest.
Newspapers all over the country carrying stories about the convention and the nomination.
People like David Broder and Coleman McCarthy writing about it in the Washington Post and across the country.
CNN, PBS, all of them.
I talked with the The National Director of the Libertarian Party yesterday said that they were about 40 or 50 media inquiries behind just trying to process the number of shows and other people that wanted to now get in on the Libertarian Party.
It's wonderful.
And of course, the reason for that is that people all over the country now recognize that government doesn't work.
It doesn't deliver the mail on time.
It doesn't educate our children properly.
It doesn't keep the cities safe.
And so they're looking for a candidate and a program that will do something to reduce government to the absolute minimum.
Not reform it, not manage it better, but reduce it to the absolute minimum.
Alright, well Harry, you're certainly right about one thing.
People are fed up with the status quo.
They're really fed up.
Frustrated, angry, even angry is the right word.
And the situation is interesting for the Libertarians this year.
More so than normal, the Dole campaign seems to be Self-destructing.
I will ask you all about all of this.
The Clinton campaign seems well ahead and roaring along, but not something people are happy about.
Ross Perot, probably going to get back into it, probably going to take the nomination of his own party, but not going to get 19% this time, arguably.
So there is a kind of an interesting opening uh... for you and your party this year would you agree with
that although question about it and it's
interesting when you mention that clinton is so far ahead clinton isn't doing anything to be there
that's the amazing part of that don't know that i mean bob dole is doing most
of the work here right uh... there's there's no explanation for clinton's
popularity or apparent popularity uh... you even have when you see the polls are very small
undecided figure which you would expect to be the case because
you talk to anybody around the country and i don't want to vote for either one
of those guys that's right but uh... the fact is that clinton is sort of coasting
along right now and will we will see what happens but We need to realize, too, that this anti-government sentiment, anti-politician, anti-two-party, anti-all-of-this-Washington stuff, is not something new.
This has been building for, in my estimation, close to 30 years.
I think it started somewhere in the 60s.
And it built very slowly during the 70s, accelerated in the 80s, and now it has reached a tidal wave in the 90s.
So it's not going to go away.
Whatever happens this year, it's going to carry over into 98 and into the year 2000.
The American people didn't just wake up to big government in 1994 or even this year.
This resentment, this anger has been building and building and building.
So, you're right.
We have our opportunity this year for the first time to really explode on the national scene, and I think the Libertarian Party is going to be the overnight sensation.
The proverbial overnight sensation.
It may be.
Somebody that's been around a long time and then suddenly is seen.
I'm very much a pragmatist politically, and I really do think that assessment is correct, Harry.
I think you've got a real chance.
The one question Bob Dole has not been able to answer, To my satisfaction, nor apparently many others, is why he wants to be president and if he became president, where he would take America.
I just haven't heard that.
Or if I have, it has not been with enough apparent conviction or content.
To interest.
So how would you answer that question?
I guess more importantly, where would you take America?
What would you really do?
Back to the country that our founding fathers had in mind, one in which the politicians and the government were bound down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, the way Thomas Jefferson put it.
A country in which every dollar you make is yours to spend, to save, to give away as you see fit.
A country in which you plan your own retirement and you put away 4 or 5 or 8% of the money and let it save up in an account whereby it is yours when you retire rather than one where the government takes it from you, spends it and then hopes to tax somebody else in the future to pay off the promises it made to you.
A country in which the cities are safe, your children are safe because you no longer have a war on drugs that has escalated crime all over America.
A country very much like what we had in the 40s and 50s, but with the technology of the 90s and the prosperity that we have never seen in our lifetime, simply because government has been so big.
How do you allow every American to keep every dollar they make and still have a national defense?
Well, right now the revenues from tariffs and excise taxes are sufficient to finance a national defense that, in my opinion, would be more effective than the national defense we have now.
The problem is that we are vulnerable to any two-bit dictator in the world who wants to lob a missile at New York or San Francisco or Las Vegas even.
If the dictator of North Korea or Saddam Hussein or somebody else gets it into his head to intimidate us, there is nothing we can do about it.
And this is after spending trillions of dollars since World War II and probably 20 to 25 years since the technology has been available to create a missile defense of some kind.
And so as a result, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year trying to intimidate the rest of the world with long-range missiles, long-range bombers, fleets patrolling the Middle East and Southeast Asia, bases all over the world meddling in everybody's affairs, going into Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Panama, Haiti, the Philippines, and so on, simply because we are vulnerable at home.
And so what I want to see is a defense That makes it possible for us to be protected against anything that might happen by accident or by design.
All right.
Well, one of the things that we have to be protected against, of course, as you well know, the Olympics are about to get underway, however it turns out with this TWA disaster.
America faces a different kind of threat today, apparently.
It's a terrorist threat, and that's going to take resources to fight, yes?
Yes, it does, but one way that we fight terrorism is simply by not meddling in so many other countries' affairs and creating resentment all over the world.
Well, you've got a point there, I'm afraid, and there are not too many examples of good deeds that we've tried to perpetrate about the world that have not come back to punish us.
Why is that, do you think, Harry?
Well, I think that people naturally resent the idea that we are meddling in other countries' affairs, that we know what is right and wrong, that President Clinton or President Bush or President Reagan or President Carter is the arbiter of some age-old dispute that may have been going on for decades or hundreds of years.
And with just overweening arrogance, a President of the United States declares which side is the moral right side and moves in and either through military aid or just through diplomatic assurances makes it plain that one side is the right side.
And the other side, of course, is very resentful and they can't fight back necessarily by fighting the United States militarily, so people come in here and plant bombs and do other things.
Would President Brown have dispatched thousands of troops to Bosnia?
Absolutely not.
On my first day in office, I will bring all American troops back home to America where they belong.
What we have to do is to protect our borders, not the borders of other countries.
I mean, there are so many things involved in Bosnia that President Clinton has no clue about, or any American president would not have a clue about.
The artificial divisions that have been created by diplomats after wars like World War I or World War II create these kinds of resentments, create these kinds of ethnic battles that go on.
And they will never stop.
And this is exactly what Washington and Jefferson warned us against, getting bogged down in these age-old battles of Europe and the rest of the world.
And for a few years, American diplomats realized that and stayed away from those things.
But with the First World War, everything changed.
And when the United States entered World War I, it marked the passing of an era.
And it also began an era in which the United States was caught up in something almost since then, where we have always had to be on guard because we were suddenly involved in the problems of other countries.
Can I ask you a hard question?
If you were not Harry Brown, a major now presidential candidate, and you were forced to vote for either Clinton or Dole, who would you vote for?
Well, that choice faced me for 30 years, and I took the high road.
I did not vote for either of them.
When you vote for someone, even if you think you are voting against someone else, you are lending authority to that person and saying, I believe in what you're doing.
Now, maybe you don't believe in what that person is doing, but that's the way it's going to be interpreted.
And there is one way that you can waste your vote, and that is by voting for somebody you do not believe in, voting for something you don't believe in.
The only possible way you can make your vote count is to vote for the person that you think is going to do the things that you feel are important.
And if you want smaller government, it's got to be for the person who you know is going to bring about smaller government, and not for somebody that wants bigger government.
Well, what I was fishing for, of course, was that libertarians ideologically are Closer brethren, surely, of the conservatives, the Republicans, or at least traditionally it has been so, than of the liberals, yes?
Well I would say of the conservative individuals in the country that there is a certain amount to that, but not to the conservative politicians.
I think we need to realize that the conservative politicians in Washington are almost indistinguishable from the liberal politicians in Washington.
The only thing that differs between them is the rhetoric, the things that they say.
But what they do is almost identical.
It really is.
Harry Brown, hold on.
We'll be right back to you.
Relax.
My guest is...
The Libertarian candidate for the presidency, Harriet Brown.
He'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast AM website.
My guest is the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, Harry Brown.
It's going to be an interesting program because he is an interesting man.
So stay right there.
Once again, the Libertarian candidate for the presidency, Harry Brown.
the once again
uh... the libertarian uh... candidate for the presidency uh... harry brown uh... harry welcome back
thank you i've got a fax here uh... and it says i support uh... this round
but how do we approach the fact as you have pointed out that an incumbent president
in a good economy is almost impossible
to unseat We are used to hearing all sorts of things about what elections hinge on.
We're used to hearing all kinds of issues about character, leadership, foreign policy, ideology, and so on.
Yes.
And I think that the reason for that is because there are no real issues in a campaign.
And when I say real issues, I mean an issue that would jeer life.
If you knew that the outcome of the campaign would make a significant difference in your life, that one candidate or the other would make a significant difference in your life, then you would vote on that basis.
But when that doesn't happen, which is almost always the case, then you look for other things.
And the economy is one of those things.
You feel good, well, there's less chance I might lose my job instead of the other thing.
What I'm bringing to the American people is a significant difference in their lives.
I'm planning to take the income tax out of their life and replace it with nothing.
No flat tax, no sales tax, but simply reduce the federal government to a size whereby we don't need an income tax.
And in fact, I've been asking people all over the country, would you give up your favorite federal programs if it meant you never had to pay income tax again?
And this is a very powerful issue, because we're talking about a 20, 30, 40 percent increase in take-home pay, depending on how much somebody pays in income taxes every year, what bracket he is in.
Of course, we have other issues, too.
Getting the government out of Social Security, so you know your parents and grandparents are going to be safe, and you're no longer going to have to pay that 15 percent Social Security tax.
Alright, I want to fly through these too fast.
How many federal employees do we have now?
I don't know, but it's in the millions.
In your administration, by what percentage would that be reduced?
Well, I would say probably in the 90s percent.
In other words, to cut to the chase, a lot of federal employees are going to be getting better jobs.
So, you're also promising that the quality of job and pay would increase in the private sector?
Well, just imagine for a minute, a trillion dollars a year is being sucked out of the economy every year in income and social security taxes.
A trillion dollars.
Now, with the repeal of those taxes, that money is going to stay in the hands of the people who actually earned it to spend, to save, to give away as they see fit.
And whichever they do, spend it, save it, or give it away, it's going to wind up in the economy.
And there's going to be an enormous shortage of labor.
There's going to be an enormous demand for new products and services.
Employers are going to be scurrying among welfare clients.
And former government employees trying to find people to retrain, to make available, to satisfy this shortage of labor.
I can imagine, for instance, employers going to welfare mothers who have five kids and don't want to leave home and put their children in child care and putting computers in their homes and teaching them how to use the computers so that they can enter data from home and be of value to the company because there are not going to be enough people to fill these jobs.
When we take the money away from the federal government, the money is not going to be thrown away.
The money is going to be spent in another way, and so those jobs are going to be there.
Let's stay with money for a second.
Here's another fact from Idaho.
It says, while I agree with Mr. Brown that the abolishment of the IRS is long overdue, I'd like to see here how he would care for the mentally retarded.
I'm currently employed by the state of Idaho as a care provider for a 17-year-old boy with cerebral palsy.
all of his funding and wages comes from a combination of social security and
medicaid i'm not ashamed of catching my checks i work hard for my
pay and so the question obviously is
with a ninety percent reduction in workers and uh...
taxes uh... or not taxes excuse me revenues collected around the
government how would you care for people like this
well he should be proud of the money that he earns uh...
and he is working hard and there's no shame in it whatsoever as there is no
shame for government employees many of them work very very hard but
unfortunately they're working a system
where nothing happens. They're working in the most ineffective system possible,
one based on force, which never works. But to get to his point of how this would be taken care of,
it would be taken care of the way it was before the federal government stuck its nose in all of
this. It's hard to remember now because it's been 30 years, but before the federal government got
into medical care and all of these other areas, the cost of a doctor visit was a fraction of what
The cost of a hospital stay was a fraction of what it is today.
Health insurance was far easier to get for people who had difficulties.
It was far, far less expensive, even for people who had difficulties.
But once the federal government got into that area, the cost skyrocketed for doctor visits, hospital care, health insurance, all of these things.
And today, government spends over 50% of all the dollars that are spent on health care in America.
And as a result, it has run these prices out of sight.
In the time before the federal government got involved, people like the one described there were taken care of through private agencies, churches, foundations, the United Way, service clubs, all had various projects that took care of those kinds of people, took care of them for life if they were unable to take care of themselves, but in most cases, took care of them for a brief period until those people
were able to get back on their feet, depending on what the difficulty was.
But when the federal government moved in, everything changed.
Not only did prices skyrocket, but people became permanent wards of the system
and lost their self-respect, lost their dignity, lost the ability to even think that they could take care of
themselves.
And so we have far more people who are dependent upon others today than there were 30 years ago.
There is a move now to require by law that insurance companies accept pre-existing conditions.
Isn't this just an effort to move the responsibility for many people from the government, the federal government, to the private sector insurance companies?
Now, if they're required to accept pre-existing conditions, It seems to me they have entered the social welfare business and they're out of the insurance business.
Very perceptive observation.
This bill that the Republicans ran through Congress is about the next to the last nail in the coffin of private health insurance in this country.
What's going to happen is it's going to force insurance companies to raise their prices drastically.
And when that happens, the politicians will not stand for it, and they will probably put in price controls.
And when they put in price controls, it will become impossible for the health insurance companies to continue to operate And when that happens they will start dropping out of business just like the auto insurers tried to get out of business in California.
And what you're going to wind up with is a single pair system in this country operated by the government just like they have in Canada, just like they have in Britain.
And it will be as bad or worse than what President Clinton had in mind for us, or Hillary Clinton had in mind with her healthcare system.
Only it will not have come from the Democrats, it will have come from the Republicans.
That's right.
And every step of the way, the Republicans will say, oh, we don't want to do this, but we have to because the free market has failed.
So short of Harry Brown or somebody like him, this country, with the Republicans or the Democrats, is on a march to socialism.
in health care without a doubt. There's no question about it.
There's one thing that the government does well.
We know the government doesn't work. That government programs never produce
the results that are touted for them at the outset. But there's one
thing that government does well.
