It is one of the most maligned substances in history, with the hysteria based on politics rather than science, but compared to drugs currently used to treat the Zika virus, DDT is relatively harmless. Mises Institute Chairman Lew Rockwell joins the Liberty Report to explain.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
It is one of the most maligned substances in history, with the hysteria based on politics rather than science, but compared to drugs currently used to treat the Zika virus, DDT is relatively harmless. Mises Institute Chairman Lew Rockwell joins the Liberty Report to explain.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Government's Role in Environmental Debates00:06:23
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, the co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Well, we have a friend of Liberty and a friend of ours on this program today.
We should have a very interesting discussion.
Our guest today is Lou Rockwell of the Mises Institute.
Lou, good to have you on our program today.
Ron, it's an honor to be with you and Daniel.
Wonderful.
Well, I want to go over a subject, and you're an expert on just about every subject, but we're going to go over an issue which is scientific, and it's also one of liberty, and one of the terrible actions by governments creating this monster.
And what brought us attention to the subject we're going to talk about today was the Zika scare, you know, people.
And that sounds very serious.
You know, this disease, even though the disease isn't harmful to those who get it, it can cause possibility, at least the indication is it could cause birth defects.
So it's nothing to laugh at.
But as usual, we see the government involved in a negative way over this.
And what we wanted to talk with you today about is DDT in particular.
And, you know, I've over the years have read that DTT wasn't as bad as they claimed.
And DTT maybe could have prevented a lot of our problems.
That's the issue that we want to visit with today.
And I know you and I have had conversations about this in the past.
And there were times when they got off on tangents way back, you know, 40 or 50 years, and nothing ever seems to change once it seems to be locked in.
So give us a little brief update on this whole issue of why we don't have DDT and should we have it brought back.
Well, DDT has been around for a long time.
It was first isolated in the 1870s.
It was used first as an insecticide in the 1940s.
And one thing to keep in mind, for that reason, it's not patentable.
The drug companies don't want DDT being used and the Monsanto and all the similar kinds of companies don't like it because they can't make money off of it.
On the other hand, DDT is a proven amazingly effective, amazingly non-dangerous by insecticide, in insecticide terms anyway, material.
For example, it is toxic.
However, for animals and for human beings, it's less toxic than, say, caffeine or aspirin or sand.
So it's not a very toxic thing.
It's unbelievably effective.
And just one of the many bad things that happen when the environmental movement, which really maybe had helped found the environmental movement, I'll get to that in a second.
But when it was outlawed, perhaps more than a million people have died of malaria and typhus in Africa and other poor areas where they would not have died.
So this is more blood on the hands of the state and more blood on the hands of the environmental movement.
And this all started to run, as you pointed out, back in 1962 when Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring.
And she argued in there that DDT should be outlawed because it made the shells of robins and other birds too thin for reproductive purposes.
That turned out not to be true.
But over the next 10 years, There was more and more propaganda from the environmentalists, which this helped, by the way, start the movement until 1972 when it was outlawed under Richard Nixon, who also gave us the EPA and other wonderful things.
And it's had a very bad effect.
So this stuff is not toxic as compared to the, for example, what they're spreading for the mosquitoes, the Zika mosquitoes for right now in Florida, far more toxic than DDT.
Nobody is complaining about that.
And by the way, why is government making these decisions?
Why are governments and government scientists?
How come property owners, how come communities can make this decision about whether to use this material or not?
So it would be great to bring DDT back.
It's not perfect.
It's not a panacea, but it's so much better than the current insecticides.
But it's hated by the left and by the environmental movement, by the government, like almost nothing else.
You know, the articles that are out, and they're scientific and academic as far as I'm concerned, has shown that there's so much fraud involved.
And you mentioned about the shells were too weak, and that's why we had some of the wild eagles died.
And it was all not true.
The one study that they used to prove this, it was DDT, is they took all the calcium out of the diet on this control study.
So there's a lot of fraud involved in this, too.
And that to me is just really, really disgusting.
Daniel?
All fraud that actually kills people.
And of course, the environmental movement, we always have to remember, doesn't like the human race.
The environment to them is separate from people.
People are always a negative for the environment.
A lot of them, Ron, as you pointed out, advocate positive policies by government to diminish the number of human beings.
That's the attitude of these people.
That's amazing.
And you know, the role of government, Lou, of course, you mentioned it early on, but the role of government, government loves crises like the Zika crises because it's such a huge opportunity for financial boondoggles to get more control over people.
You know, we used to hang posters in the old office of all the latest scares.
It was the avian virus and this and that.
It was just a big joke.
We papered the wall with them.
But, you know, the House this past a few months ago passed a bill of $622 million to fight Zika.
The White House says, that's not enough.
We need $1.9 billion to fight it.
So there's a lot of money in there for all of these special groups.
Attitude of These People00:03:46
No, of course, it's absolutely true.
And remember LR, which did the LR scare.
Oh, LR on the apples is going to be very dangerous, maybe kill you, and so forth.
It was all a lie.
It did a lot of damage to the apple industry.
