Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Jacob Hornberger
Aired: 2019-12-05
Duration: 01:16:03


=== False Freedom and State Intervention (15:19) ===

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[00:01:18]  All right, let's start the show.
[00:01:21]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:01:23]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:01:25]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:01:29]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:01:35]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:01:47]  Okay, welcome everybody.
[00:01:49]  This is a very special episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:01:52]  We're making history for our podcast because this is the first time that I have ever had a guest on the show who is currently running for president of the United States of America.
[00:02:03]  I did have one guest once who has run for president previously.
[00:02:08]  And of course, that was the great Ron Paul.
[00:02:10]  And so it's fitting that the guest I have on now is picking up that mantle.
[00:02:16]  And of course, it is Jacob Hornberger, who has gotten so many of us so excited about the 2020 race.
[00:02:23]  Thank you so much for coming on, Mr. Hornberger.
[00:02:25]  Are you kidding that?
[00:02:26]  Thanks are mine, Dave.
[00:02:28]  I got to tell you how I know about you.
[00:02:30]  Oh, please let me know.
[00:02:32]  Well, I was speaking at Porkfest last summer.
[00:02:35]  And so I arrived earlier before my talk was scheduled.
[00:02:39]  And it turns out that they had me sandwiched between two of your talks.
[00:02:43]  I was like in the middle.
[00:02:44]  So I started listening to you talk and I had never heard of you.
[00:02:48]  I didn't know about you.
[00:02:50]  I was like bowled over.
[00:02:52]  I mean, because I was, you know, I was expecting the standard reform kind of talk that you hear about in the libertarian movement sometimes.
[00:02:59]  So I turned to the guy to me and I said, wow, this guy is really hardcore.
[00:03:04]  And he says, oh, that's Dave Smith.
[00:03:06]  He really is hardcore.
[00:03:08]  Well, thank you.
[00:03:10]  That means a lot to me.
[00:03:11]  And I'll tell you, the reason I'm a hardcore libertarian is because I was a child of the Ron Paul campaigns.
[00:03:17]  That's how I got into the libertarian movement.
[00:03:20]  And one of the things that excites me most about you running for president on the LP ticket is that I think we could create a lot more children of the Jacob Hornberger campaigns.
[00:03:31]  And really, that's what it's all about.
[00:03:33]  I know that's what everything you've been doing has been about for decades.
[00:03:36]  It's educating people, convincing people that liberty is the way to go.
[00:03:41]  And I feel like there's no better way to do that than to have somebody who's passionate, who's unapologetic, uncompromising, and really believes in human liberty.
[00:03:52]  Well, it's interesting you mentioned Ron Paul because Ron is one of my real life heroes.
[00:03:57]  I mean, in the freedom movement, you know, I went up when he ran for president in 2008, I went up to New Hampshire and actually went door to door, knocking on doors and dropping literature off on his behalf.
[00:04:10]  And then I gave two speeches during his campaign.
[00:04:12]  And, you know, I've listened to Ron give a lot of talks, but I don't remember specifically very many things he says.
[00:04:19]  All I know is that when he starts talking, my heart starts thumping a little bit harder because he talks about liberty.
[00:04:26]  And you can tell that the libertarianism just exudes through him.
[00:04:30]  So as part of my campaign, I've launched a new book called My Passion for Liberty, which details how I discovered libertarianism, what are the core principles of libertarianism.
[00:04:41]  It tells people why libertarianism is the really only practical solution to the crises that Democrats and Republicans have foisted on our nation.
[00:04:50]  And it was a big honor that Ron has written the introduction to that book.
[00:04:54]  And that book, My Passion for Liberty, is available on Amazon.
[00:04:58]  Well, that's great.
[00:04:59]  And I highly recommend people go grab that and read it.
[00:05:03]  It's like so many people that I know in the liberty movement, like myself, of course, Tom Woods, Scott Horton, so many really passionate libertarians are very excited about the fact that you're running for president.
[00:05:16]  And so much of that is because since Ron Paul, we just haven't had a true passionate, hardcore libertarian running talking about these ideas.
[00:05:26]  You've had some people who are okay on certain issues, some people who lean libertarian in certain issues, but not in others.
[00:05:33]  But it's just so great to have somebody up there who's like, no, I'm bringing the whole package, the whole philosophy.
[00:05:38]  This is the way to go.
[00:05:39]  And it is the truth is that liberty throughout human history, really, right?
[00:05:45]  The struggle between tyranny and liberty has been the greatest struggle.
[00:05:49]  So many of our problems are just due to the fact that the state is interfering in every aspect of human affairs, particularly in 2019, soon to be 2020, United States of America.
[00:06:02]  Oh, you're absolutely right.
[00:06:04]  I mean, you know, we're living in really a very dysfunctional society.
[00:06:10]  And when like President Trump says that he wants to make America great again, he just doesn't understand that you cannot have a great nation unless you have a free nation.
[00:06:20]  And so that's our first challenge.
[00:06:22]  We libertarians know we don't live in a free country.
[00:06:25]  The state is everywhere.
[00:06:27]  It controls every aspects of our lives.
[00:06:29]  It takes our money and forces us to be good and caring with it.
[00:06:32]  It puts us in jail for ingesting the wrong substances.
[00:06:36]  It regulates the most minute aspects of our lives.
[00:06:39]  It has engaged in these foreign wars and assassinations and torture for at least the last three or four decades.
[00:06:49]  And so we end up with this society where everything's messed up.
[00:06:53]  Healthcare is messed up.
[00:06:54]  Social Security is messed up.
[00:06:55]  Everything's messed up.
[00:06:57]  And people are starting to sense that, that there's something wrong in the society.
[00:07:01]  You got suicide rates soaring.
[00:07:04]  You've got people unexplained, committing unexplainable acts of violence.
[00:07:09]  You got massive drug addiction.
[00:07:11]  I suggest that all of this is rooted in what you just said, that the state is intervening in our lives and people falsely believe it's freedom.
[00:07:21]  So if they start listening to us libertarians, and I think a lot of people are because they're figuring out something's wrong with this society.
[00:07:28]  And we libertarians know what's wrong with this society.
[00:07:30]  They've destroyed our freedom.
[00:07:32]  But if we regain our freedom, that's the road, Dave, to peace, prosperity, liberty, harmony, and morality.
[00:07:41]  That's the only key is how do we achieve that free society?
[00:07:45]  And that's what comes with ideas and running for office.
[00:07:48]  And as you say, educating people who want to be educated on what does it really mean to be free.
[00:07:54]  I had my brothers, if I were accorded the honor of this nomination, the Libertarian Party nomination, my question would be to have every American family debating two things.
[00:08:04]  What does it really mean to be free?
[00:08:06]  What does a free society really mean?
[00:08:08]  And then number two, what is the role of government in a free society?
[00:08:13]  And I think if people were debating and discussing that issue, we'd be doing some, making some real progress toward achieving a free society.
[00:08:20]  Yeah, it seems like the question of what the proper role of government ought to be never even really comes up in the national conversation, to use a term that I'm not particularly fond of.
[00:08:33]  But nobody ever inserts that except Ron Paul really was the only one I could think of.
[00:08:39]  But you're absolutely right in the fact that what we do have going for us is that people on a very deep level, I think perhaps even on a spiritual level, people sense that something is wrong in this nation.
[00:08:52]  And that's why so many people are flocking to the populist left, the AOCs, the Bernie Sanders, the populist right, kind of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, because they do say these things like make America great again, end this corruption.
[00:09:07]  It seems like people do sense that the country is more dysfunctional, more polarized than people can really remember it being in recent history.
[00:09:17]  And I would agree with you that it seems that this coincides with the government getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
[00:09:25]  And I don't think that's a coincidence.
[00:09:27]  I mean, people have very different views throughout our society, incredibly different views, but they don't feel a need to like fight a culture war.
[00:09:37]  I've used this example before on the show, but like I'm a Jewish person.
[00:09:41]  I live in New York City.
[00:09:42]  I can go outside and stick my hand in the air and a Muslim guy who's driving a yellow cab will pick me up and drive me home.
[00:09:50]  And I give him some money and he says, thank you, God bless.
[00:09:54]  And I say, thank you, sir.
[00:09:55]  Have a good night.
[00:09:56]  And we move on.
[00:09:57]  Now, we have very different views, like really, really fundamentally different views about the world.
[00:10:02]  And I'm sure if we sat down and went through every view he has and every view I have, there's a lot of conflict there.
[00:10:08]  But we're operating in the marketplace.
[00:10:10]  I want to ride home.
[00:10:12]  He wants some money.
[00:10:13]  We cooperate and we work together.
[00:10:15]  We don't need to fight a culture war.
[00:10:17]  But when the war is over who takes control of the state and then rules over the rest of us, then it's almost like the only option you have is to be at each other's throats.
[00:10:27]  And I think that's what you see with the Trump Hillary and now Trump versus whoever the terrible Democrat he'll be running against will be.
[00:10:36]  Well, right.
[00:10:37]  And I don't think it is a coincidence that you have this ever-tightening screw that the federal government's tightening on people and all the dysfunctionality in society.
[00:10:49]  And, you know, you've got these two major parties and the mainstream press, and they themselves act like there's these huge differences between the party, philosophical differences and so forth.
[00:11:00]  There's actually no difference at all between the two major parties, not philosophically.
[00:11:05]  They're on the same page and their battle is over who's going to get to control it over the next four years.
[00:11:11]  Who's going to get to appoint the bureaucrats and the diplomats and who's going to get the largest and the defense contractors and so forth.
[00:11:18]  But notice that in terms of structure and system, they both believe in things like social security, Medicare, Medicaid, foreign interventionism, the national security establishment, the drug war, the Federal Reserve.
[00:11:34]  We could go on and on.
[00:11:36]  And so their battle is really over who's going to get to control it.
[00:11:40]  It's a case of musical chairs.
[00:11:43]  We libertarians are coming in saying, look, that is your problem.
[00:11:47]  You've got a bad system here, what we libertarians call the welfare state and the warfare state.
[00:11:53]  And that if you want a prospering, harmonious society, the kind of society you're talking about, like when you get into the cab with this Muslim driver, we can have that kind of life internationally.
[00:12:04]  You bring all the troops home from everywhere, you stop them from killing people, intervening in the affairs of other countries.
[00:12:12]  I will guarantee you that is, and you unleash the private sector.
[00:12:16]  You lift all the embargoes, all the sanctions, all the trade wars, and you just unleash the private sector, bring the federal government sector home, restore a limited government republic, which was the founding governmental system of our country, which is the opposite of a national security state.
[00:12:33]  The private sector are our biggest, best diplomats in the world.
[00:12:38]  The world loves American tourists.
[00:12:40]  They love American businessmen.
[00:12:42]  They love American trade groups, cultural groups.
[00:12:45]  Then, once you unleash the private sector to interact with the people of the world, now you're talking about that kind of harmony that you have with your taxi driver friend.
[00:12:56]  Now, does that mean that there's going to be no more conflicts and wars around the world?
[00:13:00]  Of course not.
[00:13:01]  But what it does is it doesn't embroil the American people in all of these conflicts around the world.
[00:13:07]  So sometimes when we talk about bringing the troops home, Democrats and Republicans say, oh, that's isolationism.
[00:13:14]  Well, that's ridiculous because if you're unleashing the private sector to interact with the people of the world, that's the exact opposite of isolationism.
[00:13:22]  So we want to rein in the government, unleash the private sector.
[00:13:26]  They want to do the exact opposite.
[00:13:28]  They want to unleash the troops, the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and then wall in the American people with sanctions, embargoes, and the like.
[00:13:36]  That's the root cause of this problem.
[00:13:38]  The second part of the route is that a lot of Americans don't realize that this is not freedom.
[00:13:45]  They've been indoctrinated with the fact that they live in a free society.
[00:13:48]  My favorite quote is a quote by Johann Goethe, and it perfectly encapsulates the plight of the American people.
[00:13:55]  It says, None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
[00:14:02]  Now, if people can break through that, and that's what we've broken through, and so if we libertarians can break through, anybody can break through.
[00:14:09]  And I figure that if I broke through, because I used to believe I lived in a free country, but once people achieve that breakthrough, Dave, then we've got a shot at achieving a free society.
[00:14:20]  The problem today is while people know there's something wrong, they don't know what it is because they're still believing that all this welfare, warfare state and this tightening of the screws that the federal government is doing on the American populace is the opposite of freedom.
[00:14:35]  Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right.
[00:14:38]  And it's funny to hear, you know, because I remember, you know, Ron Paul getting labeled with the term isolationist.
[00:14:45]  And it's really just so absurd.
[00:14:47]  It's almost something, it's like out of a cartoon.
[00:14:50]  The idea that you would say, like, if somebody was proposing, like, you lived in a house and someone was proposing, I think we should, you know, invade the house next to us and shoot up a bunch of people.
[00:15:01]  And you said, I don't think we should do that.
[00:15:03]  And they went, so you never want to interact with anybody.
[00:15:06]  You're just an isolationist.
[00:15:07]  And you're like, well, I'm not saying we shouldn't maybe go over for dinner or invite them over.
[00:15:12]  I'm saying like, let's not murder innocent people.
[00:15:14]  Yet this is, well, I guess you just don't want to interact with people at all.
[00:15:18]  It's really just absurd.