It knows how to cripple you and then hand you a crutch and say,
see if it weren't for the government you wouldn't be able to walk.
And that's been the story of health care all the way along.
First, it crippled the private health market by getting into Medicare and Medicaid and running up the prices of things and making elderly people dependent upon Medicare, and reached the point now where, as I said, over 50% of the health care dollars in America pass through government's hands.
And now they say, look, if it weren't for the government doing this, you wouldn't be able to survive.
And people get sucked more and more deeply into this government health care system.
And every step of the way, it's always, well, gee, we hate to do this, but I don't see any alternative to it.
Well, there is an alternative, and that is get the federal government out of this completely.
But at the same time, we have to repeal the income tax so that people are not left helpless, so that people have their own resources to be able to take care of these things.
And so that the generosity of the American people will be there to help the people who cannot help themselves.
Okay, Harry, let's stay with money for a second.
In the last election, I don't mind telling you, I was disgusted and I voted for Ross Perot.
And the reason I voted for Ross Perot was probably the reason a lot of people in America did, because he talked about something that right now Bob Dole and Bill Clinton don't talk about.
Give lip service to a reduction of the deficit.
Latest figures show it will be reduced even further.
That's great.
But most Americans do not understand that that's the yearly deficit.
And we're reducing the amount that we're adding to the debt right now.
If you look down a few years, the service, the interest to the debt, is going to consume all the money that we would use for social welfare of any sort that we might have planned.
It will consume all that money, Harry.
That's going to be a financial crisis that could potentially bring this country to its knees.
Nobody wants to talk about it.
Well, I'll be glad to talk about it.
Please do.
Because if you were elected and virtually eliminated income tax, as slim as the chances are now, they're going to be able to do anything about this horrible debt.
And where it's going.
How would you do something about it?
Well, the first thing we need to do is to get the federal government out of everything where it doesn't belong so that we reduce the budget and we reduce the hemorrhaging.
The second thing we do simultaneously with that is to get rid of all of the assets of the federal government for which there is no constitutional authority or no constitutional purpose being served.
And there is a fantastic number of things that the federal government owns like the
52 percent of the land in the 13 western states. It owns pipelines, power
companies, commodity reserves, thousands, tens of thousands of
buildings around the country, unused military bases, unneeded military harbor. I
want to see a six-year program of auctioning these assets off and getting
the proceeds from them.
The first proceeds that come in should be used to buy private lifetime annuities for everyone who is dependent on Social Security today.
That means your parents or your grandparents will have a firm, fixed contract with a company like Equitable or Prudential or State Farm, some company that has never broken its promises, unlike the Congress of the United States.
And that way your parents or grandparents will never have to worry again that Congress is going to take their benefits away and we'll be free from the 15% payroll tax.
But then we continue selling the assets and all of the additional proceeds that come in would be used to pay down the federal debt.
Now, no one knows how much those assets are worth and how much they would bring in that six-year program.
There's no way it could be estimated in advance.
If it turns out that they bring $12 trillion over a six-year period, it will be enough to liquidate the social security system without anybody being hurt and to pay off the entire federal debt.
And $12 trillion is not an unreasonable possibility.
There have been estimates as large as $50 trillion as to the worth of all of those assets.
But nobody, again, I have to emphasize, nobody really knows what they will bring.
It is true.
We have assets.
No question about it, that exceed, I believe, our liabilities, certainly.
That's one bright spot.
And if it turns out that they don't, then the sooner we know that, the better.
The sooner we realize that the federal government is technically bankrupt and fiscally insolvent, then the better it is, because the sooner we know that, the sooner we can do whatever it is that's necessary to make that whole.
But if we put it off, it just gets worse, because every year the politicians promise more things for the future.
And mortgages more to the future and set up more liabilities that we're going to have to pay for while they retire and live off of their pensions.
National parks, BLM land, gone?
All of it.
Can you imagine how much better Yellowstone Park, for example, which is an ecological disaster today, how much better it would be managed by the Nature Conservancy or the Wilderness Society or even by Disneyland.
somebody who would have a vested interest in the future value of that
property unlike bureaucrats who have no concern about the future
value because they have nothing personal at stake involved
wouldn't you be worried though that that vested interest would lead to development that would
deface things that should not be defaced
Well, the question of what should be defaced is, of course, a subjective one.
It may well be that some parks would close down and become other things because there isn't much interest in them.
But the areas like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or so on are far, far more valuable as tourist attractions than they could ever be as anything else.
The idea that somebody would turn the Grand Canyon into a housing development or a parking lot or something else is of course a beautiful little ball mall, but it's not a practical thing.
Nobody's going to spend billions of dollars in order to acquire a property like that and then destroy the value of the property by turning it into something else that people wouldn't pay for.
Guns.
Where do you stand on guns, Harry?
Bob Dole did an amazing about-face with regard to the repeal of the assault weapons ban, which I consider to be a joke anyway.
And he's backing away from it, moving toward the middle, if not moving toward Mr. Clinton.
You're a libertarian.
I would think your position on guns would be?
That the Bill of Rights is an absolute literal document.
You have a right to keep and bear arms, and it doesn't matter if some lunatic shoots up a restaurant in Texas, it doesn't change that in any way whatsoever.
If you do anything with a gun to intimidate somebody, threaten him, hurt him, harm him in any way whatsoever, you should be prosecuted.
But as long as you keep that gun for self-defense, as long as you keep that gun to yourself, then why in the world should the federal government have any interest in it whatsoever?
I would, of course, push very, very hard to repeal the assault weapons ban.
I would push hard to repeal the Brady Bill and, in fact, to repeal all the gun control legislation that the federal government has imposed upon us.
But it goes even further than just the Second Amendment.
The entire Bill of Rights has to be respected for a change.
None of this business of, well, yes, you can take away free speech from people if the government shows that it has a compelling interest to do so.
The whole idea of the Constitution was to prevent the politicians from having a compelling interest in overruling your rights.
Those rights are absolute.
They are not there with qualifications.
You have a right to be safe from search and seizure, even if some DEA agent thinks you fit the profile of a drug dealer and you're carrying too much cash when you walk through the airport, or whatever it may be.
We have to restore the Bill of Rights, and in a Harry Brown administration, anyone who was found guilty within the executive branch of violating anyone's rights according to the Bill of Rights would be subject to censure, dismissal, or even prosecution, depending on the severity of the offense.
This present administration has such a problem.
Now, I would like to talk to you about their problems, General.
Whitewater, Travelgate, worst of all, this FBI files business.
I have been amazed, Harry, at the lack of public outrage at the FBI files scandal.
I attribute it to the fact that the Republicans, for so long, have been pounding on Clinton, without effect, without good ammunition, that when something finally came along that was truly egregious, The public kind of yawned.
I think you're absolutely right.
I think you have put your finger right on it.
In effect, it is as though they have been crying wolf for so long.
They may not be crying wolf.
There may be all sorts of things under the surface there and whitewater and so on, but they picked a scandal that was impossible for the average person to understand.
What is so bad about buying a land investment and losing money on it?
Sure, that's a mistake, but that's not a crime.
Now, that isn't what whitewater is, but that's the only way the average person can see it.
And so they wonder why everybody is getting upset about it.
It must be a political ploy on the part of the Republicans.
And now when you get to something that is more straightforward, like the filegate thing, It is, as you say, too late now to be coming forward and saying that this is something terrible that the public should be aroused about.
I think the Republicans make a great mistake in pounding on Clinton's character for two reasons.
So do I. Number one is, suppose he did finally nail him on Whitewater and he resigned and Al Gore took his place and ran for president, they would have to start all over again.
Everything that they had done to Clinton would be of no value in running against Gore.
And the second thing is, That when you talk about character, Bob Dole is skating on very, very thin ice.
Here is a man who does exactly the same things Clinton does.
He says one thing and means another.
He takes a stand on one issue and then reverses it the next day.
He goes out in public and says, I think regulation is too much and then goes back and votes to put the insurance companies out of business.
He says government is too big and then he goes back and votes for a seven year budget that's going to make the government bigger every one of those seven years.
This is not the issue in this campaign.
The issues in this campaign were going to make the income tax, social security, crime, the other things whereby bringing about really smaller government with specific credible proposals can change people's lives in this country.
And if you want to be a part of it, I hope you'll get in touch with us.
Just give us a call at 1-800 272-1776 and we'll send you information on the campaign, including information on how you can help get me in the debates.
That's 272-1776, and I hope we get a chance as we go along here this evening to talk about the possibilities for the debates.
I thought that was going to be my next question, but we're at the top of the hour, so I will ask you to hold on, relax, get a cup of coffee or something, and we're right back to you, Harry.
Grary Brown, the Libertarian candidate for the Presidency of the United States, is my guest.
This may be a real year for the Libertarians.
It sounds good, doesn't it?
We'll ask more questions.
We'll give you an opportunity to do that.
Coming up next... The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
Two hours.
Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 17th, 1996.
My guest is Libertarian candidate Harry Brown.
And he sounds good.
This is going to be an interesting program.
For those of you in the Bay Area and elsewhere joining us at this hour, you already well know about Flight 800 out of Kennedy.
It's down, and there appear to be no survivors.
A 747 Flight 800 bound for Paris.
It's given me much to think about.
I'm bound for Copenhagen on TWA Flight 866, a 747 in about two weeks, so... I'm watching this carefully.
747s don't generally just explode.
That is not to say it was a bomb, but...
I'd say that's in the higher ranges of probability.
You must be asking yourselves, what's going on with our economy today?
What was it?
161 points down, then 167 down, and then back up again, then up again the next day.
It's very confusing.
Some say it'll crash, others say it's a good time to buy.
We'll ask Harry Brown about that.
Maybe it can give you some advice.
Now, the candidate of the Libertarian Party for President, when I said, by the way, it wasn't much of a contest last hour, what I meant was that Harry just walked away with it, the overwhelming favorite.
Welcome back, Harry.
Thank you.
Harry, I want to cover the debate because your message is strong, powerful, and right on target, I believe, so far.
I have other questions to ask you where we may disagree, but on target, dead on target so far.
How do you get the message out?
Answer is the debates.
Question is, how do you get into the debates?
That's a very important question this year.
And if I may back up for a second, when you said we may disagree on some things as we go along, that of course is very, very possible.
No two people are going to agree on everything.
And I simply ask people to measure their disagreement with me on one or two issues against their overwhelming disagreement with Robert Dole and Bill Clinton and Ross Perot on so many issues.
The central issue this year is, do you want smaller government?
And if you want smaller government, there really is only one candidate, Harry Brown, the Libertarian candidate.
Now, how do we get into the debates?
I have to build name recognition, I have to get into the polls, and if I'm in the polls at, say, 8 or 10 percent in September, it will be very hard for them to keep me out of the debates.
If I'm not in the polls, then it will be very, very hard for me to get into the debates,
even if I meet all of the nominal qualifications that the bipartisan debate commission has
set forth as being required in order to get into the debates.
So...
Okay, how far into the polls do you have to be?
Well, I would think that if I were at 8 or 10 percent, it would be impossible for them
to keep me out.
But there's really no objective standard.
It's not as though Mr. Gallup is going to decide this on some basis that's already been
set forth by the debate commission.
It's just simply a question.
If the popular support is there, then they would be embarrassed to hold the debates without me, just as they would have in 1992 if they had tried to go ahead and hold those debates without Ross Perot.
They would have looked silly, and the press would have pilloried them for trying to get away with that.
And Ross Perot was only at 7% at the time that they invited him into the debate, so it doesn't require a great deal of showing, but it does require some.
And I've been, of course, working very hard over the past eight months to build name recognition, doing talk radio shows all over America.
I've probably talked to over 20 million people through over 200 shows, done newspaper interviews all over the country.
We've been spreading the message through the internet.
I've actually been winning internet polls coming in ahead of Clinton and ahead of Dole.
But we need a great deal of help, and people can write letters to the editor, newspapers, letting them know that this alternative exists, that Harry Brown has solutions that ought to be heard in the debates.
Call into other radio talk shows that you hear.
Whatever you can do to make people aware that this alternative exists is going to help boost me in the polls and eventually get me into the debates.
Alright, well here's something that might help, Harry.
I've got a New York Times News Service Article in front of me, it's entitled, NRA warns Dole it may not back him.
Furious that Bob Dole's backed off his opposition to ban on assault weapons, officials of the NRA threatened Wednesday to withhold the organization's endorsement of his presidential campaign.
and they just may uh... do it uh... harry and the question is would you
uh... seek or accept the backing of the and or a or certainly i would accept anybody's endorsement uh... and
it is the particular It's just that you don't denounce it, because people have the right to make their own decisions, and if somebody chooses to vote for me, it's not up to me to tell him that he can't vote for me.
I think that the NRA would be very, very wise to withhold that endorsement, even if Dole changed his mind and came back and said, gee, I made a mistake.
I really would work to repeal the assault weapons ban, as long as the NRA will continue to support Republican candidates no matter what happens.
Then, the Republican candidates are never going to have to cater to the NRA or to take them seriously, because they consider them to be in their pocket.
And it isn't enough just to withhold support, but to give support to Harry Brown, the Libertarian candidate, would be the most powerful thing the NRA could do to make sure that it's message is taken seriously in the future.
Alright, so with open arms, you would welcome it?
Of course!
And there is no question about it, you might as well say it right here again, you would actively work To overturn the assault rifle ban, yes?
Oh, of course.
And the thing that is different between Bob Dole and me is that Bob Dole is obviously making a political calculation.
So even if he says that he's changed his mind and he will support the repeal of the assault weapons ban, there is no assurance that that's what he will actually do because tomorrow the polls may change again and he may waver back over onto the other side.
Plus, all of this is just electioneer nonsense.
What the NRA needs Is someone who is so wedded, so committed to the Bill of Rights, that there's no question of what he's going to do once he's in office.
And it isn't enough just to support the Second Amendment.
It's got to be a candidate who supports the first, the second, and all the way through to the tenth, so that you know that he believes in these things and that nothing is going to budge him off of it.
