Non-Interventionism: America's Original Foreign Policy
Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling join today's Liberty Report to discuss what we can do to return US foreign policy to one of non-intervention in the affairs of others. Next month the Ron Paul Institute and Future of Freedom Foundation will team up in Charleston, SC to hold a conference on this very topic. Join us! Get your tickets while they last - only $5.00!
RonPaulInstitute.org/conference
Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling join today's Liberty Report to discuss what we can do to return US foreign policy to one of non-intervention in the affairs of others. Next month the Ron Paul Institute and Future of Freedom Foundation will team up in Charleston, SC to hold a conference on this very topic. Join us! Get your tickets while they last - only $5.00!
RonPaulInstitute.org/conference
Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling join today's Liberty Report to discuss what we can do to return US foreign policy to one of non-intervention in the affairs of others. Next month the Ron Paul Institute and Future of Freedom Foundation will team up in Charleston, SC to hold a conference on this very topic. Join us! Get your tickets while they last - only $5.00!
RonPaulInstitute.org/conference
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Well, very good, and we have a very special program today.
Two guests today.
So we have been given the advantage of having lots of news today, but we do want to talk about our conference coming up.
And that's one of the things that we have these guests for.
First, Jacob Hornberger is with us, and he, of course, has been with us before.
He's well known.
He's been to our conferences.
We've been to his, and he's an expert on foreign policy, and he will be joining us in Charleston on the conference that we're having, and that's on the 29th of April.
And his previous life, he was an attorney and a trial lawyer at that.
But we still trust him because he sort of knows about economics.
And civil liberties, of course.
So, Jacob, welcome to our program today.
It's great to be back with you guys, and it's a real honor to be doing this conference with you.
We are very excited about it.
Okay, great.
And I want to introduce our other guest today, and that's Richard Ebeling, who's a close associate and has worked with Bumper for a good many years.
But he's a professor, and he's a PhD in economics.
And I don't know exactly who did his teaching, but I know he knows something about Austrian economics, and that's what is important.
Richard, welcome to our program today.
Great to be here with you, and it's good to see you.
We're very good.
And Daniel, would you like to say hello to our guests?
Greetings, gentlemen.
This is the conference.
This is a preview, a sneak preview of what our friends are going to get in Charleston, South Carolina on the 29th of April.
Got good news, gentlemen, before we start speaking.
We're selling a lot of tickets.
There's not a lot left, so we're going to have a packed house.
We're looking forward to it.
Future of Freedom Foundation and Ron Paul Institute working together.
You know, before we start, though, I want to ask Jacob a personal question.
I may have asked him before, but I always like to review when people see the light.
And I know one thing that Bumper was born in Texas, down in the valley, if I'm not mistaken.
But Jacob, could you give us a real brief summary or history on when you became a libertarian?
Because I consider you the most determined and principled and steadfast libertarian.
As Leonard Reed would say, you don't leak.
So when did this all come about?
When did you really decide that you were this hardcore libertarian?
You know, you know, it's often thought that libertarians are born and it's just a matter of when we discover what we really are.
Right, I think.
Well, I grew up not in the valley, but near the valley down in Laredo on the border.
And I was an ardent leftist.
I grew up as a Democrat.
And when I was in my early 20s, late 20s, I guess, I'd already gotten a law degree and I was practicing law back in Laredo.
I was disillusioned with the political process.
And I was in the public library rummaging around looking for something to read.
And I saw these four little different colored books called Essays on Liberty that had been published back in the 1950s, some 20 years before, by the Foundation for Economic Education.
And I started thumbing through them, and they were just a collection of hardcore, pure, no-compromise libertarian essays by the likes of Leonard Reed, Ludwig von Mises, Frank Shodaroff, Baldi Harper.
They changed the course of my life, those little essays.
And I later learned that FEE, as we call it, was still in existence.
I went up there.
I met Leonard Reed, and ultimately went to work at FEE, gave up the law practice, and then started FFF in 1989.
Well, you know, I think you hinted something that I've frequently said.
I think we are all born libertarians.
I think it gets knocked out of us because we're exposed to all the anti-people in the media and government and in our educational system.
And then we rediscover it.
But, Richard, could you give us a brief summary on how you came to be a hardcore libertarian as well, and working with the Foundation for Economic Education as well as with Future Freedom Foundation?
Well, actually, Dr. Pohl, it all began the day I was born.
There you go.
Grasped by my little feet, turned me upside down, slapped my behind, and I shouted out.
And at that moment, I realized two things: the fundamental idea of Austrian economics, man acts, and the second one that came to mind is that the non-aggression axiom.
The doctor slapped my little butt without my permission.
The rest is history.
Perhaps a little bit more seriously.
I got interested in these ideas actually when I was a teenager, about 15 or 16 years old.
In my case, I first came across the writings of Ayn Rand.
And I started with her nonfiction work, not her novels, like The Capitalism and the Unknown Ideal.
And I started following the footnote references.
So who was there?
Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Reed, Frederick Bastiat.
And that, of course, then led me to discover the Freeman magazine put out by the Foundation for Economic Education.
I corresponded with them.
I then got in touch with the Institute for Humane Studies, which was run by Baldy Harper, who had worked with Leonard Reed at FEE.
And so then that spread my ideas out.
Now, I went and got my economics degrees, and I ended up teaching at the University of Dallas in Texas for four years, which is actually during the time when you and I first met.
But in Dallas, I met Jacob, who was looking for a tutor in Mises's Human Action.
And so we started doing these sessions.
And the upshot of that, he went to FEE.
But shortly after that, a few years later, he decided to found the foundation or the Future Freedom Foundation.
And Jacob asked me at that time if I would serve as the vice president for academic affairs of FFF.