=== The Mental Toll of Bad Wars (09:45) ===

[00:15:20]  But that is the world that we live in.
[00:15:22]  And I guess to me personally, there's no more important issues than the wars.
[00:15:28]  I mean, in the philosophical abstract, there's nothing worse that the state does than commit mass murder.
[00:15:35]  I mean, I dislike just about every government program, but if there's one that involves killing a lot of innocent people, that's got to be the worst one.
[00:15:44]  And in the current real world situation that we're in, we're involved in the two longest wars in American history, plus about four other ones that Trump inherited from Obama and has continued to fight.
[00:15:55]  Not one of them has one ounce of success.
[00:15:58]  It's been nothing but a disaster.
[00:16:00]  I mean, look, like there have been some wars in the past where they get really, really bloody, but you could maybe argue there was some successes here or there.
[00:16:09]  Not one of the post-9-11 wars has one inch of success.
[00:16:14]  I mean, the Taliban controls more land in Afghanistan today than they did in 2001.
[00:16:19]  Iraq has just been nothing but a disaster.
[00:16:21]  Libya, my God, I mean, it's just a failed state.
[00:16:25]  Yemen is, according to the UN, the number one humanitarian crisis in the world.
[00:16:30]  What is it?
[00:16:31]  A million cases of cholera, I think.
[00:16:33]  Just babies dying, just the most horrific stuff you could imagine.
[00:16:37]  Syria is just now starting to get a little bit better because America gave up on arming the anti-Assad moderates, as they call it.
[00:16:48]  Every one of these wars is a disaster.
[00:16:50]  And at least one thing that seems like kind of a silver lining in all of this nightmare is that most people in America seem to be done with these wars.
[00:17:01]  I mean, Trump ran on ending them, hasn't done any of that.
[00:17:05]  Even today, with the pro-war candidates, they all seem to be like, well, I do want to get out of these wars.
[00:17:12]  We just have to do it in a responsible way.
[00:17:14]  You know, like that's the new, I want to stay in Afghanistan as well.
[00:17:17]  I want to leave, but we have to do it in a responsible way.
[00:17:20]  Does it seem like maybe to you with the warfare state, people are at least waking up, realizing that this is just, there's no good has come of any of this stuff?
[00:17:30]  I don't think there's any question about it.
[00:17:32]  I mean, if there's one area where I think the American populace is going against the Democrat-Republican tide, it's foreign policy.
[00:17:41]  And what you outline is so true.
[00:17:43]  And, you know, how do you even define winning?
[00:17:46]  You define it by how many people you kill.
[00:17:49]  And this idea of, oh, well, you know, we have to get out on our terms.
[00:17:53]  It reminds me of the peace with honor that was used in the Vietnam War where they sent 58,000 of my generation to their deaths for nothing.
[00:18:02]  I mean, those soldiers died absolutely for nothing.
[00:18:06]  And that's what soldiers are dying for right now.
[00:18:08]  They're dying for nothing.
[00:18:09]  Trump goes over there on a secret little three-hour visit.
[00:18:13]  Imagine how pathetic this is.
[00:18:14]  The Pentagon's had 18 years to produce this paradise of enduring freedom or perpetual freedom, whatever they call it in Afghanistan.
[00:18:23]  And the president has to sneak in in the dead of night without telling anybody because those Taliban are dangerous hombre.
[00:18:32]  So you've got the commander-in-chief sneaking in, doesn't even spend the night there with the troops, sneaks in for three hours and then vamooses back to Washington and leaves the troops there.
[00:18:43]  I mean, he's had three years to bring them out.
[00:18:45]  And that's what he should do.
[00:18:46]  He should just order the Pentagon, pull them out now.
[00:18:50]  They've killed enough people.
[00:18:51]  They've died enough that it's time to just end this thing.
[00:18:55]  But he's had three years.
[00:18:57]  He's got troops still in Iraq.
[00:18:59]  He's got troops still in Syria.
[00:19:01]  He's got the cooperation with the Saudis killing people in Yemen, as you pointed out.
[00:19:07]  He's even sent troops into Yemen.
[00:19:09]  And now he's threatening to send troops into Mexico.
[00:19:12]  He's going to convert the drug war into like the war on terrorism.
[00:19:16]  That's going to be a real nightmare.
[00:19:18]  He's threatened war with Iran.
[00:19:20]  He's threatened war with North Korea.
[00:19:22]  I mean, when we talk about non-interventionism, Dave, this is not exactly what we mean by non-interventionism.
[00:19:29]  Yeah, no, absolutely right.
[00:19:31]  And of course, in some ways, Trump talks a good game with the wars.
[00:19:38]  But if you measure his actions, He's been bad on every single one of them.
[00:19:43]  And like you said, he's had three years at this point.
[00:19:46]  And this is the one area of government policy where there's really no excuse for the president.
[00:19:52]  I mean, he's the commander in chief.
[00:19:54]  He can argue, oh, I really want to do something else, but I can't get it through Congress.
[00:19:58]  But he doesn't need any congressional approval to end these wars.
[00:20:01]  And he promised the American people blatantly that he was going to do that.
[00:20:05]  So absolutely, you're right.
[00:20:07]  I mean, he really, it's unforgivable the fact that he's not ended a single one of these wars and actually escalated several of them.
[00:20:17]  And I agree with you that it's that I think the American people are closer and closer to being with us on this issue.
[00:20:25]  There might be some other issues that they're a little skeptical about embracing liberty in its true sense.
[00:20:31]  But on this one, I think people are really starting to get it.
[00:20:34]  And of course, look, it's not even like we're making some moral argument.
[00:20:38]  It's not like, like I've made this comparison before, it's not like you're going and robbing somebody and you get this money from them.
[00:20:46]  So you're like, hey, I robbed this person and I got money.
[00:20:48]  And we're trying to say, hey, this is kind of wrong.
[00:20:50]  Like you shouldn't rob from other people.
[00:20:52]  We're bleeding ourselves into bankruptcy.
[00:20:55]  And we got, what is it, over 20 soldier suicides a day, people coming back wounded.
[00:21:01]  We're killing innocent people and it's nothing but a cost.
[00:21:05]  I mean, the only people who are benefiting from this are like, I don't know, the Lockheed Martin or something like that, or the power of the deep state.
[00:21:14]  But there's no benefit for the American people.
[00:21:16]  And I think they're starting to realize that more and more.
[00:21:19]  So that's something we got going for us.
[00:21:22]  Well, and Trump helped us out with this because as you say in his campaign rhetoric, he made it clear that these are bad wars that are taking place and that he was going to pull out.
[00:21:33]  And so what he's saying to the American people is, hey, we need to get out.
[00:21:38]  But the fact is that for some reason he hasn't.
[00:21:41]  Now, this may be a testament to the power of the generals, the Pentagon, the CIA.
[00:21:47]  But hey, he surrounded himself with generals and he brings John Bolton into his administration and he brings all these generals into his administration.
[00:21:55]  And so if the generals are in charge here, Trump bears some of the responsibility for that.
[00:22:01]  But as you point out, he is a commander in chief of the armed forces.
[00:22:05]  All he has to do is issue an order, withdraw those troops now.
[00:22:11]  And he hasn't done that.
[00:22:13]  And my hunch is that he's not going to be doing it before the election, and he needs to be held to account for it.
[00:22:18]  The irony is the Democrats, who used to be considered the peaceknicks, they've become bigger warmongers than Trump.
[00:22:26]  And it's amazing that they think that's where the only reason they're adopting that position is because they think Americans want them to be warmongers.
[00:22:34]  But my hunch is they're taking a whole different read, a wrong read of the American temperature.
[00:22:41]  I think most people are now saying enough's enough.
[00:22:45]  Because let's face it, Dave, of all the people they've killed over there for the last 20 years, 30 years, none of them was coming to come over and conquer the United States.
[00:22:56]  I mean, these are all civil disputes over there, you know, like a civil war or a war between factions or a war between nation states.
[00:23:05]  None of them involves an invading power of the United States.
[00:23:09]  So all those people over there that have been killed, we don't know what the exact number is, but I mean, we got to stay focused on that too.
[00:23:17]  It's not just the troops that have died.
[00:23:19]  My hunch is that a lot of reason the troops are coming back really messed up mentally, committing suicide and so forth, is that I think they realize on a conscious and subconscious level that they've killed a lot of people that really they shouldn't have been killing.
[00:23:35]  I think you're absolutely right.
[00:23:36]  And I think that's such an important point to hit on.
[00:23:39]  Think that this was to me.
[00:23:40]  I think this is also a big part of the Vietnam War vets coming back and how messed up they were and just how much it destroyed the country and pitted the country against each other.
[00:23:50]  And so many of the people who are like traditionally conservative hate the kind of cultural revolution of the 60s and how so much of the kind of traditional American lifestyle was torn down.
[00:24:03]  But they don't make the connection that the Vietnam War played a huge role in this.
[00:24:08]  And from my perspective, it seems like, look, in World War II, I mean, obviously, it's not as simple as like the mainstream corporate press will make it seem like we were just the good guys.
[00:24:21]  And obviously, we were partnered with Joseph Stalin.
[00:24:24]  Obviously, America's involvement in World War I and forcing the Treaty of Versailles on the German people.
[00:24:30]  And there were all types of mistakes and horrible, horrible things that happened that led to World War II.
[00:24:36]  But it was pretty easy when you're going against the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese to feel like you were the good guys, you know, to feel like, okay, we weren't on the wrong side of this.
[00:24:47]  But in Vietnam and in all of these post-9-11 wars, it's just so obvious that we're not the good guys here.
[00:24:55]  And I know this is like a silly collectivist way of thinking, but you have to, you have to get people in like believing in this mindset that we're the good guys in order to go commit these acts of violence.