If he just simply says, well, I'm a gun rights advocate, I own a gun myself, I like to hunt, I do this, that, and the other thing.
You know, you don't have in your pocket then a man who is really going to stand firm when the political heat starts coming.
The Democrats have the same problem on the other side.
There are organizations that the Democrats take for granted, and until those organizations are willing to just sever their ties with the Democrats and say, look, you're not giving us what we want, we're not going to vote for you anymore, the Democrats will not need to worry about that support and they will not need to cater to them.
Alright, what does Harry Brown say to the black voter?
Oh, there is so much to say to the black voter.
In fact, somewhere during this campaign, I am going to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation.
Of all of the things that we are going to do to free blacks from the inner city terror that they live in now, there are a number of things, and the war on drugs, so that their inner cities are no longer war zones.
End welfare, not as we know it, but end federal welfare completely.
End the minimum wage law, which keeps young blacks from getting on the first rung of the ladder and so that they never do get a good job.
End the income tax, of course, which is going to make more jobs available, but also the income tax as it stands now is a deterrent to getting off of welfare.
uh... bring about a read uh... a return of family values by repealing the income
tax so that families have the resources to raise their children and the values
that they believe in not bill clinton or bill dole's apart pardon me about dole's
values uh... keep getting these folks mixed up
It's easy.
There are so many things that we can do.
It has been a tremendously cruel joke that has been played on blacks in this country by Democratic politicians especially that have postured as friends of the black man and yet everything that they do is designed to Whether by hook or crook or by intention or by accident or by ignorance has been designed to keep the black people down in this country.
Ending the war on drugs, for instance, would do so much just to restore the dignity of people in the black community who are being hassled by DEA officers, by local law enforcement, You know, a black man walks into an airport and pays cash for an airline ticket and he's in real trouble.
He's going to wind up in a detention room, searched, he's going to lose the money, he's going to have to sue the government to get it back.
Why?
Because any black man who's got $400 in his pocket in cash must be a drug dealer.
Harry, try this one on for size.
When I was young, I'm 51 now, there was discrimination.
There was mostly segregation, and there was some animosity between the races, but there wasn't much mixture.
That was one kind of discrimination.
That was then.
This is now.
Now, today in America, Harry, we seem to have a new kind of hatred If you will, a new kind of animosity that's building and building and building to the point that there's a lot of people out there worried about race wars.
So something has changed.
It's not your grandfather's discrimination.
It's something new, and it's a hatred, and it's really ugly.
It's a fear that the other side is going to get control of the government and impose its way upon you.
And it doesn't just apply to race relations, it applies to gender, it applies to class, rich against poor and poor against rich.
It applies to age, young versus old.
What we've created in Washington is a powerful jackpot, and everybody is fighting over it.
That's why we have so many lobbyists in Washington.
And we've got to take away the jackpot, and that will take care of the lobbyists.
But we also have to take away the power of the government to impose one side's set of values on everybody.
Because we are all scared to death that the other side is going to get the upper hand.
We're scared of homosexuals because they're going to inflict their way upon our children.
Homosexuals are afraid of heterosexuals because they're afraid that their activities are going to be outlawed or in some way discriminated against through government.
Alright, there's a good place to stop you.
Let's talk about homosexuals for a moment, alright?
There is a Defensive Marriage Act winding its way through the legislative system at the present time.
It is a reaction to what might occur in Hawaii, in the Supreme Court of Hawaii, then of course the other states would be required to respect it, then all of a sudden homosexuals would be able to be married, as heterosexuals now are able to be, and what would your position on the Well, you know, I've read through the Constitution, and there must be something defective in my copy of it, because there is nothing in there anywhere that authorizes the federal government to have anything whatsoever to do with marriage.
And in fact, there's nothing in there allowing it to have anything to do with a lot of things, but certainly not marriage, love, personal relations.
of renting of facilities from rental facilities or employment, none of these things.
The federal government has no business in this whatsoever.
And we once had a federal system in this country where states set their own rules and people
gravitated to the states that were most compatible with their rules.
And when that happened, then there was a certain competition among the states.
And that tended to keep taxes low.
It tended to keep government out of people's lives.
It tended to make it necessary for states to attract the most productive people to create
a climate that was conducive to those people.
But now we have these enormous bills that are passed from Washington and are imposed
upon everybody across the country.
And the only way you can evade them is to go to Mexico or Canada, and that's no solution.
But to get back to the point, the federal government simply has no business in this and we have got to put a stop to passing laws just to do things that we like.
Sometimes the federal government seems to pass a law that we like, but government doesn't work.
And nothing that it ever sets out to do turns out the way it's supposed to.
It's war on drugs has escalated drug use in the country.
It's war on poverty has expanded poverty many times over.
Every war that it declares, it loses one way or the other.
And we just have to quit going to Washington to solve these problems.
So your answer is you wouldn't support that bill?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes, that is my answer.
Have I become too much of a politician since we first met?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm sorry.
I should have just said no, and here's why.
I thought that would be your answer, and again, I would agree with you.
We haven't gotten to the areas of disagreement.
We'll get there.
Here's another one.
Same sort of class.
Idaho.
Now, you know, we've got a really big, big problem with teen pregnancies in America.
Over 300,000 a year.
And of that number, the great majority, 90%, are better end up on federal welfare of one sort or another.
In Idaho recently, there was a young lady, 17-year-old child, I guess, and a 16-year-old.
He got her pregnant.
The authorities in Idaho charged this young lady with fornication.
Both of them, I guess.
She decided to fight it.
And her position basically was, You're out of your minds if you want to prosecute me on, and they did, on a charge of fornication, then I want equal enforcement and I want everybody, then minor alike, charged with fornication when they have sex outside of marriage.
So this kind of law, I take it, would be another one that, even though it sounds good and it's well intended, is all wrong.
Well, it's completely unenforceable.
All you could do is pick off somebody here and there and try to make an example of them, but it's almost ludicrous.
It amazes me to hear that such a law still exists in the United States.
I imagine there are probably still a few states that have laws against adultery.
This one's 75 years old, Harry.
Yeah.
Well, every once in a while, a local sheriff drags up an old law that has never been enforced and suddenly enforces it, maybe because it was his niece or somebody else who was involved.
But of course, I'm running for a federal office, so I'm primarily concerned this year about what the federal government does.
But libertarians everywhere, of course, would reject such a law.
So you would then find yourself probably agreeing with the ACLU on that?
Yes, and I would find myself agreeing with the ACLU on a number of issues and disagreeing with them on some others.
Not because I think they're too permissive, but on other issues they're actually promoting more government rather than smaller government.
Alright, let's get on to a rough one.
Drugs.
Harry, I think that I've watched the drug campaign and more in this country for years when it was really being fought.
Now when it seemingly is half-heartedly, if that, being fought.
And I've always thought marijuana as a drug was probably, arguably, less harmful than alcohol.
Even fully legalized would be less harmful to the economy than alcohol.
That's not to say there wouldn't be harm, because there is harm, but less harmful than alcohol.
So there's a case for decriminalizing marijuana.
Plus, it prevents the lie being told to our children Which is, your brains fry on marijuana, and the kids find out, gee, my brain didn't fry, I was lied to, and so then it makes it all the easier for them to go on to cocaine or heroin or crack or whatever is, PCP, whatever is out there.
But these harder drugs, these harder drugs, Harry, libertarians, this is where the split always occurs.
Libertarians, I do believe, want all drugs legalized.
Am I correct?
Well, we come back again to the fact that government doesn't work.
And we can say what government ought to do, and we can say, gee, in this particular area, I think there should be a law.
And we can go on and talk about all the things that we want government to do, but we have to keep coming back to the unalterable fact, which is that government doesn't work.
There is a demand for drugs in this country.
There has always been a demand for drugs.
Government cannot stop it.
Just passing a law doesn't do it.
The difference is, That before we had drug laws in this country, the demand was so much less than it is now, because there weren't pushers on high school campuses pushing these drugs on kids, trying to create a cash cow.
Because once it's illegal, there is then a component in the black market, a component in the price, for evading the law.
And it then becomes profitable to have pushers on high school campuses hooking kids on these drugs.
Before we had drug laws, we didn't have muggers on the streets trying to support a $100 a day habit.
Before we had drug laws, we did not have gangs financing their activities with drug sales and fighting over monopoly territories.
We didn't have children killed in drive-by shootings.
We didn't have cracked babies.
We didn't have overdose problems.
We didn't have any of these things until the war on drugs started in the 1960s.
There actually was a time in this country when there were no drug laws whatsoever and any child could walk into a drug store and buy heroin.
Can you imagine that?
Just buy it off the shelf as a pain reliever or sedative just the way Bayer sells aspirin today.
And yet, children didn't go in the stores and buy heroin.
Despite the unrestricted availability of drugs, there were no drug problems as we know it today.
Of course there were people who took heroin.
Of course there were people who smoked opium, if that's what you do with opium.
But that was a nation, Harry, of greater morality, greater individual responsibility, all the things Libertarians talk about.
That was then.
And I'm sorry, Harry, but this is now.
And we don't have a nation made up of those kinds of people.
Now, formulate your answer to that.
We're at the bottom of the air.
We'll be right back.
And you can answer it any way you want.
You're listening to the Libertarian candidate for the presidency of the United States.
Somebody who should be listened to.
So keep your dial, as the saying goes, right where it is.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
on this somewhere in time.
I'm going to be doing a lot of research on this.
Music You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 17th, 1996.
My guest is Libertarian candidate Harry Brown.
This is interesting stuff.
Stay where you are.
we will get to the phones.
Somewhere in time with Ark Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks.
www.arkbell.com Alright, back now with Harry Brown, subject drugs.
Let's get it over with Harry.
Does this mean Harry could sell Art heroin?
Art could sell Harry crack?
No problem.
Yes it would, but why would we?
We would be competing with Bayer or SmithKline or some other company that would be selling it at a fraction of what it sells for today because in any legal market competition pushes the price down to where there is a very thin profit margin.
But when you have a black market that is trying to evade the law, then you have gigantic profits in there and it becomes Then valuable to have pushers pushing this on people, trying to hook them, trying to get new customers that way.
Let's say American manufacturers begin manufacturing, selling drugs in drugstores.
Okay, fine.
Would it be legal then for ART to get an APSAC and bring back an APSAC of a very cheap heroin from Mexico?
I suppose so, but I don't know why you would do so.
Well, because I could undercut U.S.
prices, no doubt.
Oh, well, you could do that with any product.
That's always a possibility, but it usually works out that if you bring it back, it's going to cost you as much to do that as the difference in the price, and you're not really going to accomplish anything.
The problem is that it's the illegality that creates the profits, that creates the market, that creates the problems in this.
And if you just make marijuana legal, for instance, then all of the traffic in marijuana will suddenly switch over to cocaine.
And then if you make cocaine legal, then all the traffic will switch over to crack, and make crack legal, and it'll switch over to heroin.
What you have to do is to make them all legal.
And some people say, well, wouldn't you at least make it illegal for children?
No, because if you make it illegal for children, then all of the criminal activity that is focused on adults today will be focused on children.
And we are in a situation here where our cities are being destroyed.
We can no longer afford to turn and look away from this.
We have to face up to the fact that this is all a let's pretend game.
That the war on drugs has done nothing except expand drug use in this country and we can no longer afford it.
We are destroying America.
We are destroying American citizens.
So you would end the war, period?
Absolutely.
When I was a child, I could walk through the small town outside of California where I lived at 10 o'clock at night without any fear whatsoever.
There were no muggers, there were no gangs, there were no pushers, none of those things.
Now, crime has developed for reasons other than the war on drugs, but the war on drugs is obviously, without question, the biggest impetus that has created the crime wave that we have suffered in America the last 30 years.
Most people listening to this broadcast are too young To know what it was like to live in a safe city.
I remember it, Harry.
Let's take a 16-year-old who's out selling drugs right now, making hundreds of dollars a week, if not thousands.
Lots of money.
So, Harry Brown legalizes drugs.
And he can no longer make hundreds of dollars selling drugs.
Now, is this little guy going to go marching over to McDonald's and say, boy, I guess that's it.
I'm out of business.
I'm going to have to go flip burgers.
Here I go.
Not all of them will.
Some of them will look for other criminal enterprises, but a great many of them will because the drug market is such an easy, simple way to get into this.
And, you know, some gangs, for instance, that are being financed now with drug money may turn to numbers or prostitution or something of that sort, but there are already people in those businesses and they're going to have a tough time muscling into those.
I live in a place where prostitution is legal, Harry.
My little town has A couple brothels.
A few more down the street.
Would you legalize prostitution?
Well, that's not a federal issue, but if I were running for governor of California, I probably would.
I would probably want to see it happen.
Whatever you try to have the government do, you are not going to get, and you are always going to get side effects that you don't like.
Here's an easier question for you.
Libertarians, generally, Do you become eligible for federal election matching funds, but don't accept them as a matter of principle, correct?
There is a little bit of dissension on that within the party, but yes, you're essentially correct.
I qualify for matching funds just like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Pat Buchanan did, but unlike them, I turn them down because I don't believe in welfare for individuals, for corporations, and certainly not for politicians.
That's very principled.
The second part of the fact says, it's true.
This is the kind of idealism which is going to prevent a libertarian from ever being elected.
You need money to be elected, lots and lots of it.
Why not use the system's money to overthrow it?
After Harry is president, then he can work on eliminating federal financing of elections.
After I'm elected president, I can become an honest man again.
Yeah, that's what he's saying, alright.
Obviously, if I will give up this principle, then you have no way of knowing what other principles I'm going to give up in the quest for some kind of expedient solution.
The important thing is you know now that if I will not take the 30 pieces of silver in order to get elected in the first place, then I'm certainly not going to sell out once I'm safely in office.
This is the best way I have of proving to you that I mean what I say, and that when I get into office, I'm going to reduce government drastically to a fraction of its present size, and I will stand up to Congress.
I will have the will and determination to do what is necessary to make government smaller, something that no president in my lifetime has done.