And it was just another one of these government scams.
So you always have to be so careful.
I think it's a good rule of thumb, always assume the government is lying unless they're proven to be truthful.
And if you do that, you're not going to be fooled because I don't care whether it's foreign policy or environmental policy or domestic policy.
They tend to be the biggest bunch of liars on earth.
You know, science, they claim science has settled the issue and therefore you can't challenge it.
But it's always, you know, the government science has settled the issue.
So this was settled in 1962.
And this was, what is amazing is it wasn't really a scientific article at all.
And yet people went along with that because I think you mentioned about the movement for the environmentalists to control all of us and get the government involved.
So those who wanted to do that literally went and did this.
But you know, when I think about this, science has settled it.
And I get to thinking that, you know, if you challenge anything, you know, global warming, I mean, you might not be able to get into a university if you believed, if you didn't, you know, agree that global warming didn't really exist or you challenge it just on scientific terms.
You know, even if you took a neutral position, say, it hasn't been settled, why should we accept this that science is settled?
Because science has never settled.
And I keep thinking, well, what are some of the great scientific achievements that came about after long periods of ignorance?
Well, you know, even right now, there's in academic circles, you're allowed to challenge Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, you know.
And the other one that I think is a good example of never accepting this idea that government said this, the science is this, don't ever challenge it, don't change it, or you're politically incorrect and we're going to get you fired and you will be totally destroyed.
You know, the flat earth people existed for a long time.
The people for over 6,000 years believed the earth would be flat.
And just about 500 years ago, Copernicus proved that the earth was not flat and it was not the center of the universe.
And so most all that history, I mean, you could lose your life over the fact if you didn't believe that the earth was flat, you could get in a lot of trouble.
And I think, just think how long ignorance can last.
You would think in this day and age that we could refute it.
But even doing a program like this, you can expect a lot of grief on this.
People are going to, and Lou, you come on this program with great risk.
They might even want to criticize you, and they might want to even criticize the Bises Institute.
Who knows?
Well, it's absolutely true, Ron.
And of course, we know that some of the people who are the global warming enforcers, or as they now call it, climate change, which, you know, by the way, is not what happens from spring to summer.
It's, you know, something else, although they use that for try to confuse people.
They want to sometimes, some of these people want to jail you if you question the so-called climate change, if you question global warming.
So they're totalitarians, and I think it's always a good rule of thumb: if people want to silence all discussion of a particular topic, there's something funny going on.
It doesn't mean that you're right, but it does mean the people enforcing this, maybe they themselves believe they don't have the goods, and so rather than have anything questioned, they want to silence and even put people in jail over it.
Vaccines and Free Speech00:09:38
So these are a very nasty bunch.
We think of them as maybe, you know, loving the birds and the animals and the forests and the outdoors.
Their main deal life, even worse than the communists in this, they hate the human race.
They want humans to be less prosperous, less free, for the benefit of allegedly the bugs and the birds and the insects and so forth.
So that's exactly the wrong way to be.
We, of course, should be pro-human.
We're glad we're humans.
And when people want to shut us up, it's so important, and this is, of course, your whole life, Ron.
You have refused to be shut up.
You've told the truth.
You've asked the questions that are not supposed to be asked.
Look how much good you've done.
So this is the way to proceed, no matter what, no matter that fact.
The fact that it outrages these people is like a metal on our chests.
It's interesting you bring up the settled science.
I remember when I was living in Hungary, I'd studied the case of Dr. Ignat Semmelweis, who was really the discoverer of the germ theory of disease.
He noticed that people were going straight from autopsies to deliveries and that the babies were dying.
And so he came up with the idea of washing your hands.
Well, the science had already been settled and it had nothing to do with germs.
He was literally driven crazy.
He went insane.
It turns out he was right.
But I was going to ask you, Lou, you mentioned earlier that some of the solutions now, DDT is gone, we can't talk about it.
Some of the solutions they're having now seem to me far worse.
This one, you probably can pronounce it, Dr. Paul.
I can't.
Piriproxifen is what they're using to fight this Zika right now.
And they say that might actually be causing the microcephaly in people.
The other thing they're talking about is creating Franken mosquitoes.
They're putting all sorts of genetically modified material.
They say that may not even cross over into the human body if you get bitten.
That sounds a heck of a lot worse than DDT.
Right.
No doubt.
Me too, unless they want to test it in Washington, D.C. I'd be okay with that.
There you go.
You know, the other thing that, excuse me, you want to have the other thing in science that they don't recognize that sometimes they can play tricks and create fraudulent tests is that almost every substance that we deal with can be turned into a dangerous substance.
For instance, I imagine 14 gallons of DDT, if you swallow it, might make you sick, you know, this sort of thing, even though a little bit doesn't seem to hurt people.
But anyway, all substances are dangerous, and if you use them in excess, and I think of one medical condition that was discovered, which was really unfortunate at one time, when prematures were born, they figured, well, they can hardly breathe.
And they would give them oxygen and they would really push the oxygen.
And even if you just gave them regular air, they could go blind from us.
That's the last thing they needed.