=== Defending the Good Guys Mindset (02:07) ===

[00:25:06]  And I think that you're really onto something where part of the reason why so many of these people fall apart is because it's just so obvious.
[00:25:14]  It's so obvious that we're just going into someone else's country who posed no legitimate threat to us and killing a bunch of innocent people.
[00:25:23]  And it's hard for any, I know, this is why the troops, active duty military, sent more money to Ron Paul than all of the other candidates combined because they know better than anyone that they're like, look, we invaded some other country with guns.
[00:25:37]  Of course, they started shooting back at us.
[00:25:39]  And it's just tragic.
[00:25:41]  They're the pawns.
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[00:26:55]  The soldiers are the pawns.
[00:26:57]  And, you know, this mindset, oh, well, let's just thank the troops for their service is just a superficial, ludicrous mantra that the real friends of the troops are those of us who have been fighting never to have sent them into Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place.

=== Charity vs Military Propaganda (15:30) ===

[00:27:14]  And then after they were sent there, and we libertarians have been consistently saying, pull them out, pull them out.
[00:27:20]  And Iraq's your perfect example.
[00:27:22]  I mean, here was a country that had never attacked the United States.
[00:27:26]  And so you send these troops.
[00:27:27]  I mean, if you take Dave, for example, a serial killer, he's got his conscience so buried that he can go out and kill a bunch of people.
[00:27:36]  Doesn't bother him a bit because his, his conscience is so deep down hidden away that it doesn't bother him.
[00:27:43]  But you take your average soldier sergeant, private lieutenant captain, he's got a family.
[00:27:49]  These are guys that usually are women that go to church.
[00:27:52]  They, their conscience, is right there on the upper level, and so you send them into a country and say kill or be killed against people that have never attacked the United States.
[00:28:03]  And so all of a sudden they're people who are defending their country from a foreign invader.
[00:28:07]  They're called the bad guys for defending their country against this illegal invader, unconstitutional invader.
[00:28:14]  And the soldier's put in a position, well, I don't have a choice.
[00:28:17]  I'm going to have to start killing all these people who are firing at me.
[00:28:20]  How can that not affect a person of deep Christian or Jewish faith that has a conscience that knows it's wrong to kill?
[00:28:28]  I don't see how anybody can be put in that position and not have it adversely affect them when they get home.
[00:28:33]  Yeah, and it's really, it's just so tragic the way that kids are propagandized and bribed into the military and lied to and get sent over there.
[00:28:46]  I mean, the whole thing, it's tragic for the innocent people who are killed over there, but it's also really tragic for so many of these guys who join up in the military because they, well, first off, a lot of times they probably don't have that much opportunity in their life and they feel like, well, okay, this is going to get my college paid for and put me on a path to a better life.
[00:29:04]  And they buy into this propaganda of like we're defending freedom and all of this stuff.
[00:29:09]  And yeah, yeah, it really, it really is just a tragic situation.
[00:29:14]  And the only silver lining is that it's gone so bad that it's hard for people to not wake up at this point.
[00:29:20]  And one thing that we can learn from the Donald Trump presidential campaign and him being elected is that he did, you know, he did say even in South Carolina in the Republican primary, he stood up and said, you know, George W. Bush lied us into the war in Iraq.
[00:29:39]  And I think a lot of this, the reason why the audience was receptive to that, I think Ron Paul deserves some credit for the groundwork that he laid in those Republican primaries in 2008 and 2012.
[00:29:50]  But people were willing to hear that message.
[00:29:52]  And I think a lot of those guys, you know, if you're talking about a Republican primary in South Carolina, a lot of those people bought into the war in Iraq at the time and they've seen the results of it.
[00:30:03]  And they were like, you know what?
[00:30:05]  I know I got Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio on stage, but I'm going with this guy who says that we never should have fought this war to begin with.
[00:30:13]  And obviously Donald Trump hasn't, you know, look, if he had come in and kept his word on that and ended all of these wars, maybe we wouldn't be, we'd be a lot easier on him and maybe you wouldn't be running for president.
[00:30:24]  But the truth is he didn't.
[00:30:26]  And all these wars are still going on.
[00:30:28]  But at least we can learn from that that people are more and more open to this idea.
[00:30:33]  So there's some real hope there.
[00:30:36]  That's an absolutely fascinating point.
[00:30:38]  And you raise another really fascinating point that I want to raise or talk about.
[00:30:43]  And that is these young guys that are lured and young women that are lured into the military in large part because they need jobs.
[00:30:52]  They need economic opportunity.
[00:30:55]  And that then intersects with what the government totally has done to the economic conditions in America.
[00:31:02]  You know, with the out-of-control spending, sucking, you know, $3 trillion out of the private sector to finance this gigantic welfare state and a warfare state, locking people out of the labor market with economic regulations.
[00:31:16]  So they corner people into not having an economic opportunity.
[00:31:21]  And so what do they have left?
[00:31:23]  Well, let me go join the military.
[00:31:25]  And so they go in and join the military because they've been left with no effective choice.
[00:31:30]  Some of them go into the drug trade because of the huge black market prices that illegality produces.
[00:31:37]  But either way, they're being funneled by virtue of the fact of what the government has done in its totality.
[00:31:46]  As you pointed out earlier, you know, $23 trillion in debt.
[00:31:50]  President Trump's adding another trillion this year to it.
[00:31:53]  I mean, you know, how can this end nicely?
[00:31:56]  And unfortunately, as you point out, the young people say, well, I don't have any other really effective choice.
[00:32:02]  I'm going to go join the military.
[00:32:03]  And then they get sitting into these wars where they're killing and dying really for nothing.
[00:32:08]  Yeah.
[00:32:09]  Well, as you mentioned, obviously the debt is really, you know, just seeming more and more insurmountable and just unsustainable.
[00:32:19]  And you are one of the things that really separates you from other people, even within the Libertarian Party or Libertarians who have run for president before, is that you don't mince words about the entitlement programs.
[00:32:31]  And you just say, look, we got to abolish Medicare.
[00:32:33]  We got to abolish Social Security.
[00:32:35]  These programs are unsustainable.
[00:32:38]  They've got trillions in unfunded liabilities and they're disasters.
[00:32:41]  They distort the market and we got to get rid of them.
[00:32:44]  And that is something that is, everybody's always been saying that's the third rail in American politics and you can't talk about it.
[00:32:52]  But I got to think at this point, hasn't every third rail basically been touched already?
[00:32:57]  And some people are still alive to speak about it.
[00:33:00]  So why not?
[00:33:01]  Why not just be honest if we're libertarians and say, yeah, we got to abolish these programs?
[00:33:06]  I mean, it's like these Republicans claim they're for small government, but we don't want to cut military spending and you can't touch the entitlements.
[00:33:14]  And it's like, well, then you're not touching anything in the government.
[00:33:17]  I mean, that's it.
[00:33:18]  That's pretty much the whole government is military spending and entitlements.
[00:33:21]  So let's be honest about this.
[00:33:23]  We got to roll back these programs, abolish them.
[00:33:27]  Absolutely.
[00:33:27]  And for me, though, it's a moral issue.
[00:33:30]  I mean, you know, we got a lot of religious people in this country.
[00:33:34]  They go to church or they go to synagogue or go to the mosque or whatever.
[00:33:38]  And yet here we have this system that is based really on mandatory charity.
[00:33:45]  Now, how do you reconcile mandatory charity with God's gift of free will?
[00:33:51]  God trusted the people.
[00:33:53]  He said, I'm going to vest in you free will.
[00:33:57]  You're going to decide whether to honor your mother and father if they get cancer in their old age, whether you're going to help them out when they have that sickness or when they have financial difficulties.
[00:34:06]  And God effectively says, I trust you.
[00:34:10]  Okay.
[00:34:10]  Caesar comes into the process and says God made a mistake that he should never have trusted people because young people are bad people.
[00:34:20]  They will not take care of their parents if given that choice.
[00:34:23]  And so we have to have a safety net.
[00:34:25]  We have to force them by taking their money and giving it to the...
[00:34:29]  That's what Social Security is.
[00:34:31]  There's no retirement fund.
[00:34:32]  It's never been a retirement fund.