And understand that even if I don't get elected this year, if I get 15 or 20 percent of the
vote, we're going to have the balance of power in America and we're going to change the face
of politics forever.
Because the politicians will then know that you have someplace else to go, that they don't
have you in their pocket.
And if that happens, then they're going to have to shape up to a certain extent.
But finally, they will shape up for good when we have a Libertarian Congress and a Libertarian President, and whatever we accomplish this year lays the groundwork for electing Libertarians to Congress in 98 and electing a Libertarian President in the year 2000.
Okay, well, here's something I want to ask.
I would ask you how you would, if you get in the debate, you would debate the candidates.
Now, with reference to Bob Dole, I don't think there'll be a problem.
You're very articulate.
Bob Dole couldn't even take on Katie Couric.
But we have a president, Bill Clinton, who, though he is not favorite of many, he's almost the monster from the id, Harry.
He's the perfect creation of a politician.
He really can campaign well.
How would you take this guy on?
I wouldn't attempt to take him on.
I would talk directly to the American people.
But every time that Bill Clinton tried to pull his Compassion Act, I would say, if you want to be compassionate, start doing it with your own money and not with the taxpayer's money.
And start being compassionate about the people who work hard every day of their lives and do not have a cushy job at the taxpayer expense like you do.
And you're taking their money and you're posturing with it.
But the important thing is to talk directly to the American people and say, what would you do with the money that you're paying in income tax now once it's no longer drained away from you?
Would you put your children in a private school where you can have the values that you want taught without having to fight with the Board of Education?
Would you save up for that business you've always wanted?
Would you support your favorite charity or cause or support your church in a way that you never could before?
What is it you're going to do with that money?
Because I swear to you, That once I am President of the United States, I will not rest until we repeal the income tax, and every dollar you make will be yours to spend, to save, to give away as you see fit, and that you will once again control your life, control your resources, control your own freedom, control your own destiny.
That's a very powerful message.
The President...
You know, Harry, don't you, what partial birth abortion is?
It's an abomination.
An abomination, yes.
And that must come close to challenging libertarian principle.
How do you stand?
It unfortunately is not a federal issue.
There is nothing in the Constitution that provides for the federal government to get involved in crime control in any way whatsoever.
And it is allowing the federal government to get into crime control that has expanded crime in this country and created so many problems.
I hope that people will realize That a war on abortion is going to be no more successful than the war on drugs or the war on poverty.
In fact, if we were to declare a war on abortion, given the federal government's record, you can guarantee that within 10 years, men would be having abortions in this country.
Alright, the FDA, Harry, a different kind of drug, legal drugs, really they're not much different in a lot of ways, but there are a lot of new drugs that come out.
If the FDA was gone and Uncle Harry's Pharmaceutical House could turn out anything... I didn't mean to say Harry, I should have picked Peter.
Uncle Peter's Pharmaceutical House could turn out any sort of little drug at all.
And that drug turned up to be hurting people.
In other words, is there a legitimate reason for something like the FDA to exist?
We wish there were.
We wish that the FDA had the power to make these decisions correctly.
But the fact is that whenever you turn anything over to the government, it becomes a political issue.
And everything is decided on the basis of politics rather than science, on the basis of morality or anything else.
Everything becomes a political issue.
And let me give you an example.
You're an FDA Commissioner, and there's some drug that you're trying to decide whether you should approve.
One person on your staff says, well, you know, they sell this thing in Europe, they've been selling it for a year, they've had no problems whatsoever.
Another person on your staff says, well, but you never know, in a year or two somebody might come up with a side effect and die, and if that happens, They will drag you before Congress, they will pillory you, the press will crucify you, you'll lose your job, just that and the other thing.
And so you keep it off the market another couple of years, and what happens during those couple of years?
20,000 people die because that life-saving medicine was not available, because you know that if you keep it off the market and people die no one
will ever hold you accountable but then there was on the market and one person
died then you will be in real trouble what about the little mind
i mean there are there have been serious problems of course the little mind
was approved by the fda
and then suddenly it turned out that it caused birth defects
and uh... and the american people of course immediately quit buying it
because the american people are not stupid uh... the whole concept of federal regulation is that we
are all dysfunctional children who do not know how to make
decisions we do not know how to delegate responsibilities we don't know how to do
anything and that we we would just go out and buy rotten meat and eat it merrily
along that we would uh... fly on unsafe airplanes where the airlines could not
prove to us that they were safe that we would buy uh... medicines that uh...
would be bound to kill us when in fact the american people are a heck of a
lot smarter than the politicians are
But maybe they're not as responsible as that America you talked about that you remember, and I do, too.
Of course they're not, because individual liberty and personal responsibility go together.
And when you take away individual liberty, people lose the ability to be responsible.
But you know something?
Give them back their liberty, and the next day they're suddenly responsible again, because they're feeling the consequences.
Yeah, but they're not responsible the next day, Harry, and the example I would give you is the Soviet Union.
I interviewed Luver Brezhnev here, the niece of Leonid Brezhnev, a couple of weeks ago, and it was an interesting talk, and she said, you know, we went from no freedom and government doing everything for us to the precise opposite.
With what she said was almost too much freedom.
Not that she wants to go back, but too much freedom.
And it's resulting in quite a bit of anarchy in Russia right now.
I'm going to go see it for myself shortly.
Wouldn't roughly the same effect take place if Harry Brown became president?
In other words, all of these restrictions and laws and federal government intervention would be gone.
And here we've got a nation full of Arguably, more irresponsible citizens than we once had, there would be a period of anarchy.
Well, there are several things to be said about that, and I'll try to be as brief as I can.
In situations like Russia, it's very much like the deregulation of the savings and loan industry back in the early 80s.
What happens is you have a partial change, and the result of that is that government is still there, distorting everything.
But freedom gets blamed for it because it appears to be more free than it was before.
In the case of the savings and loans, what happened was they allowed savings and loans
to make investments that they couldn't make before, but at the same time, they raised
the deposit insurance limit from $40,000 to $100,000, which ended private regulation,
which was the thing that was keeping the savings and loans in line.
Now, the savings and loans no longer had anybody looking over their shoulder except the government,
and government doesn't work, and government doesn't prevent disasters like that.
The result was that the savings and loan industry collapsed, and private enterprise got blamed
for it, deregulation got blamed for it, and in the same way, a lot of what's going on
in Russia is being blamed on freedom, when in fact, there is still a very, very strong
state there that is making laws, that is making rules, and preventing people from working
out the problems that exist there.
But let's come back to the United States.
What are we going to do in this country?
Are we going to create a transition program managed by politicians and bureaucrats, take us from here to where we want to go?
We know that isn't going to work any better than any program that has worked in the past.
Government doesn't work and government transition programs always fail and they always get aborted before you get to the promised land.
The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 were supposed to be three years of tax cuts, 81, 82 and 83.
Well in 82 they raised taxes.
In 83 they raised taxes again.
You cannot trust politicians for any kind of a transition program that is supposed to take you to less government.
It just simply will not happen.
So you don't want to tinker under the hood.
You want to just pull the hood up, detach it, yank the engine out, roll it together.
Right, and replace it with a smaller motor.
That's it in a nutshell.
One last thing about the FDA, if I may, because we've sort of left people hanging there with apparently no protection.
We're not going to take medicines unless we have some assurance that those medicines are safe for us.
So what are we going to do?
We're going to ask our doctors.
And what are our doctors going to do?
They can't monitor every test themselves.
They in turn will find agencies that they will have confidence in.
And those agencies probably will be backed up by insurance so that if something does happen to you as a result of taking a medicine, you probably will be automatically insured by the product rather than your own insurance policy.
The FDA does not take care of people when it makes mistakes.
It just says, oops, and next time we'll do better.
But private companies are put in the position where you will not do business with them unless they can prove to you that what they are offering you is safe.
Okay, so your position is as a libertarian.
There would be a period of anarchy, to strong a word, perhaps, disruption, enjoyment of No, I don't really think there would be.
For one thing, let's just walk through this.
I'm running for president.
in the street. That's right. That it would eventually though straighten itself out.
No I don't really think there would be. For one thing, let's just walk through
this. I'm running for president. You know what I stand for.
Somehow against all the odds I get elected in November and immediately the press
says well he's going to change his band now now that he has to face
reality and actually do something about government.
But I don't.
By January, people begin to realize that I'm serious.
They begin to realize it because of the proposals I make to Congress and so on.
But it's going to take several months to get those through Congress.
But during that time, It becomes apparent that one way or another this is going to happen.
That Congress is eventually going to cave in.
That Congress is going to have to do something to accommodate these demands because this is why I was elected.
So along the way, what's happening of course is that American companies realize what's
coming ahead and they want to get ahead of their competitors.
So they immediately start trying to expand their workforce to accommodate this.
They start recruiting people who may be on welfare now, may be working for the government
now.
In other words, the expectation of what's going to happen in the future will bring it
into them.
And the orderliness that would take place after this period of anarchy, as you say,
will actually be brought into the present.
This is the way things always work in the economy.
The price of an investment today does not reflect the value of that investment today.
It reflects the anticipated value of that investment in the future.
And that's the way business works.
So you would have an automatic transition period, except it would be the marketplace
that would be providing the transition and not the politician.
Harry, one of the reasons, you right now are being heard on about 278 radio stations nationwide and heard very clearly.
And your message is getting out.
And it's wonderful.
If we didn't have the Federal Communications Commission, it may well be that Harry Brown wouldn't be heard, Art Bell wouldn't be heard, and a lot of other people wouldn't because there would be anarchy on the broadcast bands, AM and FM and so forth.
What do you say?
Well, that's sort of like saying if there were not a Federal Trade Commission, then Sears would invade Montgomery Ward.
Sears doesn't stay out of Montgomery Ward's doors because of the Federal Trade Commission.
It stays out of because we have trespassing laws in this country, and somebody trespasses on your property, you call the police.
If somebody trespasses on your waiting line, you call the police.
You don't need a federal agency for this.
all you need to do is to respect property rights and property rights are the basis of our common law in this
country and you're going to see what you've got the public airwaves
the public airwaves so that the airwaves are no more public than then uh... your
property is where it where your house is uh...
all that is is that it's not public airwaves well i don't understand i'm
dominated airwaves where government parcels that out of the government had
created these when in fact airwaves exist and they're discovered by private
individuals yes uh... and uh...
as with any other kind of land or property but they are there who should claim property
They are parceled out with the public good in mind, and those who apply and get licenses must prove they serve the public interest.
Interest, as defined by the politicians.
And you know who they are.
Yeah, I do.
All right, Harry.
Hold on.
We're going to come back, and when we do, we will take calls.
And believe me, we'll get calls.
Every line's been ringing since minute one.
So, Harry Brown, back in a moment.
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
I'm going to be doing something called the Carl Sagan Show.
I'm going to be doing a show called The Carlyle Show.
you you
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Good morning, my guest is Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Brown.
And we're going to get back to questions and your phone calls coming up in just a very few moments.
The new version of the Coast to Coast AM app is here, now available for Android as well as iPhone.
For Coast Insiders, it offers the ability to download the most recent shows, so you can listen to them at your leisure.
The new app also has listen live and streaming features, plus recaps, contacts, and upcoming show info.
Coast Insiders with Android system 4.0 and above, or iPhone.
Check out our new app at the Google Play or iTunes stores, or link from the Coast website.
Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM.
You know, in the days of our parents, they never would have questioned government.
Nowadays, people are beginning to say, you know what?
Something's wrong.
I'm not happy with this.
I mean, what's going on here?
Why are they so obsessed with trying to control us?
Well, I personally think there are tremendous numbers of people out there who know they're not being told the truth and no one is talking to us that we need to help each other.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 17th, 1996.
Uh, Harry Brown, are you there?
Yes, I am.
Good, good, good.
So, no FCC.
Oh, we're still with the FCC?
Well, I just wanted to finish up on that.
It's close to my heart.
Let me ask you again what I asked at the beginning of the show.
Would you give up your favorite federal program if it meant you'd never have to pay income tax again?
Yeah.
I would.
I would.
And I think most people would answer that way.
I really do think they would.
That's what I found around the country.
Yeah.
Well, then we've got to get your message out.
And again, I'm going to make you do it.
Give out your 800 number, please.
Oh, do I have to?
You have to, yes.
Okay, it's 1-800-272-1776.
That's 1-800-272-1776.
And we'll send you information on the campaign, including seven ways you can help Harry Brown get into the presidential debate.
One of them is money.
I mean, Harry Brown is not taking federal matching funds.
He's turned them down.
That really is an amazing thing to me, Harry.
It must have been a tough choice.
As you said, there was some dissension about it in your party.
Yes, it was not a tough choice for me.
I could not have imagined from the very beginning taking the funds, but some people advised me that I ought to, but it never was a question in my mind.
Alright, here comes a hard foreign policy question for a Libertarian.
Harry Brown is present.
The situation in Russia deteriorates.
Boris Yeltsin kicks the bucket.
She's probably going to do anyway pretty soon.
Alexander, I think it is, Lebed, turns out to be not such a nice guy, resumes the war in Chechnya.
There become a big problem.
Harry stays out of Chechnya, right?
Of course.
We wouldn't accomplish anything there any more than we do in Bosnia or Haiti or any place else.
Okay, bear with me.
Harry pulls all foreign troops home, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Levitt turns out to be crazy, gets influenced by Zhirinovsky and others.
Hostilities break out, it ends up a nuclear missile is fired and destroys London.
London, England.
Harry Brown, Libertarian.
Mr. President, what are your orders?
Well, government is very good at getting us backed into a corner where we have no choice but to go to war.
And so the first thing I would do, once I take office, is to put up a reward of $50 billion or whatever seems to be the appropriate figure to get a missile defense.
Not by turning it over to the Department of Defense, by offering it as a reward to the first company that can
demonstrate a working missile defense.
And we put that in place just as fast as possible so that we don't have to be afraid of something
like what you said.