They went blind from the fact that their eye had not developed enough, and oxygen was a danger.
It became a poison.
So people have to be careful on these studies.
That's how they can come up with fraudulent studies.
They can come up and claim it was oxygen that is the evil.
Let's get rid of oxygen.
Oh, it's the CO2, you know, and we have to get rid of the CO2.
Well, this is such an important point, and it's not easy to find out.
But anytime we see a study, a study on some particular drug, an environmental study, a study on global warming or whatever, you always want to ask who paid for it?
Who selected the guys doing the study?
But the question is always: who paid for it?
That doesn't prove that the thing is wrong, but it's very useful information to have because, of course, typically the people paying for the studies that have a certain result are the ones who profit either in terms of money or in terms of power from the results of that study.
So there's a lot of fraud, exactly as you're saying.
You know, and the other thing, I think Daniel mentioned this about how drugs are used and they don't do much good.
But, you know, they have not come up with a medication that really helps.
It's a total failure when they try to treat malaria.
The people continue, you know, to die.
And also the vaccines, you know, and as long as there's, you know, a lot of government money going into it, they're going to work on a new vaccine.
Just think of the Ebola virus, how big a fraud that was.
They had already spent billions, not billions, millions of dollars on a vaccine.
But when the time came where they used it, oh, we don't even know where that research was.
So we have to start all over again to develop this government vaccine to deal with Ebola.
So, you know, it's a shame that we have to always point to the source, but it's necessary that we do.
And it is government.
And government is so out of control that it's just a shame that so many people buy into it.
It's always fear and intimidation, whether it's economic fear or international fear.
It's get people really, really scared, and then they will capitulate and go along with the warmongers and the demagogues and the war profiteers.
And even these people who are in industry, the drug industry, there's another example.
Well, it's true, Ron.
And of course, they always have a purpose in mind.
These are not disinterested, objective scientists.
They're hoping they're either on the government grant, they want government grants, or the companies want a monopoly.
They want money from the government.
So you just always have to be very skeptical.
Another thing that you mentioned, the vaccinations, why is it so, I mean, why is being a vaccine denier, as they hilariously put it, like being a global warming denier, why is that supposed to get you kicked out of kicked out of normal society?
If you're concerned about giving your little baby, Dr. Donovan points out that all the vaccinations that the government would like to give an infant are the equivalent of an adult getting like a cup of vaccine.
Even if that's not harmful, and I think there's no question the MMR vaccination leads to autism and the unbelievable epidemic of autism that's going on in this country.
But they don't care about that.
They don't care about the families ruined the child, the children ruined, whole multi-generational families ruined over what the vaccinations can do to little children.
They don't care.
You care Ron.
People like us care.
And it's so important to speak out.
So whether it's DDT, we want to have the truth told about DDT.
We'd like to have people in Africa and other places who are murdered by malaria because there's no DDT.
We'd like them to be able to make a choice.
The U.S., of course, being the world power, the world government, I guess they'd like to be the solar system government too.
They weren't just satisfied with outlawing DDT here.
They forced through the UN the entire world to outlaw DDT.
So it's outlawed in Africa.
Now there's a slight loophole.
You can get permission, not easily, by the way, to put it on the inside walls of your house.
Well, okay, but you can't spray it in the garden.
You can't spray it in the town, even though that wipes out malaria.
So these people, you know, they proclaim themselves humanitarians.
They're the enemies of mankind.
And we always have to remember that in everything they say, everything they do, they're not our friends.
You know, Lou, we want to finish up on a positive note.
And I mentioned before that after thousands of years of flat earthers, we finally conquered them.
And science, good science finally came out and ruled.
Can we be hopeful that maybe something like that could happen, that there will be another day where we will actually be allowed to use DDT and see the improvements that we're talking about?
I would think that the best test for this is if anybody pays attention to this program and we do get a little bit of attention, maybe we have lit a spark because we certainly don't read about it or hear about it in the ordinary media.
All we hear is the other side of the story.
Well, I think there is absolutely more interest in DDT right now.
Just as there's a huge anti-vaccination movement, people are getting more educated and they're resisting.
Just like there's a huge global warming resistance movement, most people don't buy Al Gore's story.
Quite rightly, they think it's a pack of lies designed to make him a billionaire more times over and the rest of the Al Gores that oppress us.
So we're winning the battle among the people.
The government, the power elite, the big corporations, as usual, are on the other side, the big universities.
But there is absolutely reason to be hopeful.
And just the fact that you're having this show on DDT, there's far more interest among all the non-controlled scientists in the use of DDT.
People are talking about it again in Africa, even though it's very politically incorrect to mention DDT any place.
So maybe there's going to be hope.
For that matter, I hesitate to mention this, but maybe there will be a black market in DDT and people will just go ahead and use it if they would like to use it.
There you go.
Well, Lou, I want to thank you very much for being with us today, and I know our audience are going to be very pleased with our program, and we really appreciate you being with us.
Ron, great to be with you and Daniel, and thank you very much.
Good.
And I want to thank our audience being with us today.