[00:34:34]  It's a straight welfare state program that's funded by taxes.
[00:34:38]  And so my position is what we need to do is recapture in this country a faith in ourselves, a faith in others, a faith in freedom that you really can trust young people.
[00:34:51]  Social Security is a great big insult to young people.
[00:34:54]  It's saying, you young people are bad.
[00:34:57]  You wouldn't take care of your parents if you had your own money and you had the right to spend your money the way you want.
[00:35:03]  So we got to force you to do it.
[00:35:06]  Why do young people put up with this insult?
[00:35:08]  What I want to do is I want to vest young people with the opportunity with their own money and they make that decision.
[00:35:16]  Now, will every young person go out and help his parents in times of need?
[00:35:20]  Of course not.
[00:35:21]  But that's what freedoms are all about, the right to say no.
[00:35:24]  But that's when we turn to church groups.
[00:35:26]  That's when we turn to voluntary charity groups.
[00:35:29]  So my system or the libertarian system is based on a concept of freedom and voluntary charity in free markets as compared to one based on mandatory charity.
[00:35:40]  Same thing, Dave, with healthcare.
[00:35:42]  I mean, it is not a coincidence that our healthcare system got destroyed when Medicare and Medicaid were created.
[00:35:50]  That's the cause of the problem.
[00:35:52]  This is what nobody wants to face, is that we had the finest healthcare system in the world in history.
[00:35:58]  Healthcare costs were low.
[00:36:00]  They were stable.
[00:36:01]  They were like going to the grocery store.
[00:36:02]  Nobody had major medical insurance.
[00:36:04]  I mean, how many people had grocery store insurance to protect against soaring grocery store prices?
[00:36:11]  And doctors were giving free treatment to the poor.
[00:36:14]  I grew up in one of the poorest cities in the country.
[00:36:17]  Doctors' offices were filled every day and half the people there couldn't pay.
[00:36:21]  And doctors never turned them away because they felt this was their ethical and moral obligation.
[00:36:27]  That's what I'm fighting for.
[00:36:29]  In order to restore a healthy and a free market healthcare system, you've got to get rid of Medicare.
[00:36:37]  All of these reform plans will not work.
[00:36:39]  It is an inherently defective system.
[00:36:42]  And so once you realize that, you say, well, if it's inherently defective, no matter what Warren comes up with her plan or Bernie Sanders or anybody comes up with a plan, it's not going to work.
[00:36:52]  Then your only solution is to say, let's try freedom.
[00:36:55]  And that's why the moral issue, as well as the practical issue, that freedom really does work.
[00:37:01]  And it's incumbent on us libertarians to convince people that freedom works.
[00:37:06]  If we libertarians have doubt over whether freedom works, how do we expect other people to believe that freedom works?
[00:37:11]  No, you're absolutely right.
[00:37:13]  And it's like, why not?
[00:37:15]  You know, once you start pussyfooting around these issues and go, well, maybe we, you know, you know, and this, this was, again, and I don't want to I don't want to put you on the spot to criticize other previous nominees in the Libertarian Party, but this was my criticism of the Gary Johnson campaign was when he would say, hey, I think we should legalize pot.
[00:37:35]  And they'd say, but what about heroin?
[00:37:36]  And you'd go, oh, maybe not heroin.
[00:37:38]  And then it's like, well, now it just seems like you have no principles and you're just going with what's popular instead of just being like, hey, I believe in something and I'm going to tell the American people what it is I believe in and try to persuade them of that.
[00:37:52]  And even if it takes me into issues that could be unpopular in certain demographics.
[00:37:56]  Look, man, Medicare, everybody should, whether you're on the left or the right, you should be for repealing these entitlement programs.
[00:38:05]  If you're on the left, okay, maybe in some ways you support redistribution of wealth.
[00:38:12]  The idea would be from rich people to poor people.
[00:38:16]  Well, Social Security is redistributing wealth from a poorer group to a richer group.
[00:38:22]  I mean, who on the left has ever said they're for that?
[00:38:25]  Young people have way less net worth than the retired do.
[00:38:29]  So why should they bear this burden?
[00:38:31]  And if you're on the right and you care about family values and religion, as you invoked before, it's like, well, look, the government comes in and destroys these bonds of families taking care of families.
[00:38:44]  They put the church on the back burner.
[00:38:46]  They put community on the back burner.
[00:38:48]  And now everybody's relying on the state.
[00:38:51]  This is it.
[00:38:51]  No matter what your perspective is, you should get it.
[00:38:53]  And the other thing that just, and it just goes to show how dishonest all of the corporate press and the political establishment is, is that, by the way, whether you agree with Jacob Hornberger and Dave Smith or not, the programs are insolvent.
[00:39:10]  There's tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities.
[00:39:14]  It cannot continue this way.
[00:39:16]  No serious person who's in their 20s thinks that there's going to be Medicare or Social Security for them.
[00:39:23]  You're paying into a forced Ponzi scheme.
[00:39:26]  It's worse than a Ponzi scheme because it's, you know, there's a gun in your ribs.
[00:39:30]  So everybody should be willing to talk about this.
[00:39:33]  Absolutely.
[00:39:34]  And, you know, and the point you're really making also is that people have become dependent on this.
[00:39:41]  This is what the welfare state does.
[00:39:43]  It's like a narcotic that once you get on it, it's like, oh my gosh, I couldn't live without it.
[00:39:48]  I mean, think of all the people that will die in the streets if we were to abolish these programs.
[00:39:52]  So the concept is always, well, no, let's reform it.
[00:39:55]  Let's reform it.
[00:39:56]  And as you point out, I mean, if you look at the national debt, $23 trillion, that does not include the unfunded liabilities.
[00:40:04]  And so you've got a huge amount of money that young people are on the hook for, but everybody's got this mindset of, oh my gosh, we're hooked now.
[00:40:12]  We're on this heroin, this political heroin.
[00:40:15]  We can't get off it.
[00:40:16]  Well, nonsense.
[00:40:17]  You have to get off it if you're going to establish a healthy society.
[00:40:21]  There's no other way.
[00:40:22]  And the best way to do it is like with heroin.
[00:40:24]  Well, I don't know if that's the best way of heroin, but the best way to do it is like cigarette smoking, gold cold turkey.
[00:40:30]  I mean, just repeal these programs.
[00:40:32]  And then you believe in freedom.
[00:40:34]  A lot of seniors don't even need the money, Dave.
[00:40:36]  They're very wealthy people.
[00:40:38]  So they would do very well without Social Security.
[00:40:41]  There are people who genuinely need help.
[00:40:43]  Okay.
[00:40:44]  Now children have a lot more money at their disposal.
[00:40:47]  They're keeping all their tax money funding this program.
[00:40:50]  You don't have to pay this huge Social Security bureaucracy anymore.
[00:40:54]  Church groups now have more money.
[00:40:56]  Community groups have more money.
[00:40:57]  But that's where we need to rely on the concept of voluntary charity.
[00:41:02]  And another point you raised is very interesting about the drug issue.
[00:41:06]  And this debate's been going on in a larger sense in the libertarian movement for a long time.
[00:41:11]  Should we settle for legalizing marijuana?
[00:41:14]  Well, Milton Friedman, the Libertarian Nobel Prize-winning economist, he was dealing with occupational licensure and arguing why it should be abolished.
[00:41:24]  And he said, you know, I could deal with, you know, I could focus on like hairdressers or shoeshine people, but instead, I'm going to take the toughest case.
[00:41:32]  And he took the case of doctors as to why we need to abolish occupational licensure for doctors because he said if people can understand the toughest case, everything falls into place.
[00:41:44]  And so that essay is in his book, Capitalism and Freedom.
[00:41:48]  Well, that's what we got to do with drugs.
[00:41:50]  It's not enough to legalize marijuana.
[00:41:52]  You got to legalize heroin, cocaine, meth, opioids, every single substance based on freedom, because it's none of the government's business what people put into their mouths.
[00:42:03]  And because this war is so destructive of our liberties, it is the most racially bigoted government program since segregation.
[00:42:11]  And it needs to go entirely, not just with marijuana, with all drugs.
[00:42:16]  So when we make that case, then I think people are able to better understand where we libertarians are coming from.
[00:42:23]  It's not that we're saying, hey, we hope everybody goes out and takes drugs.
[00:42:26]  We're talking about what does it mean to live in a free society.
[00:42:30]  No, you're absolutely right.
[00:42:32]  And the truth is that, you know, it's like we've had heroin, take heroin because that might be the example.
[00:42:40]  I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think that's about as destructive a drug as is out there.