Because if we are defended against a missile defense and it is eventually space-based,
then that's going to defend London and it's going to defend the rest of the world, even
though that's not what they're asking for and even though we're not trying to be the
world's policeman.
We would intercept missiles on their way up rather than on their way down.
That's a damn good answer, Harry.
Of course, that's going to take money, which you think then would come from private sector.
You would offer a reward, as you say.
Yes, it would be developed at a private expense rather than a taxpayer expense.
The taxpayers would pay for it only when we knew it worked.
Ronald Reagan said we needed a missile defense, turned it over to the Department of Defense, and now 12 years later, 13 years later, and I don't know how many tens of billions of dollars have been spent, we're no closer to it than we were then.
It's true.
Let's take some calls.
I promise.
We've got to do that, so let us do it.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hello there, going once.
Yes.
Yes.
Where are you, please?
This is Lee from Langdon.
Langdon what?
Langdon, North Dakota.
Alright.
Yes, I was wondering what his opinion is on the recently passed Telecommunications Decency Act.
I was the only presidential candidate, the only visible presidential candidate, who spoke out against the Communications Decency Act, which would have censored the internet.
And it was passed by Republicans and Democrats.
And I vowed that on my first day in office, I would pardon everyone who had been found guilty under that act.
And then, of course, it went to court and the court has blocked implementation of the act as a violation of free speech.
Government doesn't work.
The day that that act went into effect, hackers on the internet were already figuring out ways around it.
Of course.
Of course.
And I think it entirely proper that the major portions of it, I believe, will be overturned because of the First Amendment.
I mean, it's really a no-brainer.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hello there.
Going once, going twice.
I think some of these people may have died of old age.
What?
No, it's just that we don't screen calls, Harry.
We just let them ring, and after ringing for, I don't know, two or three minutes, maybe you as president could do something about that, by the way.
The phone company cuts people off.
They don't allow them to just eternally ring.
Ring forever.
Yeah, they don't anymore.
That changed.
Oh, it's obvious we need a law to do something about that.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
Where are you, sir?
I'm in Phoenix, KFY.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, and this is Mr. White here.
And Mr. Brown?
Yes.
I was wondering, have you talked to Mr. Hamlin?
Ken Hamlin?
Yes, sir.
Yes, I was on his show once for just about 20 minutes.
I think you should get on his show again.
I think that would be great justice.
I do too.
He seems to be a fine man and I've read some of the things he's written over the years and he makes a lot of sense.
Okay, just wondering.
Thank you.
uh... thank you uh...
i'm i guess i will say what i've heard earlier today and it may
or may not be true but i've heard that uh...
uh... the ken hamlin show may well be off the air in a couple of months
Oh, that's too bad.
I'm not exactly sure what occurred.
That's a pretty strong broadcast rumor that went out today.
It may be entirely wrong.
I hope it is.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
How are you?
Okay.
Okay, yeah.
Mr. Bass, I have a short question for you.
What do you think of our central bank, and would you keep it, and if not, what would it be replaced with?
Ah yes, the Fed.
The Federal Reserve has been a disaster.
Prices have risen 15 times over since the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913.
And it presided over the worst banking crisis in the history of this country and the worst depression in the history of this country, and we have to do away with it.
I cannot do it by executive order.
I would have to pressure Congress to repeal the Federal Reserve Act, but I would certainly do that and try to get us back on a gold standard so that politicians could no longer manipulate interest rates and the money supply.
Government doesn't work in this area any better than it does anywhere else.
Alright, could a Libertarian president be effective with what would likely be a hostile Democrat and Republican controlled Congress to contend with?
No question about it.
Oh yes.
But suppose for a minute that I couldn't be.
At least we would have somebody on our side up there.
At last we would have a small government president standing up to a big government Congress instead of a big government president caving in to a big government Congress at the drop of a hat.
There are so many things I can do without congressional approval.
On the first day in office, I'll rip regulations out of the Federal Register that have been put there by previous presidents.
I'll bring all the troops home to America, get them out from under United Nations command, end all affirmative action and other discriminatory programs within the federal government.
I will pardon all non-violent drug offenders, all non-violent gun control offenders, all tax evaders, get these people out of prison so that there's room for the murderers, muggers, and rapists who are terrorizing our streets but getting out on plea bargaining and early releases in order to make room for pot smokers in the prison.
I will do so many things.
I will confront Congress, and I will just say no to Congress.
Any president who had the will and determination could have turned this thing around at any time in the last 60 years, but we have not had a president who really wanted to do so.
What do you think that President Clinton would do with a second term?
I don't really think it would be that much different from the first term.
The people have said, well, freed of all the restraints of having to run for re-election, he would just be a flaming liberal and so on.
President Clinton just likes power.
I mean, that's what he liked in Arkansas, that's what he likes in Washington, and he loves anything that gives him power and prestige and so forth.
But he wouldn't have any more luck getting his programs through in the second term than he did in the first term.
So he'd be more like a flaming weather vane.
Yes.
Well put.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
Good morning.
Good morning, Colin.
Yes, sir.
Gregory from Detroit.
Detroit.
Yes, sir.
Yes, Harry.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I saw you on C-SPAN at the convention and I was very impressed.
Thank you.
I want to make a few statements here.
I was somewhat saddened when you asked Harry what would he do for the black voter.
No, I didn't ask that.
I said, what would you say to the black people of America?
Yeah, I think that's wrong in my opinion.
When you did that, you excluded every other ethnic group in the country.
I think we, as a citizen in this country, and as Harry should do, is just stick with us American citizens and look to us as a whole, not try to divide us racially.
So, Harry, don't allow these people, not including you, Art Beard on this, but the people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and so forth, to race-pimp this political year.
My question is to you, Harry Brown and Stiff.
What is your opinion and what is the Libertarian's opinion on Clarence Thomas, if he's decided anything wrong or correctly?
Give some examples.
And I'm hoping that in the future, if you're confronted with these race pimps in the black community and whatever community that should approach you, that you stand strong, do not cowtow, do not Have a bit me and become a bit more tell them.
What the problem is in this country, and it is not racism, but a socialist philosophy that has dogged this country for over 60 years.
Alright.
I appreciate your comments very much.
They're very to the point.
With regard to Clarence Thomas, I, in my estimation, and I have not made a thorough study of this, I want to say right up front, I think Clarence Thomas is probably the best of the nine Supreme Court Justices we have now.
I don't believe he's good enough.
I don't believe that he respects the Constitution as much as I want to see a Supreme Court judge respect it.
But he has come down with some decisions in which he has gone against public opinion because he has stood on the side of the Constitution.
It just amazes me, however, that somebody can write some excellent decisions as he did
in the case of the beating that took place in a prison where he pointed out exactly what
the constitutional issue was, but then in some other issue just simply go along with
the majority on something that obviously overrules the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I mentioned earlier in the broadcast, I believe, that my one litmus test for a federal judge
would you obey the Bill of Rights completely?
Would you respect it completely as an absolute, literal document without reading anything into it whatsoever?
And if you would, I probably would appoint you, even if I disagreed with you about some other things.
And the opposite would also be true.
If you don't see it that way, I don't care if I agree with you on a lot of things.
We have to get back to the Constitution as the important first step to restore order in this country.
And by restoring order, I mean binding the politicians down with the chains of the Constitution.
Problem, though, Harry, for example, in a lot of civil wars, and were there to be one that would break out in this country, both sides would waive the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
Well, I think part of the problem is the wrong questions are asked and the right ones are never asked.
both would be uh... saying uh... the government or the anti-government
people that they're fighting for the constitution
uh... and so it's a matter of interpretation is that well i think part of the problem is the wrong
questions are asked of the right ones are never asked if bob dole
should ever be on your broadcast and i can't imagine that he would ever come on
to your broadcast because you ask the right questions and i don't think that the he or bill clinton ever want to
hear the right questions
But I hope that you would ask him when he starts waving the 10th Amendment around saying, we've got to get back to the 10th Amendment.
Of course he's going to stop doing that now that he's trying to move to the center.
But just ask him, well now the 10th Amendment says that the federal government shouldn't be involved in anything that isn't specified in the Constitution.
Right.
I don't see anything in the Constitution about education or health care.
Does that mean you're going to eliminate these completely from the federal government?
And if a reporter would simply ask that question, the charade would be over.
But no reporter will ever ask it.
And that's why people can run on the Constitution and yet have absolutely no intention of obeying it because they never make specific proposals and nobody ever holds them to that and makes them say, exactly, what does this mean?
Pat Buchanan has been the same thing.
We've got to get back to the Constitution in this country.
Well, what does that mean?
What does that mean you're going to stop the federal government from doing?
Well, I'm going to stop them from breaking the Constitution.
In what way?
What departments?
What are you going to get rid of?
What exactly are you going to do?
I've made specific proposals, and I should mention that I have a book called Why Government Doesn't Work.
In that book, I lay out exactly what we're going to get rid of, how we're going to get from here to smaller government, so that you can read it, analyze it, decide for yourself whether this makes sense.
And if it does, then I hope you'll support me.
If it doesn't, then obviously you'll have to choose among the big government candidates.
Harry, let's see what you think, whether you have any inside info for us.
George Will, over the weekend, on the Brinkley Show, ...said that if Bob Dole has four more weeks, as bad as the last four that he had, there very well may be a virtual insurrection at the Republican convention coming in San Diego.
One would imagine the numbers would be narrowing.
The MSNBC poll put Ms.
Clinton at about 24 points, so it's actually at a time when it should be narrowing.
It's getting wider.
It's amazing, and a lot of people are despairing of Bob Dole.
He never seems to let an opportunity to disappoint go by.
What do you think is going to happen at the Republican convention?
Matt Buchanan will be there.
Is he going to be a cannonball, or is this going to be sort of a boring inauguration?
Well, it obviously makes you wonder how the Republicans are going to stand for this, but we have to remember That Bob Dole is not doing anything different now from what he did a year ago.
He's always been this way.
He's always been somebody with no fixed principles who simply goes with whatever it is that he can make a deal for to get something through the Senate to take care of Archer Daniels Midland or some other constituent.
So the point is that these people all knew this back when they were touting him in the primaries, when Governor Merrill was in New Hampshire, was heading up his race there, when the governors of other states were and so on.
What I'm saying is that the party officials Uh, knew this about Dole a long time ago, and they still wanted him as the candidate, and that isn't gonna change at the convention.
Uh, he is too entrenched, he has too much power, he has too many connections, he has too many favors owed to him, uh, to be possibly displaced at this point at the convention.
He will be the Republican candidate, no matter how bad a candidate he is.
No insurrection, then?
Uh, there may be a small attempt at one by Pat Buchanan or somebody else, but it won't succeed.
Well, in that case, I'm glad I'm going on vacation.
Incidentally, in case I don't get a chance before the program is over, I do hope you have a good time in Europe, and I know you're a little anxious about the flight, but I hope you can relax and enjoy your vacation.
You've certainly earned it.
Oh, well, thank you.
That's very kind of you.
Yes, I'm looking forward to it.
All right, let's see if we've got time for one more before the bottom of the hour here.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hi.
I wanted to ask Mr. Brown... Yes?
If he thought, really, that there was no difference between the Republican Party and the Democrats, who have been in control for 30 years, because the way it's going right now, unless he gets more exposure than he's getting, and this is probably the best radio show for that, the press is still not going to acknowledge the man.
They're going to do the same thing they did to Buchanan.
Um, isn't it just going to give Clinton more... I mean, he's the only guy that... that the Democrats will all vote for Clinton and we'll have Buchanan and Brown and... It just sort of, uh, uh, fragments the Republican candidate.
Uh, it is a very, very good question.
In other words, could you be Buchananized?
And the answer is, of course, you could be.
Think about that, Harry.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 17th, 1996.
This is a special edition of the Coast to Coast AM Show.
It's a special edition of the Coast to Coast AM Show.
Got a black magic wand Got a black magic wand, got a black magic wand.
Got a black magic wand, got a black magic wand.
Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Toast AM from July 17, 1996.
I'm Art Bell.
My guest is a presidential candidate, and one I think actually with a chance.
His name is Harry Brown.
He represents the Libertarian Party, which seems to stand for something.
A real rarity these days, I should say a real rarity, and we're going to ask about that
sort of thing and Pat Buchanan, another man who seems to stand for something even if it's
not a complete agreement, in just a moment.
The new version of the Coast to Coast AM app is here, now available for Android as well
as iPhone.
For Coast Insiders, it offers the ability to download the most recent shows so you can listen to them at your leisure.
The new app also has listen live and streaming features, plus recaps, contacts, and upcoming show info.
Coast Insiders with Android System 4.0 and above, or iPhone.
Check out our new app at the Google Play or iTunes stores, or link from the Coast website.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 17th, 1996.
july seventeenth nineteen ninety six back out of harry browne uh... harry
what about the possibility that uh... as you began to gain some momentum and i can
see that you might this might be your year uh... they would try to do you what they did pat buchanan
Whether you agree or not, I take it you disagree in some areas and agree in others with Mr. Buchanan.
He is certainly a principled man and believes strongly in what he believes in.
So do you.
They would try to do to you what they successfully did to him, would they not?
It's very possible, but I have a weapon that none of the other candidates have, and that is I am offering to change people's lives substantially.
I am offering to get the income tax out of their lives.
I am saying to people, if you will give up your favorite federal programs, you will be free of the income tax forever.
Now, when some people in the media, for instance, taking a worst-case scenario, decide to make up things about me, which I believe they made up things about Pat Buchanan, they still have to deal with the fact that I am offering people to be free of the income tax, to make Social Security safe.
In other words, the presence of real proposals will overshadow a great deal of whatever negative garbage they want to dump on me.
When you don't have that many things to offer, then the negative garbage takes over and becomes the prominent issue.
And you find yourself fighting that all the time.
Whatever it is they want to call me, I'm going to respond by saying yes, but would you give up your favorite federal program if it meant you never had to pay income tax again?
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the FBI is one of our favorite federal agencies.
An airplane just went down.
The latest news is The FBI's terrorist section is now investigating.