=== Despair, Addiction, and Black Markets (06:09) ===

[00:42:45]  It's certainly up there.
[00:42:46]  Like heroin's a really, really bad drug that you can, it's very addictive and you can die from it and it destroys people's lives.
[00:42:53]  Well, we, heroin has been incredibly illegal with outrageously stiff penalties for like 40 years at this point.
[00:43:02]  And look at it.
[00:43:03]  It's killing tens of thousands of Americans a year as we speak.
[00:43:07]  They're getting fentanyl on the black market.
[00:43:09]  They're getting all of these things.
[00:43:10]  It's like this does, obviously, this doesn't solve the problem.
[00:43:14]  The problem isn't the substance.
[00:43:16]  People, it's not like me or you or someone, like I have a great wife and a beautiful one-year-old daughter.
[00:43:23]  It's not like if I encounter a substance, I'm going to go, oh, I'm going to go throw my life away now because of this substance.
[00:43:29]  The problem is human despair and the place that somebody's in when they become an addict and getting addicted.
[00:43:35]  And like, oh, there's all these deeper psychological issues.
[00:43:38]  And you don't treat that by threatening to throw someone in a cage for 30 years.
[00:43:43]  And then, of course, there's the, as you point out, the black market problems.
[00:43:46]  It creates all of this crime.
[00:43:48]  It's really something that, like, you know, 100 years later, Americans still haven't learned the lesson from prohibition.
[00:43:54]  Even though when we speak of the prohibition of alcohol, pretty much everybody's together going, like, oh, yeah, that doesn't work.
[00:44:00]  That was a really stupid thing to do that led to the rise of Al Capone and all of this, this gang violence.
[00:44:05]  But nowadays, and Trump will still go, you know, there's all of these, you know, all of this crime and these gangs and the drugs that come over from the southern border.
[00:44:14]  And it's like, yeah, you're right.
[00:44:16]  That is a legitimate problem.
[00:44:17]  But here's the problem.
[00:44:18]  No matter what the government mandates out of Washington, D.C., there is demand for these drugs.
[00:44:24]  That's something that exists.
[00:44:26]  It's whether we like it or not.
[00:44:27]  If I could wave a magic wand and there was no demand for fentanyl, I would do that.
[00:44:31]  That would be great.
[00:44:32]  But you can't.
[00:44:33]  None of us can.
[00:44:34]  People want these drugs.
[00:44:35]  And I don't know exactly.
[00:44:37]  I mean, I don't know exactly the perspective of somebody who's like a fentanyl addict, but people are at a place in their life where they want it.
[00:44:44]  That's the reality on the ground.
[00:44:46]  And we can either try to deal with that in a responsible way, or we can just have SWAT teams come in and give an avenue for the worst members of society, these gangs, to make a bunch of money because there is this demand that exists.
[00:45:02]  It's so obvious.
[00:45:03]  Just repeal the whole war on drugs.
[00:45:05]  It's been a failure on every level.
[00:45:07]  And God bless you for saying it.
[00:45:09]  Well, and you would get rid of the drug lords and drug gangs and drug cartels immediately.
[00:45:16]  I mean, this is what's so ironic: they spend all this money prosecuting these people.
[00:45:20]  They send them away for hundreds of years, and they're quickly replaced by 10 more gangs and cartels.
[00:45:26]  But if you legalize drugs, those people go out of business overnight.
[00:45:29]  So if you want to put them out of business, there's only one way to do it, and that's through legalization because they can't compete in a legal market.
[00:45:36]  They can only compete in a black market.
[00:45:39]  So who would be selling drugs?
[00:45:40]  Who would be selling the heroin, the cocaine?
[00:45:42]  Pharmacies would, and pharmaceuticals would.
[00:45:45]  And by the way, a drug addict would then be getting good, solid drugs instead of these corrupted drugs that are killing them.
[00:45:53]  And then we treat drug addiction, as you said, in the private sector.
[00:45:58]  That's where it should be treated.
[00:46:00]  That's the humane thing, where you've got Alcoholics Anonymous, narcotics rehab groups, therapy, counseling, all the things that people can't do right now, because if they go start talking about their addiction, they might be talking to a narc.
[00:46:14]  And so if you bring it out into the open and you say, we're going to treat these problems in the private sector, we're going to remove the criminal justice sector, then you start getting peace and harmony in that society.
[00:46:26]  You still have to figure out why is this such a drug-addicted society?
[00:46:30]  And I think it goes back to our original discussion at the beginning of the hour that we live in a very dysfunctional society.
[00:46:37]  I mean, if you look at the Soviet Union, the rates of alcoholism were enormous.
[00:46:42]  And I think that's where the despair comes in, that when you live in a socialist country, in a tightly controlled country, you get this sense of despair and depression.
[00:46:53]  But if you have a free society, there's an excitement, there's a dynamism.
[00:46:58]  People are looking at life with some joy and wonder.
[00:47:01]  And I think drug addiction would plummet as we start loosening the screws up that the feds have been tightening and start moving toward a society of liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony.
[00:47:12]  No, I completely agree with you.
[00:47:14]  And I think it's also tied to the bigger picture of what we were discussing before, where, you know, sometimes libertarians and people in the like objectivist in the liberty world, they have this dynamic between collectivism and individualism, which can be misleading sometimes, because really what it's about is about force versus voluntarism.
[00:47:35]  And whether you have voluntary collective, you know, organizations, there's nothing wrong with that.
[00:47:39]  But our problem with the state is that it's a collectivist organization based on initiating violence against peaceful people, forcing people into this collective.
[00:47:48]  And as we were mentioning before, what they do is they destroy all of these other collectives.
[00:47:54]  The sense of community, church, family, all of these other things suffer when the state gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
[00:48:02]  And people, you know, there's this natural thing where you kind of, the beauty of freedom is that as you were saying before, so if you're if there's not social security and instead we're trusting young people and giving them the freedom to hope that they'll take care of their parents when they're an older age, well, now all of these incentives kind of line up.
[00:48:23]  It's like, well, you want to take really good care of your kids and you want to be really loving to them and you want to be a part of a church and you want to be a part of a community because you need it.
[00:48:31]  It's like in your own self-interest and this helps cohesiveness.
[00:48:35]  And I think when the state comes in, it destroys so many of these institutions.
[00:48:40]  It destroys our common culture.
[00:48:41]  It destroys our common traditions.
[00:48:44]  It destroys churches, communities, all of these things.
[00:48:46]  And when you destroy all of these things, my guess is that this also leads to human despair and the rise in things like addiction.

=== Crowding Out Compassion and Values (02:25) ===

[00:48:54]  So I think it's really all related.
[00:48:56]  And, you know, I mean, like what you were saying about alcoholism in the Soviet Union, it makes perfect sense to me.
[00:49:02]  Of course, if you don't have any, if you don't have these voluntary institutions, then yeah, human beings, we're not made to be isolated.
[00:49:12]  We're not made to be without family and community.
[00:49:16]  I think that's an absolutely fascinating insight.
[00:49:19]  And I think you're right on.
[00:49:20]  I mean, I think you're really onto something here, that with this massive state involvement in people's lives, they crowd out the values that most of us hold dear, the compassion.
[00:49:33]  There's a cynicism that starts setting in.
[00:49:36]  Why should I help that person?
[00:49:37]  The government's already doing it.
[00:49:39]  Or why should I donate to that university?
[00:49:41]  The government's already doing it.
[00:49:43]  And then the more the money the government takes from us, indirectly through inflation with the Federal Reserve or directly with taxes, it gives us less opportunity to do the right thing.
[00:49:54]  So they crowd out these values and they suppress these values.
[00:49:59]  I totally agree with you.
[00:50:00]  I think that's a fascinating insight that you just made.
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=== Totalitarian Lies and Deep State Shifts (14:13) ===

[00:51:20]  Again, like everything else the state touches, it just a destructive force.
[00:51:25]  So let's transition to the- Well, you raise an interesting point about there.
[00:51:28]  I mean, there's an as you know, there's an interesting debate and has been in a long time in the libertarian movement between the anarchists that don't want any government at all, and then the minarchists, the limited government advocates.
[00:51:39]  And I'm a limited government advocate.
[00:51:41]  So when people say, oh, well, you hate the government.
[00:51:43]  No, I don't.
[00:51:44]  I hate the things that government is doing that it should not be doing.
[00:51:50]  And I favor like a limited government republic.
[00:51:53]  That was the type of government structure that the framers called into existence with the Constitution.
[00:51:58]  That totally changed after World War II.
[00:52:00]  The federal government was converted into what we know as a national security state, consisting of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, and to a certain extent, the FBI.
[00:52:10]  That is a totalitarian form of governmental structure.
[00:52:13]  North Korea is a national security state.
[00:52:14]  Cuba is a national security state.
[00:52:16]  Russia, China, Egypt, and post-World War II, United States.
[00:52:20]  So what I want to do is dismantle the national security state structure, but I want to preserve a limited government republic.
[00:52:28]  And then I want to be talking in terms of what does it mean to be free?
[00:52:31]  What should government be doing?
[00:52:33]  Should it be putting people in jail for ingesting the wrong substance?
[00:52:36]  I say no.
[00:52:37]  Should it be interfering with peaceful economic transactions between people?
[00:52:41]  I say no.
[00:52:42]  Should it be forcing people to be good, caring, and compassionate?
[00:52:45]  No.
[00:52:46]  That doesn't mean that I hate the government.
[00:52:48]  It means that I'm opposed to the government doing things that it shouldn't be doing.
[00:52:52]  Yeah, well, what Ron Paul used to always say was that the proper role of government is the protection of liberty and nothing more and nothing less.
[00:53:00]  I mean, that's what they're there to do.
[00:53:03]  And that's what the founders understood, or at least wrote about.
[00:53:07]  I guess some of them weren't the best ones they got power at enforcing that.
[00:53:13]  But I think you're right.
[00:53:14]  And the national security state stuff, that's another thing that's really changed in the last three years or so with everything that's been going on with Donald Trump and the Mueller investigation and now this impeachment with the quote whistleblower who seems to be a CIA operative.
[00:53:30]  It seems like libertarians, we were talking about this kind of secret government of unelected spies and bureaucrats and how much ungodly authority they wield.
[00:53:42]  But now this is kind of popularized.
[00:53:44]  Like the term the deep state is out there and they're not even really hiding it anymore.
[00:53:48]  It's just kind of like, yeah, you know, 60 minutes and Andrew McCabe goes, yeah, we basically had a discussion at DOJ about whether we should invoke the 25th Amendment or whether we should go with a special prosecutor or how exactly we're going to get rid of this guy.
[00:54:05]  And there is something that I find interesting, but also kind of exciting that at least the deep state isn't so deep anymore.
[00:54:16]  And now they're kind of just out here talking about it.
[00:54:19]  And for whatever problems you may have with anyone else, I mean, these guys were elected by no one.
[00:54:28]  And they can lie us into wars.
[00:54:30]  They can just go start wars.
[00:54:32]  They can attempt to overthrow elected presidents.
[00:54:35]  I mean, this is something that, and nobody, you seem to be one of the only people I hear, again, even in the Libertarian Party, one of the only people I've ever heard say, since I actually don't remember, I remember in 1988 Ron Paul saying this on the Libertarian Party.
[00:54:50]  Forgive me if somebody else has, I don't remember, but that you just say, abolish the CIA, abolish the deep state.
[00:54:57]  We don't need these organizations.
[00:55:00]  No, they are antithetical to the principles of a free society.
[00:55:03]  If you live in a national security state society, you are not free.
[00:55:07]  That's automatic because this is essentially a fourth branch of government.
[00:55:12]  And it is the most powerful branch of government.
[00:55:14]  You know, George Washington said government is force.
[00:55:17]  This is where the force of the federal government is concentrated.
[00:55:20]  Okay, that you've got some marshals that are armed and maybe some agricultural agents or something that are armed.
[00:55:27]  But here you've got a massive military structure.
[00:55:31]  You've got a CIA with the power to assassinate, including assassinate Americans.
[00:55:35]  And Pentagon's got that power too, to take Americans into custody.
[00:55:39]  A lot of Americans don't realize that these are all totalitarian powers that have come into existence post-World War II.
[00:55:46]  You've got the NSA conducting massive surveillance schemes.
[00:55:50]  Nobody can be certain in this society that the NSA isn't monitoring telephone calls and emails.
[00:55:57]  You just don't know.
[00:55:59]  That is not a free society.
[00:56:01]  When you've got to be thinking about that possibility, that is not a free society.
[00:56:05]  And our founders, they could have brought a national security state into existence if they had wanted to.
[00:56:11]  But I guarantee you, Dave, that at the Constitutional Convention after they met and they were there to amend the Articles of Confederation and they come out with this new plan, if they had said, we are proposing to you, the American people, a government that's going to have the power to assassinate you, torture you, take you into military custody, start wars whenever we want, surveill you, spy on you, they would have just laughed.
[00:56:36]  They said, you know, what's the joke here?
[00:56:38]  They never would have approved the type of governmental system that we have.
[00:56:42]  And so, yeah, I say if you want a free society, and this is what I'm telling libertarians, and if I were accorded the honor of being the nominee, I'd tell the American people.
[00:56:52]  If you want a free society, there are certain prerequisites to achieving that.
[00:56:56]  And one of these is restoring a limited government republic.
[00:57:00]  And the others we've talked about, dismantling the welfare state programs, the regulatory state programs, the drug war, and so forth.
[00:57:07]  But if you want a free society, you got to ditch this totalitarian governmental structure, the whole military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about.
[00:57:16]  And you've got to restore a limited government republic with powers that are limited and enumerated in the Constitution itself.
[00:57:23]  Because this fourth branch of government, it has omnipotent powers.
[00:57:28]  I mean, it can essentially do anything.
[00:57:30]  When you've got the power to assassinate your own citizens, what bigger power than that, Dave?
[00:57:37]  Yeah, and it'd be one thing, like maybe there'd be an argument for them if they were even good at what they claim to do.
[00:57:45]  I mean, they're saying, like, well, you have to give us all of this ungodly totalitarian power, but we'll be the central intelligence agency.
[00:57:53]  But when it comes to their actual intelligence, at least what they claim, they've been wrong about pretty much everything that's big.
[00:58:00]  I mean, they didn't see the fall of the Soviet Union coming.
[00:58:03]  They didn't see the fall of the Shah in Iran coming.
[00:58:06]  They thought Saddam Hussein was sitting on like a stockpile of nuclear weapons or something like that.
[00:58:11]  They get all of these decisions wrong.
[00:58:13]  They thought Qaddafi was about to go genocidal.
[00:58:15]  We're just finding out from the latest Wikileaks dump that it looks like they got the intelligence on Bashar al-Assad and Syria completely wrong.
[00:58:22]  And it looks like there may not have been a gas attack at all.
[00:58:25]  And when you listen to these people, you start wars based on false information.
[00:58:31]  Of course, I agree with your principled view of it.
[00:58:34]  I think that's the most important thing, but they're not even good at what they claim to be good at.
[00:58:38]  And I got to say, in addition to that, I do think that I would think that there's got to be an opening for Trump supporters to hear this pitch more than ever, where you're like, look, man, let's say you're a big Donald Trump guy and you really like, you wear the MAGA hat and all that stuff.
[00:58:57]  It's like, well, look what the deep state did to this guy, who you were all behind, right?
[00:59:02]  And he was going to make America great again and everything like that, or whatever it is that you project onto him.
[00:59:08]  It's like, well, look at this.
[00:59:09]  You've got these guys who were elected by nobody who are working to undermine him.
[00:59:13]  They're bragging about it in the media, how they're working to undermine him.
[00:59:17]  And what does Donald Trump turn around and do?
[00:59:18]  He reauthorizes the Patriot Act.
[00:59:21]  He's not going against any of these guys.
[00:59:23]  So if this is such a problem, well, guess what?
[00:59:25]  It's going to be a problem for every president that you like going forward if they don't get with the program and do whatever it is that the CIA wants them to do.
[00:59:35]  So here's somebody, Jacob Hornberger, who's actually running on dismantling this ungodly power structure.
[00:59:42]  And Eisenhower talked about this in his farewell address.
[00:59:46]  He says the military-industrial complex, he said it was necessary because of the Cold War.
[00:59:51]  I believe the whole Cold War was a big racket, totally unnecessary as well.
[00:59:56]  But let's assume that Eisenhower is right.
[00:59:58]  The Cold War is over.
[00:59:59]  Eisenhower said this apparatus, this military-industrial complex, which is really his term for the deep state or the national security state, is a threat to our democratic processes and to our liberties.
[01:00:12]  And that was back in 1960 or 61.
[01:00:16]  I mean, imagine how much more powerful it is today.
[01:00:20]  I mean, you know, the real question is: even if Congress decided they wanted to dismantle us, would the CIA permit itself to be dismantled?
[01:00:28]  Would the NSA permit this?
[01:00:29]  Would the Pentagon permit this?
[01:00:31]  Because in their minds, they are the essential key to preserving what they call national security, which is a nebulous term that absolutely means nothing.
[01:00:40]  It's just a license to do whatever they want.
[01:00:42]  And there's another important thing that everybody should keep in mind.
[01:00:45]  And this is the point that Ron Paul made in that famous presidential debate was when his campaign took off.
[01:00:52]  That the reason that we've got this whole war on terrorism and the anti-American terrorist threat is because of what the deep state has done in foreign countries.
[01:01:02]  As Ron put it, they came over here to kill us because we, meaning the deep state, was over there killing them.
[01:01:10]  And so if you bring all the troops home from everywhere, which is what I would do, then there's no more anti-American terrorism, which means you don't need the war on terrorism.
[01:01:20]  Things start returning to normal.
[01:01:22]  We don't need a TSA if we don't have all this terrorism business.
[01:01:26]  So we need to place responsibility where it lies.
[01:01:29]  The deep state went into the Middle East.
[01:01:32]  They began intervening after they lost their official enemy, the Soviet Union, in the Cold War racket.
[01:01:38]  And that's what produced the anger and the rage that finally manifested itself with anti-American terrorism.
[01:01:45]  1993, the attacks on the World Trade Center, those were in retaliation for what the U.S. government was doing in the Middle East.
[01:01:53]  The attacks on the USS Coal, the attacks on the embassies in East Africa, and then culminating in the 9-11 attacks, and then the post-9-11 attacks.
[01:02:03]  It's all oriented, all rooted in foreign interventionism, which is, of course, what the deep state's been doing.
[01:02:10]  No, absolutely.
[01:02:11]  I mean, look, I say it a lot on this show, but it's the idea that, you know, whatever it is, 12 years now after Ron Paul and Giuliani had that confrontation, I can't believe we even still need to make this argument.
[01:02:24]  And it's not something that's just a complete, you know, like obvious no-brainer.
[01:02:29]  I mean, look, there's really only been two groups in the Middle East.
[01:02:34]  It's two groups that are both Sunni radicals, right?
[01:02:37]  There was Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
[01:02:38]  Those are the guys who have perpetrated attacks against the West.
[01:02:42]  And both of them were funded and armed.
[01:02:45]  And in the case of Al-Qaeda, trained by the deep state.
[01:02:50]  So let's stop doing that.
[01:02:52]  How is this even like a difficult argument to have?
[01:02:55]  It's like, okay, well, what could we have done to have avoided these attacks?
[01:02:59]  I don't know.
[01:02:59]  Don't give them a whole bunch of money and weapons.
[01:03:02]  That seems like a good place to start.
[01:03:04]  Like, isn't that like fairly, you know, non-controversial to say, let's not give terrorists weapons and money.
[01:03:14]  But, you know, I think sometimes that the truth is that for a lot of people out there, they just need to be reminded that this is in fact what their government has done because nobody in the corporate press is really telling them that.
[01:03:27]  I mean, there might be one article buried on page 27 of the New York Times about, you know, how some of the weapons ended up in ISIS's hands, but nobody's really like banging that into people's heads.
[01:03:38]  And I think that's what needs to happen.
[01:03:42]  So let me ask you a question.
[01:03:45]  And I was just saying, the mainstream press is on board with the whole national security state, deep state foreign interventionism.
[01:03:51]  And so they effectively become assets.
[01:03:53]  And what you were referring to is Afghanistan, where the U.S. says, oh, well, let's suck the Soviets into their own Vietnam.
[01:04:01]  Let's get them to invade Afghanistan.
[01:04:03]  Well, why is that even a moral thing when you're trying to get another country to have another Vietnam where people are going to get killed en masse?
[01:04:11]  And then they start funding these radical Islamic groups to fight the Soviets while they're in Afghanistan.
[01:04:18]  Those Islamic groups become the genesis of al-Qaeda.
[01:04:21]  That's right.
[01:04:22]  They invade Iraq, and that's how we end up with ISIS.
[01:04:26]  And then people forget that.
[01:04:27]  Oh, we got to fight ISIS.
[01:04:28]  We got to fight ISIS.
[01:04:29]  Well, it's always just one intervention leading to another intervention, to another intervention.
[01:04:33]  And there's really just one answer to it, Dave.
[01:04:36]  Bring the troops home and stop the interventions, period, and unleash the private sector to interact with the people of the world.
[01:04:42]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:04:43]  And I say, like, you know, people, it's like a big thing on YouTube where people watch those videos of when troops come home and they're greeted by like their wife or their daughter, their son, their girlfriend, their dog.
[01:04:56]  It's like these beautiful videos of when some, excuse me, when some guy gets to come home and he's greeted by his family.
[01:05:03]  Let's have like, you know, thousands and thousands more of those videos.
[01:05:07]  It's just going to be nothing but a positive thing.
[01:05:09]  Let's just bring them all home.
[01:05:10]  How about even the ones in the non-dangerous zones?
[01:05:13]  Bring them home from Germany and South Korea.
[01:05:15]  Hey, do we need troops in Germany?
[01:05:17]  I think the war was over in 1945.
[01:05:19]  It's 2020.
[01:05:21]  I think we're ready to bring those troops home.
[01:05:23]  Let's declare victory in World War II and bring the troops home.
[01:05:27]  I think Germany's back on its feet now.
[01:05:30]  I think Japan's back on its feet.
[01:05:31]  Let's bring all of the troops home.