That's obviously leaning toward the possibility of terrorism.
While you would bring the troops home, give the world less reason to hate us, if you were president of the U.S.
and somebody put a bomb on one of our 747s and brought it down, what would you do?
Well, it may well be a function of the Department of Defense to have a unit that would investigate things when it appears to be something having to do with foreign policy.
But the idea of having a federal police force is something that was anathema to the Founding Fathers because they were afraid that it would lead, inevitably, to things like Waco and Ruby Ridge, which we have seen.
And they would be aghast at the idea of having all of these different federal agencies, like the DEA, the BATF, the CIA, the FBI, and all these people carrying guns, even carrying them into vitamin stores to make raids and so forth.
Because once you give that kind of power to the federal government, it will corrupt, and it will create a situation where eventually innocent people get killed, and that's what the founding fathers were trying to avoid.
With regard to other things that transcend state lines, crimes, fugitives, the fingerprints of people who may have come from the other side of the country or whatever, you don't need to have a federal agency for that.
The states themselves can subscribe to private or To private agencies, or set up an agency of their own to do this, to make it available to facilitate cooperation between various states.
It does not have to be something imposed by the federal government on everybody.
And that's always the key, is that when the federal government does it, you no longer have any choice.
Then the decision is made.
But if the states themselves set it up, and the agency doesn't work well, then they'd get rid of it and they'd get another agency.
Or there might be competing private agencies.
All right.
Back to the lines.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harriet Brown.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Where are you?
Oh, I'm in Bellingham.
Bellingham, Washington.
All right.
Yeah.
Harry, I'm really thrilled to talk to you.
I missed the beginning of the show, so maybe Art already asked you this question.
But I'm a transsexual and other than that though I'm very very conservative but I'm really upset with the Republican Party's anti-gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender position, where's the Libertarian Party on these issues?
You're right, we did in a way cover it, but go ahead, Harry.
Well, Libertarians believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility, and freedom from
government on all issues at all times.
So we don't say, gee, government's too big over here, but over there we need a law.
And the first and important step that we need in this country is to get back to the Constitution
and bind the government down by it.
And there's nothing in the Constitution that governs personal relationships, personal activity of any kind whatsoever.
This is not an area that the federal government should be in.
I would obviously veto the Defense of Marriage Act as mere posturing by politicians in order to cater to a certain group of people, even though they know it would not have any effect upon the future of the country.
No, I absolutely agree.
I mean, the last place that our government ought to be is in anybody's bedroom.
Absolutely.
Alright, Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hi, I'd like to know if Harry supports California's Prop 178?
187, you mean?
Uh-huh, alright.
The border, good topic.
Yeah, I don't want to appear to be hedging on this.
I have not read the bill.
All I know is what I read in the papers, which means I know very little about it.
But I do support open borders and I do support getting rid of the welfare state because I
think that the problem we have today is not too much immigration, it is too much welfare
state.
And if we dismantle the welfare state, then we're no longer going to attract people who
are coming here just to get on the gravy train.
Instead, we would once again be attracting the people who are fleeing oppression, who
are trying to find a country where they can be free of government and raise their families,
go into business and do productive things and make a way for themselves in this world
which they couldn't do in the old world from which they came.
So what we need to do is not try to solve what seem to be the problems of immigration
by putting more government on top of the problems government has already created.
Let's get rid of the welfare state first and if there's still a problem with immigration, let's discuss it at that point.
So here's where you differ with Pat Buchanan radically.
He'd build a wall, you'd open the border.
Yes, and the wall isn't going to work any better than any other government program has.
I mean, government can't keep drugs out of the country, and it can't even keep them out of its own prisons.
How is it going to keep people out of the country?
They'll find a way to get in.
They always do.
They'll bribe guards, they'll do whatever is necessary to get in.
And if they can't do it themselves, then somebody will go in the business of bribing guards to get these people across the border, just as they do now.
So, I take it you would remove any and all federal restrictions on employers hiring non-citizens?
Absolutely.
The idea of making employers agents of the state to check people's identity cards and all of that is just so contrary to the American way of doing things that I can't imagine why politicians can even discuss this with a straight face.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Where are you, please?
This is KSD St.
Louis.
St.
Louis.
Yes, sir.
Would you ask your guest, please?
He keeps saying government doesn't work.
He's kind of laid off the judicial aspect of it.
What about tort reform?
You didn't hit that hot button.
All right, let's hit it.
Yes, the judicial branch.
Uh, Harry, what would you do there?
Is the color still on the line?
No.
Oh, that's unfortunate because I'm not really sure what he means by court reform.
Do you?
Tort reform.
Oh, tort reform.
I'm sorry.
I thought he said court reform.
Tort reform.
One of the problems we have in this country, of course, is just too many laws.
And when you have too many laws, you have too many lawsuits and you have too many lawyers.
The problem is not avaricious lawyers.
We all want to make money.
We all want to help our families by increasing our standard of living and so on.
And lawyers are no exception.
But the tremendous quantity of laws gives rise to tremendous lawsuits.
And I think if we reduce government and throw out these laws that were really a lawyer's paradise like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1990 and the Clean Air Act and things of this sort, which are just invitations to lawsuits and provide for private lawsuits, God, I love listening to a truly principled person, whether I agree or not.
I really love it, Harry, and that's you.
Do you remember the movie Network?
mental limits on settlements and things of that sort.
Once again, we are using government to solve a problem that government itself created.
So we always need to look first to get government out of the picture rather than bringing government
further in.
God, I love listening to a truly principled person, whether I agree or not.
I really love it, Harry, and that's you.
Now, do you remember the movie Network?
Yes.
You remember when they took our friend into that long mahogany table and there was a sort
of a murky guy down on the other end and he instructed the Network fellow that he was
tampering with the basic forces of nature.
Now, at some point, Eric, somebody like you as president would be so instructed, I would imagine, wouldn't you expect that?
Who's going to instruct me?
Oh, I don't know.
The hidden hand, the people, I don't know, the people at the big desks, I don't know.
Some faceless person's going to step out of the closet and say, now that you're in office, you need to know who's really running this country.
Exactly.
Well, it's possible, but I wouldn't have gone through all of this the last two years and what I'm going to have to go through the next four months just to be facedown by some faceless person stepping out of a closet.
Well, you're close enough to know probably Maybe.
Whether such a thing really exists, such a power structure behind...
Whoever, apparently, is in charge.
Do you tend to dismiss that, or do you embrace that?
No, I do tend to dismiss it, and I hope I don't lose a great quantity of our listeners in saying that.
It is the structure itself that is the conspiracy, not the people behind it.
There are no people behind the curtain any more than the Wizard of Oz was a real entity.
Again, I agree with you, and I'm sure if you embraced it, you probably wouldn't be running.
Oh, that's true.
That's true.
I would be afraid for my life every day.
But the fact of the matter is that it is the structure itself that creates this chaos.
And we tend to think that there is some guiding hand behind it all.
But a guiding hand would have done things considerably differently, I think.
It's just that we've created this giant jackpot and everybody is fighting over it, and it is naive to think that you are going to be able to control it, that you can get the right laws passed that's going to make everything okay.
Because there's always going to be somebody more powerful than you, somebody more politically influential than you are, and it's his values that are going to be imposed upon the country, not your values.
So when you think you're going to do away With the people that are immoral in your eyes, you're going to do away with the corporations that are making too much profit in your eyes.
Whatever it is you think you're going to do, it's going to be overruled by somebody who's got a lot more influence than you do.
So the obvious answer to this is not to gain control of this, but to knock it down to size where nobody can control it.
One thing that very much shocked me about the Buchanan campaign was when it took the turn Against corporate greed.
I mean, I just couldn't believe it.
And in fact, Miss Buchanan was appearing with Union people and it was just absolutely amazing to me for somebody who claimed to be a Reaganite conservative to be doing what Miss Buchanan did.
Did that surprise you?
Well, I can't say it surprised me in that it seemed to come this way gradually.
It was step by step by step.
It wasn't an overnight thing, in which case it would have surprised me and amazed me.
But it seemed to have started in the late days of the 1992 campaign.
And has just been moving steadily in that direction since then, so that now I don't think there is any fixed principle that guides him.
And that doesn't mean that he may not believe very heavily in what he is saying, but it means that there is no single principle by which you can judge how he will come down on some issue tomorrow.
The problem with me is that I'm so predictable.
You know which side I'm going to be on on whatever the issue is that's going to come up tomorrow, next week, or next year.
The very function of a politician seems to be to compromise.
How could you succeed without moving in that direction?
I mean, you're so principled, you're so centered.
When you really got there, and you faced the realities of Congress, the Senate, things you wanted to get through versus things they wanted to do, I mean, how in the world, Harry, would you come to terms with that?
Well, there may have to be compromises on steps, but the difference will be that when I become involved in a compromise, it will mean that I only got half of what I tried to get, meaning we will only reduce the government half as much this year as I intended to reduce it.
The way all the others compromise is that we wind up with half as much more government than somebody else was asking for.
The problem with the Republicans was they began giving away the store the day that they were inaugurated into Congress in January of 1995.
They didn't submit a budget that would make the government smaller, let the Democrats scream and holler, and then compromise by reducing the government only 5% instead of 10%.
They immediately submitted a budget that made the government 4% larger, and then the Democrats
started screaming that it ought to be 5%, and that the Republicans were mean-spirited.
Well, if the Republicans are going to be accused of being mean-spirited, why don't they even
do something in the process to earn the epithet, instead of just saying, no, no, we're not
mean-spirited, we're for big government just as much as the Democrats are, we just don't
think it should grow as fast.
What I want is, if there are going to be any compromises, there are going to be compromises
that mean we don't get as much as we want, not that we gave away more than we wanted.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hi, this is Tim in Minneapolis.
Yes, sir.
You kind of addressed this earlier, but I have another question about it.
Many people really don't want to vote for Dole, but will just because they don't want Clinton.
I'm not convinced that anything is going to change in that direction, but I was thinking, what would Harry Brown think of the idea of having second and third choice on the ballot?
I'd be much more apt to vote for Harry Brown if I knew that if it fell through, I would get my second choice.
I understand what you're saying.
I think that there's a better, more direct way, and that's simply to have a runoff, to have a popular vote and then decide the popular vote by a runoff if somebody doesn't get a majority the first time around.
That way, if you voted for me and Clinton wound up with 48% and Dole got Whatever, 38% and I got 14% or however it played out, you would have your chance to vote for Dole the second time around.
I would feel sorry for you having to vote for somebody you disagreed with so much, but that's another question.
I haven't had a lot of time to think about electoral reform because I've been focused on the system the way it is now and what I need to do to get elected.
But I think that a runoff is probably the best way to end, once and for all, the idea of the spoiler, the wasted boat, and all of these other things.
Why would that be better than what I just suggested?
Well, because it's less complicated, for one thing.
It's hard for people to understand a scoring system in which you give a second choice, a third choice, and so on.
I think it's more simple the other way, but either way is better than what we have now.
I understand what you're saying and I'm certainly not going to argue the point with you.
One more question.
You were talking about the heroin and the cigarettes and I was thinking, do you really
believe that cigarettes, if they, I mean that seems, everybody, I mean there's a lot of
people using cigarettes and I can't imagine.
Alright, well that's a no brainer I'm sure for Harry.
Uh, Bob Dole got in a great deal of trouble, uh, Katie Couric over this, and now, uh, human cigarettes are going to be following the Dole campaign everywhere.
This is the most amazing issue I've seen in years.
When I was 18 years old and started smoking, there were people all over me saying, don't you know those are coffin nails?
I mean, this was back in the early 1950s, before there even was a Surgeon General.
And now they're saying, my gosh, you know, if it weren't for the federal government, nobody would know that tobacco and cigarettes could be harmful to your health.
Thank goodness we have the government to take care of us.
It's interesting, too, that the times when they've slapped huge taxes on cigarettes in some states, the next thing you know there are trucks bringing them in from other states.
There's hijacking.
There are all the things that go along with the drug trade.
That's right.
Actually, if cigarettes were banned, Class A carcinogen totally banned, there would be an increase in drugs probably proportional to a greater Then not that we have with other illicit drugs now, yes?
Oh yes, plus you would have the same kinds of things going on in the cigarette trade that you have now in the drug trade.
There would be, people would continue to smoke and people would continue to sell cigarettes and it would be a criminal enterprise and you'd have gangs.
The only difference would be they'd be delivered in little, little baggies and stuff like that.
Right.
One way or another would get here and people would start dying of overdoses of tobacco because the tobacco would be laced with things that they don't know about in order to make them more powerful because you'd have to try to confine it to as small a space as possible so you'd want to get as much kick out of one cigarette as you could.
A lot of logic there.
Right back with Harry Brown.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in time, coming up.
I'm going to be doing a video on the new
version of the game.
I'm going to be doing a video on the new version of the game.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 17th, 1996.
The one thing we don't have to ask Harry Brown about is the health issue.
We're testing that this morning.
It's a little after 5 o'clock in New York.
First of all, I want to just thank you for bringing everyone out here to Cornucopia.
Just phenomenal knowledge.
I don't know of anyone else that I've ever listened to at radio that just fills my brain and stimulates me.
But, you know, I was listening to the show and I thought to myself, Do you think George, the common citizen such as you or I, really has any hope towards the future of any privacy or anything else?
I think we do.
I think eventually so many people will see the light, see what you see, see what I see, that eventually they'll say enough is enough.
And I think that we do have a future and we're going to win in the long run.
It's going to be bumpy along the way.
It's not going to be easy, but we will get there.
That's my take, and you know what?
As long as I can continue on the airwaves and tell people this, I shall.
Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night.
But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show.
The Coast Insider is your key to a normal life.
For 15 cents a day, you can wake up refreshed knowing that last night's show is waiting for you with podcasting.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Noory and special guests.
The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners.
Visit coasttocoastam.com to sign up today.
Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM.
You know, in the days of our parents, they never would have questioned government.
Nowadays, people are beginning to say, you know what?
Something's wrong.
I'm not happy with this.
I mean, what's going on here?
Why are they so obsessed with trying to control us?
Well, I personally think there are tremendous numbers of people out there who know they're not being told the truth, and no one is talking to us, so we need to help each other.
Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night.
But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show.
The Coast Insider is your key to a normal life.
For 15 cents a day, you can wake up refreshed knowing that last night's show is waiting for you with podcasting.
Listen on your way to work and again on the way home.
Or listen to one of over a thousand archived shows from the past three years.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Noory and special guests.
The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners.
Visit coasttocoastam.com to sign up today.
You'll sleep like a baby knowing you'll never miss your favorite guests and topics ever again.
Remember, a one-year subscription comes out to only 15 cents a day.
Sign up today at coasttocoastam.com.
The new version of the Coast to Coast AM app is here, now available for Android as well as iPhone.
For Coast Insiders, it offers the ability to download the most recent shows, so you can listen to them at your leisure.
The new app also has listen live and streaming features, plus recaps, contacts, and upcoming show info.
Coast Insiders with Android system 4.0 and above, or iPhone, Check out our new app at the Google Play or iTunes stores or link from the Coast website.
Now, we take you back to the past on Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
I really like asking hard questions and getting straight answers.
That's what Harry Brown has been doing.
Art, you said you like to ask hard questions and get straight answers, but you didn't ask the question that you said at the beginning of the broadcast you were going to ask about what's going to happen to the stock market.
Well, I predicted for a long time and gave up.
It's a big mystery to me, but I will indeed ask you.
A lot of churning and moving about.
It's generally gone up.
It almost had a tragedy the other day.
So what do you think?
I don't know.
Next question.
Good answer.
That's really the same answer I give.
Alright, next question is a hard one.
And it is this.
In Hawaii, there is a big sovereignty issue going on right now.
The Hawaiians want sovereignty.
In Texas, there is a group drawing up papers to secede from the Union.
Texas has a strange little clause in their constitution that would seem to possibly allow for such a thing.
Years and years and years and years, Alaska has been circulating petitions for secession.
I lived up there, so I know.
And what would President Harry Brown do if they wanted out?
Well, I believe states should have the right to secede because that's one way of keeping the federal government in line.
States aren't going to secede as long as they get more from the union than they lose.
But when they can't secede, then of course the federal government has no reason to respect the roles of the states.
And the decentralized idea that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created this union.
Well, that's a big issue in California.
I mean, the illegals come across the border.
L.A.
County Hospital has births that are about 65%, I believe, illegal aliens.
And that costs a lot of money.
It costs California a lot of money.
So much that Prop 187 came.
It was going to the courts.
What would your answer to that be?
You would have open borders.
California would be complaining bitterly.
We can't carry this load, they would say.
Well, then don't buy the free services.
That's the answer, is to quit having the taxpayers have to pay for other people's health care and other people's problems.
And if you do that, then people are going to stop coming here, because in many cases they're coming specifically to have babies and to do other things at the taxpayer's expense in California.
And you're right, there are federal regulations that are being imposed upon hospitals and states and other people, making them pay for these things, and we've got to get the federal government out of this area.
Let the people of California decide for themselves, and I imagine the people of California will decide not to support people who come running in from Mexico.
He's to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hello.
I think it has something to do with garbage in and garbage out when you start with a false premise.
I have to say that I think Mr. Brown is starting from a false premise.
I don't think the problem is government.
I think the problem is big business controlling government.
Big business getting itself too much into that control of the government.
And I don't think, for instance, we would hear from the Socialist Workers' Party or the Workers' Will Party to take over C-SPAN or hundreds of stations as they do on the Art Bell Show, precisely because, unlike the Libertarian Party, they don't coincide with the ultra-white wing element of the Republican Party.
I see Mr. Brown, at least on domestic policy, Maybe not international, being Newt Gingrich squared to the 12th power.
And when you ignore the fact that you take the government out of the picture, which is controlled by big business, to turn this pretended blind eye to the thousand ton corporate rogue elephant, which would then not have to go through the middleman.
To dominate our lives, to exercise this total dictatorial control over us.
All right, Caller.
Pause for a moment.
Here we've got a good one, Harry.
This sounds like Bill Clinton in a debate with you.
No, it's not Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton is right-wing himself.
The Republicans are to the right, I think.
All right, all right, all right.
So you're left of Bill Clinton.
Good enough.
All right, Harry, go ahead.
Okay, well, first of all, you said that big business is using government to impose its way upon us, and I agree with you.
In many cases, that's true.
Big business is milking the taxpayer dry.
Archer Daniels Midland gets a subsidy, it seems like, in every bill that passes in Congress, whether it's to do away with discrimination or something to do with health care or whatever it may be.
There's always a subsidy in there for certain companies.
And the answer is to take government out of the picture.
Then you say big business will dominate us directly.
But you don't have to do business with big business.
You can refuse to buy from any company that you want to.
You cannot refuse to buy from the government.
When the government says you're going to pay this tax, you pay the tax.
When the government says you must provide family leave for your employees, you must provide it even if your employees want something more with their employee money than family leave.
You are given no choice when the government makes a decision.
But when big business makes bad decisions, you just simply say, I'm not going to buy from those people anymore.
Who is saying?
have to buy from somebody and we have to work for somebody, they would have absolutely even
the greater control rather than the other government, which is controlled 95% by big
business and influenced 5% by the voter.
We wouldn't even have that electoral slight influence over big business.
We would be a total dictatorship of the CEOs by the CEOs.
Who is they?
You're talking as though General Motors and Ford and Chrysler get together and decide exactly what the automobile market is going to be.
That Microsoft and WordPerfect and all of its competitors get together and impose something upon you.
They don't!
They're struggling against each other and they're competing with each other to try to get you to buy from them.
Ford is very unhappy when you buy a General Motors car.
Microsoft is very upset when you buy WordPerfect instead of Microsoft Word.
Federal Express gets very, very antsy when you start doing business with UPS.
They don't get together with UPS and decide how to divide up the market.
We have no power as consumers to any significant extent.
We're totally at their mercy as working people.
And this idea that we're not going to be paying taxes under your regime is ridiculous because if the theoretical tax on our check is reduced, the businessmen will simply reduce our net pay.
by that much so we come back with that same amount. This is really an attempt to
save, as usual, the Republican tax mantra of giving up even more of a huge
windfall, tax windfall, to big business and to suck the working man into thinking
that he's exploited by taxes rather than as a wage worker, with his wages being constantly slashed. If business can
decide what to pay you, if business can pay you anything that it wants and get away
with it, then why aren't we all working for the minimum wage? Why is it that
some of us make a hundred dollars a week, others make a thousand dollars a
week, others make ten thousand dollars a week?
Because actually, if business could pay anything that it wanted to, then it would be paying the minimum wage to everybody and it would just be government that would be keeping us from getting less than $4.25 an hour since business would gladly pay us $3 or $2 or $1 an hour.
But the fact is that business pays more than the minimum wage because each company is competing with other companies to get the best workers.
There's no connection there because it's a matter of supply and demand, but within that supply and demand they are constantly trying to reduce by downsizing, by forcing people of welfare to use them as a competing army of slave labor that can be used to better down the wage levels.
All of this claims to get rid of the welfare state is another attack.
on wages because once you force millions of people into a scarce job market to
compete for those jobs you deliberately depress the wages of everybody and people
have been conned into actually voting for that and they're cutting their own
throats.
Well, you're covering a lot of ground there and I think we're getting away from the issue but you point out
that businesses is trying to make more profits which is exactly
what you're You want to make as much money as you can for your family, and I don't blame you.
And everybody who works for a company, who manages a company, wants to make as large a profit as possible in order to reward the shareholders and to make as much money for themselves, and we all do.
But the fortunate thing is, That if government is not involved, then the only way we make a lot of money is by providing something that somebody is willing to pay for.
And the way we do that is by satisfying them and finding out what it is they need and want and giving it to them.
Federal Express is successful because it has provided a service that wasn't available before.
Microsoft is successful because it has provided something, it has revolutionized The PC industry.
Absolutely.
You don't need to repeat it.
Harry, your answer was pristine.
He was dead wrong.
Here's a kind of an off-the-wall question, and I'm going to ask it.
It was asked of Jimmy Carter when he was a candidate.
We've got Independence Day, the motion picture.
We've got Roswell.
We've got America suddenly fascinated with UFOs and things that they think the government is hiding.
If you were elected president, would you release whatever information the government has with regard to UFOs or any contact that may have been made or any vehicles that we may be possessing and back-engineering?
Would you do that?
Oh, certainly.
I would open up files of every imaginable kind, not just on UFOs if there are any such files.
There's practically nothing the government has any reason to be secret about, and especially if we create the kind of defense in this country we need where we are invulnerable to incoming missiles, Then we no longer need to feel the need for all kinds of intelligence to know what other countries are doing.
There's very little need for secrecy at all.
Just the normal privacy that would protect the privacy of individuals within the government.
Yeah, but what about this, Harry?
You would have this one space shield that would stop, and I agree we need it, stop something in the ascent stage and blow it to smithereens.
Probably hurting the people who launched against us.
That's a good idea.
But, inevitably, somebody's going to walk across Harry's open border with a suitcase bomb and blow one of our cities to smithereens.
Well, a missile defense... What I'm saying is you need intelligence.
Yes.
A missile defense can't protect against everything.
It can't make a bologna sandwich, either.
But that doesn't mean it should be discarded.
I agree.
But you do need other things, of course.
You do need to try to stop that.
But this is the...
This is really no different from law enforcement in any situation.
It doesn't matter whether a terrorist has come in on a plane and landed at Kennedy and walked into New York City or somebody has come in from New Jersey who's a mobster and walked into New York City.
The situation is exactly the same.
And I don't see where federal law enforcement agencies are any more efficient than local law enforcement are, but we do have a problem when we create federal law enforcement agencies and that we wind up with less accountability and it leads to things like Waco and Ruby Ridge.
And your contention internationally is that because we have our fingers in so many pots, people are beginning to bang us over the head with them.
Yes, of course, as the one way of getting revenge.
I don't see Foreign policy is being a big issue in this campaign, however.
I think that we are inevitably going to come back to the all-important question, which I think is the most important question in politics today, and that is, are you willing to give up your favorite federal programs if it means you'll never again have to pay income tax?
Because we can finance national defense and the judiciary just on the levels of the revenues coming in from tariffs and excise taxes now.
We do not need an income tax if we make the government abide by the Constitution.
And I think that's going to, I'm going to try to make that the most important issue in the country.
And if we can get that issue raised in the debates, if we can get me into the October presidential debate, and make Bill Clinton justify the idea of taxing your income, and make Bob Dole explain why he's so set on keeping Social Security in the hands of the government when it's made such a mess of it and made things so unsafe for our grandparents and parents.
Then I think we can change the face of politics in this country forever.
And I hope that people listening who want to help open up those debates to real issues will give us a call at 1-800-272-1776 so we can let you know how you can help us get Harry Brown into the presidential debates in October.
That's 1-800-272-1776.
Harry, I recently had James Collier on the show.
He wrote a book called Vote Scan.
He contends there is widespread vote fraud in America.
I don't know about that.
Maybe there is, maybe there isn't.
I saw a movie called Nixon the other day.
Have you caught that yet?
No, I haven't.
I've read a lot of bad reviews of it.
Well, at one point Nixon turns to somebody after losing the election.
And said, look, we're not going to contest it.
They stole it fair and square.
Now, do you believe that the voting structure in America is basically sound?
Obviously, there's dead people vote in Chicago, that kind of thing.
But I mean, do you think there are real problems?
Are you worried about that?
Well, I think that anything that is run by government is going to be very inefficient, and it lends itself to corruption of one kind or another.
I doubt that, for instance, Barry Goldwater really did have more votes than Lyndon Johnson, or that George McGovern really had more votes than Richard Nixon.
But in a very close race, such as the Kennedy-Nixon race, corruption might tip the difference.
And I don't know what the answer to it is in the short term.
In the long term, the answer is to reduce government to a size where people are no longer battling over control over it because there's not much to gain from getting control over it.
Indeed.
All right.
Hold on, Harry.
We'll be right back.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
I see them bloom for me and you And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world .
.
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands, saying how's it going They're really saying I'm in love with you
I have made a stride.
I've watched them grow.
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world Yes, I think to myself
I'm going to go to bed.
The End to myself.
Good night.
My guest is presidential candidate Harry Brown.
represents the Libertarian Party.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 17th, 1996.
Thank you for listening.
Bye.
Back now to Harry Brown.
Harry, would you like to do an interview with Katie Couric?
Sure.
Let's talk about tobacco.
All right.
I want to go to the state of the phones for the remainder of the half hour here.
On the first time caller line, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Well, it's good to hear somebody can really talk about the Constitution.
Yes, sir.
Where are you?
Oh, I'm calling from Seattle.
Seattle.
All right.
And the question I've got is this.
1933 War and Emergency Powers Act.
There was a presidential candidate that was running on the Republican side, and he dropped out of Charles Collins.
Do you remember that name?
Oh, Charles Collins, this year?
Out of Georgia, this year.
Yes, sure, I know Charles Collins.
Well, he brought up the fact that he had all the candidates on that, saying, sign off the War Emergency Powers Act, trading with enemies, that sort of thing.
All that sort of thing would disappear as far as the Federal Reserve.
Everything to do with the welfare situation.
And then, of course, we'd be able to get ourselves back to the gold standard.
Well, I think that's a little oversimplified.
All of these things were passed separately, and they weren't passed under the authority of the War Powers Act.
They were just simply passed because congressmen don't pay any attention to the Constitution anymore, and they do not feel themselves limited by it in any way.
But I understand what he was saying, and I understand what you're saying, and I think that we should repeal the War Powers Act, and I would certainly do everything in my power to see that that happens, rest assured.
Alright, good enough.
Uh, let me see.
Let me read this to you and see how you respond.