=== Bringing Troops Home from Conflict Zones (02:49) ===

[01:05:33]  Let me ask you just on a more like personal level.
[01:05:36]  You've been, of course, you've been at the Future of Freedom Foundation for decades now, and you've been writing a ton and really dealing with the principles and the philosophy.
[01:05:46]  And now you're campaigning and you're out doing that.
[01:05:50]  What's it like?
[01:05:51]  Are you enjoying it?
[01:05:51]  Are you having fun?
[01:05:54]  That's a really interesting question.
[01:05:57]  This turned out to be a very interesting part of my life.
[01:06:01]  I've been advancing liberty in the educational arena for 30 years, and I love it.
[01:06:06]  I mean, I've had a blessed life.
[01:06:07]  You know, there's not very many people that can say they absolutely love to go to work every day, and I love it.
[01:06:13]  I mean, the worst thing that could ever happen to me is to retire because, I mean, I just, I love going to work and get to work at six o'clock in the morning, and I just can't tell you how much I love it.
[01:06:24]  And so, but then I got to a point in my life, and I started thinking, okay, you've battled these people in the educational arena for 30 years now at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
[01:06:35]  And before that, I worked for a couple of years at the Foundation for Economic Education as a program director.
[01:06:40]  I said, it's time to just throw myself bigger into this battle.
[01:06:45]  And the best way to battle them directly is in the political arena.
[01:06:50]  And so I just, after a lot of soul searching, I said, I'm going to go into it.
[01:06:54]  And I don't like politics.
[01:06:55]  I mean, there's all the backbiting and the intrigue and the manipulation and the backstabbing, all the stuff that comes with politics.
[01:07:04]  But I just figured I want to throw myself bigger into the battle against these Democrats and Republicans who have destroyed our freedom.
[01:07:11]  And why am I doing this?
[01:07:13]  Well, I want to live in a free society, Dave, before I pass from this earth.
[01:07:17]  And I don't know if I'm going to get that.
[01:07:19]  I mean, a lot of people have passed on without having that experience.
[01:07:22]  Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises and so forth.
[01:07:26]  But I figured I'm going to try.
[01:07:28]  I'm going to throw myself into this battle.
[01:07:31]  I'm going to go for the Libertarian Party nomination.
[01:07:34]  If I lose it, then heck, I go back to the Future of Freedom Foundation.
[01:07:38]  But I figured I got to try.
[01:07:40]  And if I can win this nomination, I'm going to try to win the nomination, then it's going to be like, what an opportunity to battle Donald Trump and whoever the Democrats put up on what does it mean to be free?
[01:07:52]  How do we achieve a free society and just take the debate to a whole different level?
[01:07:56]  So what I've done in the past month, I announced about a month ago, okay, I could have spent my time intra-party, you know, going to the conventions, which I'll be doing because as you know, the Libertarian Party nominates by convention in May.
[01:08:10]  But I said, you know, I want to do more than that.
[01:08:12]  I want to break out of the party here.
[01:08:15]  So it turns out that the Libertarian Party has earned major party status in certain states that entitles them to participate in the primaries.

=== Spreading Liberty Beyond Party Lines (07:39) ===

[01:08:23]  And one of those states is right here next to Virginia, where I live, North Carolina.
[01:08:29]  So I said, okay, that's drivable.
[01:08:30]  I can go down there.
[01:08:32]  So that's what I'm doing.
[01:08:34]  I have announced on my campaign website, which is jacobforliberty.com, that I want to win the North Carolina primary.
[01:08:41]  And I want to win it big.
[01:08:42]  In 2016, Gary Johnson got 2,500 votes in that primary.
[01:08:49]  Well, to put things in perspective, Hillary Clinton got 700 or 800,000.
[01:08:53]  Donald Trump got 700 or 800,000.
[01:08:56]  Okay, I want to like quadruple the number of votes that Gary Johnson got.
[01:09:01]  And so it's a non-binding primary, but nonetheless, this gives me a chance to do what I like to do.
[01:09:07]  I like to campaign.
[01:09:08]  I like to interact with people.
[01:09:09]  So I'm down there campaigning among a large part of African Americans.
[01:09:15]  I went to the bus station in downtown Raleigh, just introducing myself to people and giving them a campaign card, like a little combination card and brochure that tells who I am.
[01:09:24]  And it's got a quote there.
[01:09:26]  End Jim Crow mass incarceration and the drug war, the most racially bigoted government program in history, instant segregation.
[01:09:34]  And so everybody was so kind to me.
[01:09:37]  These are all poor African Americans.
[01:09:40]  But I engaged them in conversation and they were just so kind.
[01:09:42]  And we talked politics.
[01:09:44]  And then I went, I've been to an African-American newspaper there and I interviewed the reporter who wrote a story about an African-American guy that got a 200-year jail sentence for drug distribution.
[01:09:57]  He's been in jail 30 years.
[01:09:59]  I just did an hour-long interview in Spanish with a Hispanic paper because there's a lot of immigrants there.
[01:10:06]  So what this is doing is it's gotten me out of my office, my ivory tower at the Future of Freedom Foundation, and interacting with people and talking to them, like and listening to them about what's going on in this country.
[01:10:19]  And I'll tell you something I wrote on my website is really fascinating.
[01:10:23]  Those people in that bus station, as poor as they were, and I would say the average education was like 10th grade or something, they had a better insight into what's going on in this country than your highfalutin college graduate, Columbia, Princeton graduate that's writing op-eds and editorials.
[01:10:40]  It was fascinating.
[01:10:42]  Like one guy says to me, Mr. Hornberger, we're killing a lot of people over there that really don't deserve killing.
[01:10:49]  This guy had like a 10th grade education.
[01:10:51]  I mean, how does he get that insight?
[01:10:54]  So my point is we got to start listening to people in the lower echelons economically of American society.
[01:11:00]  Nobody listens to them.
[01:11:02]  And I think they have a better handle on what's going on in this country.
[01:11:04]  They know about the drug war.
[01:11:06]  You've talked to any African American and every one of them knows how racially bigoted it is, how the blacks are getting much higher jail sentences.
[01:11:14]  You go to your average, well-to-do white person.
[01:11:16]  He has no idea of the racial bigotry in this war.
[01:11:20]  And so to answer your question, These four weeks have been among the most meaningful of my life of just interacting with people as part of a campaign.
[01:11:28]  Social media, I'll be honest with you, I don't like it.
[01:11:32]  I don't do Twitter.
[01:11:33]  I don't do Facebook.
[01:11:35]  If I were made the nominee here, I would be reaching out to non-libertarians, you know, saying, this is what we libertarians are fighting for.
[01:11:44]  This is why we're fighting.
[01:11:45]  This is why people go to these LP meetings and build up the structure of the party.
[01:11:50]  These are the principles.
[01:11:51]  This is why we're fighting.
[01:11:52]  And that's what I want to do, you know, as compared to sitting in my bedroom sending out tweets every day.
[01:11:58]  Yeah, no, I can totally understand that.
[01:12:01]  And it is, you know, you're absolutely right.
[01:12:04]  I've had this experience in my life too, where a lot of times people who are like the, you know, the more affluent, the more highly educated in our society, you know, whatever the problems with our society may be, it's working out fairly well for them.
[01:12:18]  And so they're not really incentivized to look at the really, you know, nasty parts of this system.
[01:12:24]  But even as you say it right there, I mean, 30, like if you just almost like take a step back and act like you didn't know anything about the world, but you had, you know, a basic sense of morality in you, and you said, we are throwing a human being in a cage for 30 years.
[01:12:40]  Wouldn't you go like, so what did that guy do?
[01:12:42]  Like murder a child or something?
[01:12:44]  I mean, what did he like stab a grandmother?
[01:12:47]  And you go, no, he distributed a plant that we put on a no-no list of the, and it's like, holy macro.
[01:12:54]  Like, how can anybody get away with such a just heinously evil, you know, system?
[01:13:00]  But I guess, I guess that, you know, evil systems have lasted throughout society because a lot of people just don't really question and evaluate them.
[01:13:08]  All right, look, anyway, I want to say this.
[01:13:10]  We are all, I know, you've only been announced for a month.
[01:13:14]  This is the very beginning of your campaign.
[01:13:16]  You have gotten so many people like myself really, really excited about what you're doing.
[01:13:21]  I mean, I know I speak for Tom Woods and Scott Horton and a whole lot of my listeners, man, who have joined the LP.
[01:13:27]  People are trying to become delegates to ensure that you get this nomination.
[01:13:32]  I know you've only been announced for a month, and I saw recently there was a poll online that you were dominating in.
[01:13:37]  You were the frontrunner.
[01:13:38]  And I just got to say, man, thank you for doing this because it's really, it's a shot in the arm for a lot of us real hardcore libertarians who just want to see somebody out there spreading the message of liberty again.
[01:13:49]  We haven't had this since 2012.
[01:13:51]  And so thank you so much for doing it, man.
[01:13:54]  And I really encourage everybody to go to jacobforliberty.com.
[01:13:58]  They can learn more about your campaign, learn how to help out.
[01:14:01]  And yeah, if there's anything in closing that you want to say, the floor is yours.
[01:14:06]  Well, look, the honor is mine, Dave, for you to say those words.
[01:14:10]  I mean, I've learned about you in this pork fest, and I know how highly respected you are.
[01:14:16]  And I know how hardcore you are.
[01:14:18]  So to have that coming from you.
[01:14:19]  And God, Scott Horton is my greatest fan.
[01:14:21]  I mean, this guy's awesome.
[01:14:23]  And any friend of Scott Horton's is a super VIP and Tom Woods has just been wonderful.
[01:14:28]  And it's just an honor to have these hardcore guys that are supporting me.
[01:14:33]  It's kind of kind of like a shock.
[01:14:35]  But I know I got to earn this thing.
[01:14:37]  I don't know about that poll.
[01:14:38]  I mean, to me, I'm starting at the bottom of the totem pole.
[01:14:42]  Everybody's been in this race much longer than I am.
[01:14:45]  And I got a lot of climbing to do.
[01:14:47]  And I want to earn this.
[01:14:48]  I know I need to earn this nomination.
[01:14:50]  That's why I'm in North Carolina.
[01:14:52]  I'm trying to show people this is what I want to do to spread liberty in this land and to achieve a free society.
[01:14:57]  I want to be your standard bearer.
[01:14:59]  I want to be your spokesman.
[01:15:00]  And I'm going to be, of course, my campaign motto is a campaign of principle for the party of principle because I believe libertarianism is not only right, it's the practical solution.
[01:15:11]  So I want to thank you very much for giving me the time to be in your guests.
[01:15:14]  And thank you for everybody listening in.
[01:15:17]  And if anybody wants to come and help me and I do need some help financial and otherwise, please come to jacobforliberty.com and thank you again, Dave.
[01:15:26]  Well, thank you.
[01:15:27]  It's my pleasure.
[01:15:28]  Open door policy.
[01:15:29]  Anytime you want to come on the show, just let me know.
[01:15:32]  And we're happy to have you back.
[01:15:33]  I'd love to have you back a few times throughout the campaign to talk about the latest.
[01:15:38]  You know, we didn't even get into the state of politics in the Democrats and Republicans.
[01:15:44]  Maybe next time we'll talk about that a little bit.
[01:15:46]  Kamala Harris is out today, everybody.
[01:15:49]  So sad to see that drug warrior campaign fall apart.
[01:15:54]  So anyway, one more time.
[01:15:55]  Thank you, Jacob Hornberger.
[01:15:56]  Really appreciate it.
[01:15:57]  And thanks, everybody, for listening.
[01:15:59]  We will be back on Friday with a brand new episode.
[01:16:02]  See you later.