Art, this is email I got prior to your appearance tonight, Harry.
I'm writing because I have a question that I'd like to hear Harry Brown answer.
I have been a Libertarian Party member since I turned 17 in 1995.
Paid my dues with part of my birthday money.
I was curious about Harry's views on what will become of the Libertarian Party after the 96 elections.
It is my prediction it will become much more popular.
As it already has, and we will see far more moderates in the party.
What do you think?
I'm not sure what he means by moderates.
I guess what he means is people who are devoted to winning elections and implementing the libertarian philosophy politically.
I think that there has been a little bit of a struggle within the party.
On one side are people who believe that if we ever won an election, it must be that we must have sold out our principles.
But I don't believe that.
I think that the only conflict occurs between principle and politics when you do not understand how to sell your principles in a politically persuasive way.
And I think that the party is attracting more and more people who are able to do that, and that's part of the reason the party is in such a good position this year.
And I do agree with the writer of the email message.
that the party will be much stronger as a result of this.
We have a thousand candidates running across the country for federal, state, and local
offices this year.
We have candidates running in a majority of congressional districts in every U.S. senatorial
race and many, many state and local races.
So we will be a presence on the scene, and whether or not I get elected, there are going
to be a lot of Libertarians elected to office around the country this year, and I hope that
one thing that will help that will be a strong national campaign.
And I hope that if you want to help on that score, give us a call at 1-800-272-1776.
Alright, here's a question for you, kind of like yours, only turned around a little bit, Harry, from me.
Harry, is there any principle that you would sell out to become president?
No, because once you sell it out, then you have lost the very thing that you're trying to do.
I'm 63 years old.
I have no interest in becoming a professional candidate or a professional politician.
I want to serve one term in Washington.
Clean up the stables, get this thing turned around, and I want to go home and spend the rest of my years in peace and freedom.
I don't have that many years left.
20, 30 years, maybe 40 if we get rid of the FDA.
But the fact is that if I were to do something in order to get elected, Then what would I have accomplished then?
I would have lost the very thing that I was setting out to do in the first place.
I really do not relish the idea of spending four years in Washington coping with Congress, but it is something that I'm willing to do because I can't see anybody else doing it.
So, if I were to say to you, there would be enough people that would suddenly embrace the Libertarian Party, and you, as the candidate, and this could be indeed the magic year The way the election is going right now, if you would simply give up this insistence on the legalization of drugs, you would say?
I would say that would be impossible, because then people would not know where I stand on anything else.
They would say, well, gee, maybe he would give up the idea of repealing the income tax.
Maybe he would figure the only way out of Social Security is to raise the Social Security tax, or to cut benefits for our parents and grandparents.
This is a cornerstone that the only way we are going to solve problems is by getting government out of these areas, not bringing government more deeply in.
And we have to do something about crime in this country.
This is a scandal that we can't walk through our cities in the evening or the middle of the night.
It is, yes.
If we care anything about our children, we have to repeal and end the war on drugs.
Pardon me for interrupting you.
No, it's all right.
I almost have a romance with what you're saying, Harry, but you know, I worry a little that what you want for America could have been, but can't be now.
And I just, you know, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, it could have happened.
I just, I worry that it couldn't happen today, that things have gone too far.
That we've gone too far, strayed too far, become too dependent, and what you want is what I want.
But I don't know that it would work in America now, and I'm sure you've given that a lot of thought.
Well, in the first place, if I'm elected, it means that the majority of the people in this country want it, and they're going to do everything possible to make sure that it does work.
They're going to be on our side.
We're not going to be fighting the American people.
We're going to have them on our side trying in every way possible to make sure that the transition is proper and that the transition is peaceful and that the transition is prosperous for everybody concerned because that is what they will want too.
I understand, well understand, your feeling about when it becomes too late.
I think there is a time when it becomes too late.
I am convinced now that we have not arrived at that point yet, but that we may be at that
point five years or ten years from now.
That's why we can't fool around anymore, wasting our votes on people who are going to make
government bigger, who are going to add to the liabilities, who are going to make further
promises that can't be kept, that are going to create resentments and can lead to rebellion
and maybe even revolution in this country because of all the broken promises.
So we have to do something about this now and we can no longer afford to play games
by voting against somebody.
To keep him out of the White House, we have to start voting for what we want.
And that is why you're running now.
Absolutely.
And if we do not ask for what we want, we have no chance of getting it.
If we give away the store at the outset and say, well this is all we can hope for, then you might as well forget this whole thing and just make up your mind that you're going to live the rest of your life with a government that gets bigger and bigger and bigger every year.
There's a lot of people that have done that, Harry.
They have determined that America is going to be apportioned out, and they're just going to grab the biggest piece they can get while the getting's good, you know?
Yes, and sometimes people call into talk shows that I'm on and say, don't you understand what you're up against?
You can't fight Congress.
You can't do this.
You can't do that.
In other words, the whole thing is hopeless.
And I always want to ask them, well, why are you even bothering calling into a talk show?
Why are you even listening to this show?
Because they care.
It's hopeless.
They care.
Yes, they do.
They're just very embittered, very upset, angry, frustrated, blah, blah, blah.
And you're touching on a very good point there that perhaps I didn't realize is that, oh, I hate to use this expression, but maybe it is a cry for help.
Maybe somebody is raising these things hoping that I will reassure them.
Of course.
People don't like the way things are going, Harry.
They don't like it.
I understand that.
That's for sure.
And I would never have run if I did not think that way and did not believe that there was a chance to win.
All right.
We don't have a lot of time.
Ease to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hello.
Hi.
My name is J.R.
I'm from York, Nebraska.
Yes.
And if I understand Harry's position correctly, he wouldn't interfere with the state's sovereignty and if the state's Still wanted to criminalize drugs, they would be free to do so, am I correct?
That's true.
We make a terrible mistake in asking the federal government to overrule other levels of government when we think those other levels of government are wrong.
Because we can always move from one state to another, but who wants to move to Mexico to escape the federal government when it is wrong?
Well, you're right.
I think it would be a terrible mistake for your state to continue to criminalize drugs, because what would happen then is criminals would move out of other states and into your state, because they will go where the drug trade is illegal, where they can still make a lot of money off of it, and they cannot make money where drugs are legal.
I guess I disagree on your position on that.
I guess the point I was trying to make is if the federal government goes back to its constitutional positions that the Founding Fathers intended, the states that have the sovereignty to do what they thought was right in their own states.
That's absolutely right.
The federal government has no authority to be involved in law enforcement or crime control in any way whatsoever.
There are only three federal crimes in the Constitution.
Piracy, treason, and counterfeiting.
And aside from treason, Piracy and counterfeiting are mostly the province of the federal government these days, and politicians are the only ones engaging in those acts, pretty much.
Alright.
But one other point there with regard to the state sovereignty.
I'm sorry, it must be getting late at night, it just flew out of my mind, so go ahead Hart.
Alright, let's just move on.
You're simply saying...
That states could do what you would not urge them to do, but you would allow them to do.
It's as simple as that.
I would keep the federal government out of their affairs.
Yeah, good enough.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
How are you doing, Bart?
And how are you doing, Mr. Brown?
Good evening, or morning.
Yeah, morning it is.
Where are you, sir?
This is Rob calling from the home of the Redding-Ripple.
They're already in California, all right.
Yeah.
Hey, I'm a recent, uh, I just left the Democratic Party for the Libertarian Party a couple of months ago, and I'm going to school right now to go into law enforcement, but one of the things that I saw, um, been helping out police and stuff on a few things, is that, um, drugs do cause most of the crime, and, um, you know, I think it'd make it a lot easier on local agencies without all of that, you know, having this You mean that the local law enforcement agencies would be
free then to chase violent criminals instead of chasing pot smokers?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean.
Right, well I agree with you 100%.
The resources will always be limited and to have police officers chasing people in alleged
crimes when there is nobody actually making a complaint makes no sense whatsoever.
The definition of a victimless crime is a crime in which no one complains to the police about it.
Obviously, if somebody steals something from your house, you complain to the police.
But if your neighbor is smoking pot, you don't complain to the police unless you're just a snoop.
But the pot smoker doesn't have anybody complaining because he's not victimizing anybody.
He may be hurting himself, and that's a debatable question, but the point is that he is not hurting anybody else in the process, and to have the police chasing those kinds of crimes means you're taking resources away from chasing the thugs who are terrorizing society.
What do you think of Dr. Koworki?
I think people ought to have the right to decide when they want to take their own life and if they're incapable of doing that and in great pain and somebody offers to help them then so be it.
Obviously there is a danger that a doctor might go over the line but there's a danger that a doctor might perform a slip shot operation on you and kill you in the process.
That's a danger that will exist under any circumstances.
I agree.
I do agree.
I really do.
I'm probably more of a Libertarian, Harry, than I am a Republican.
Well, you sure sound like a Libertarian to me.
Yeah, I know.
I was going to mail you a party card tomorrow.
Well, maybe you should do that.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hi there, Harry.
I disagree with you on the issues.
By the way, you have a lot of good points, but I disagree with you on the issues as far Well, it may be that somebody has given you some bad information.
The Federal Reserve owns a little of our federal debt, but it owns a very small part of it.
to deal with the Federal Reserve and right there we would eliminate most of our national
deficit right there I believe.
It may be that somebody has given you some bad information.
The Federal Reserve owns a little of our federal debt, but it owns a very small part of it.
Most of it is owned by individuals who buy government bonds through mutual funds.
mutual funds and various other kinds of retirement accounts that own government bonds.
Some foreigners own government bonds, but the great bulk of it is owned by the American
public.
Might as well face up to it.
It's a real debt.
Yes, it is a real debt.
That's an ideal way of putting it.
And it is going to have to be paid off by getting rid of government assets.
Either that or raising taxes.
And of course that has never worked in the past and it's not going to work in the future.
The only way we're going to do it is to get the government to divest itself of all these properties that it owns.
You know it's an amazing thing.
You remember a few years ago the big deal about how they finally closed all these military bases.
Oh yes.
A great bipartisan accomplishment of the government.
The government still owns those military bases.
It still costs money in the federal budget to operate them, and it's still a drain on the taxpayers.
It's just a different kind of a drain.
Can you imagine how much money you could get for Presidio today if you sold that off at auction?
Probably in the billions of dollars, because it is a fantastic piece of property in San Francisco that the federal government owns.
Yes.
All right, Harry.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hello.
Yes.
Is there anything you could say to the people that talk about NAFTA and GATT a lot, if you know what I mean?
Sure.
Where are you?
Oklahoma.
Oklahoma.
All right.
NAFTA and GATT.
Well, as we discussed earlier, I believe that you should be free to buy whatever you want from whomever wants to sell it to you anywhere in the world.
But I don't think we get that way by creating 1300-page regulations like the NAFTA agreement and all of the GATT agreements.
I don't see any reason for the United States to be involved in any international agencies at all.
I do not see where it furthers our interests in any way whatsoever.
So you would just have open borders?
In other words, you want to buy something from Japan?
Fine, let the ship come in, we'll buy it, right?
We don't have to worry about foreign competition.
What we have to worry about is our own government, which hamstrings American business and makes it uncompetitive.
But Harry, the question.
I understand that aspect of it.
It makes sense with your ideology, but what about The Japanese.
In other words, the Japanese have all of these.
They're not libertarians.
No, of course not.
They're stupid.
Why should we pay for their stupidity?
If they're so stupid that they won't let American cars in, then why should we double the stupidity by not letting Japanese cars in here when a lot of people want to buy Japanese cars?
Because we'll end up with a gigantic trade deficit.
No, a trade deficit cannot exist in reality.
It cannot exist in isolation, I should have said.
A trade deficit is also always offset by a capital surplus.
And what happens is the Japanese earn these dollars and then they turn around and invest them in the United States, which creates jobs in the United States.
And if you raise tariffs, what happens is you wind up with the same trade deficit, except that you have higher tariffs and nothing has been accomplished by it.
Actually, that is true, Harry, because they came and bought a lot of real estate, some buildings in New York, and they took a bath.
They sure did.
We got a lot of our money back.
Everybody was scared to death of the Japanese buying Rockefeller Center as though they were going to take it back to Tokyo with them.
Yeah, I know.
One more.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Harry Brown.
Hi.
Hello, this is Dan from Utah.
I'd like to talk to Harry Brown about a few things.
First, the voting.
I believe I have a better way of doing the voting thing.
The way to do it is to remove the restrictions on the number of people you can vote for.
We've already covered that one.
And we don't have too much time, Dan.
We're about to hit the hour.
Well, that's interesting.
I believe that we shouldn't have any businesses at all.
We should animate, atomize the economy, and everybody should be a buyer, and everybody
should be a seller.
Therefore, I don't believe in a consumption tax.
I believe in a straight tax on every transaction.
Well, that's interesting.
I think I'd like to leave that, because it's so far from the realm of possibility right
now that we have more immediate concerns that affect us in this election.
One of them is, of course, getting the government out of our incomes.
And that is the primary plank in my campaign platform, which is to repeal the income tax and replace it with nothing so that everything you make is yours to spend, to save, to give away as you see fit.
And I remember what it was I wanted to say to the caller a couple of minutes ago when he said that he didn't agree with me completely on the drug issue.
I want always that you keep this in perspective.
We're bound to disagree on some things.
We've covered such a gamut of things here this morning.
Yes.
But stop and think how much you agree with Bob Dole or Bill Clinton or Ross Perot.
If you want smaller government, there really is only one candidate.
And I am that candidate, and I need your help.
Enlist in this program to do something finally to turn this thing around once and for all.
And don't think about how you're going to keep Clinton out of the White House.
Think about how you're going to get your own life back.
Well said.
As always, it really has been a pleasure, Harry.
You're fun to interview.
It's always fun to interview somebody who really believes in Well, thank you, Art.
It's been a tremendous four hours.
I've really enjoyed it.
Well, it has been a good program.
We'll follow the news today, and we will talk tonight.
Thank you all.
I'm Art Bell.
▲
Export Selection