And then the rest is history.
Very good.
Comment on Liberty00:10:13
I have one comment, and then Daniel has a question.
But my one comment is to you, Richard.
I delivered approximately 4,000 babies.
I never slapped anybody.
So I don't know why they did all that slapping around.
And you were a victim, Daniel.
Well, we are.
Just because you were a libertarian, Doctor.
There you go.
Well, as we started out saying, we are having a conference next month.
And you might ask, well, why do we need to get together and talk about non-intervention?
I guess that's a ridiculous question.
I just have to say a few words.
Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, Nikki Haley.
We have the neocons consolidating power.
We have people who want war with Iran.
John Bolton published an article not long ago.
Hey, it's time to attack North Korea.
So I think it's self-evident, but maybe, Jacob, I know this was your idea first to get together and try to do this together.
What's going through your head?
What can people expect when they come visit us next month?
Well, and the way I look at it is this is the most important issue of liberty in our lifetime.
We all know that the welfare state is a massive infringement on liberty along with the income tax that funds it, the Federal Reserve, the drug war.
But I don't think there's any greater threat to our liberty and our prosperity than interventionism abroad, foreign wars, the national security establishment.
Madison points this out that of all the enemies to liberty, war is the biggest.
Not because of some foreign enemy, but because of one's own government, because it consolidates power, it uses the wartime environment as an excuse to infringe on liberty with privacy violations, assaults on civil liberties, massive government spending and taxation and debt.
And so there couldn't be a more important issue for us to be addressing right now.
And that's the idea of this conference.
It's raising people's vision to how urgent this is.
I mean, we've seen these forever wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
And as you point out, they're now threatening to expand them to Iran, to North Korea, and to Africa, to who knows where else.
And it's time for Americans to stand up and say, this is not the direction we want to take America.
It's time to restore America's original foreign policy of non-interventionism.
And that's the theme of the conference, America's original foreign policy, non-intervention.
You know, I agree with everything that Bumper just said, but I have a question for Richard, and it has to do with economic policy.
And over the years, I've talked a lot about monetary policy, and I got interested in politics to speak out, mainly because I was interested in the tragedy of the 1970s with the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the more power given to the Federal Reserve.
But I've made this statement, I want you to make a comment on this, Richard, is that, yes, war is a big deal, and I agree with Bumper.
And of course, the welfare is a big deal.
But in many ways, I think if there was not this horrendous corruption in the monetary system where credit can be created out of thin air, because they're really the financers and they're really the taxers who allow this system to go on a lot longer than it would under the conditions of a sound currency.
I'd like you to make a comment on that, if you would.
Yes, I think that you're absolutely right.
It would be very difficult for governments to undertake foreign interventions, that is military adventures abroad, that have nothing to do with the legitimate defense of Americans and their property at home, if they did not have the capacity, particularly in this post-World War II era since 1945, to have absolute discretionary ability to fund government deficits.
If the government was undertaking not only the domestic welfare state entitlement programs, but complementary in conjunction with that, the foreign adventures and the military budgets that involves,
and had to tax the population dollar for dollar that these military adventures and bases and armament programs cost, it would make the American people much more knowledgeable and aware of what militarism and American empire is costing them as private citizens.
But the fact that they can run huge budget deficits, $500 billion, now a trillion dollars, and we'll fund this with all borrowed money that ultimately gets in one way or another created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.
It creates the illusion that people can have something for nothing.
Oh, we don't have it.
We can have the government play this big global policeman with all of those negative effects that we would consider negative.
And it's really not costing us very much.
My tax burden is this.
Of course, they're borrowing all this money.
We have over $20 trillion in debt, but that's someone else's problem in the future.
Those future taxes will come from some other person's income and wealth, and in many cases, long after the current citizenry are passed away.
But it will burden their children and their grandchildren.
They're shifting the cost of global policemen to the shoulders, to a great extent, the future generations, to create the false impression that it's not costing the Americans in money, in wealth, and productivity as much as the reality is.
Yeah, not only is that bad economic policy, it's bad morality as well, Danny.
Absolutely.
It is ironic, though, because this robust foreign policy, which we call interventionism, is portrayed at home.
First of all, the costs are hidden.
And this is one thing we focus so much on in the show.
The average American does not know how this is destroying his personal economy and the national economy.
But it's ironic that this is portrayed as something very macho, very powerful, when in fact it's making our country very weak and eventually very powerless.
But I wanted to ask Jacob something, and I know you've spoken at our conferences before.
You're always a huge draw.
People love hearing you.
And I'm not putting you on the spot because I know you address this, but I want you to talk to the people that they're thinking about going this position.
But what can we do?
Why should we bother coming out?
What's the point of getting together to listen to these guys talk about this?
What would you say to those people, and what can they expect to take away from getting together with a couple of hundred people in Charleston next month?
This is where change happens.
I mean, this is the reason why totalitarian dictators will not permit these types of conferences to take place in their countries.
I mean, you won't see this kind of conference in China, not even in Russia now, it seems, certainly not in North Korea.
Why?
Because even though a government has total power over the citizenry, it knows the power of ideas on liberty.
That ideas on liberty can influence the way a person thinks, and then that person shares his perspectives with someone else.
And all of a sudden, you have this new public opinion that's being sweeping across the country that's going from person to person, email to email, article to article, and circumventing the mainstream press, the public, the government sector.
And all of a sudden, this is what brings paradigm shifts to a society.
And it's all done through the power of ideas.
I mean, all four of us believe in ideas.
If we didn't, we wouldn't be doing these shows.
We wouldn't be doing this website.
We wouldn't be doing this conference.
We do it because we know that ideas matter and they can change the course of society.
And that's what this conference is all about.
Changing the course of society to one that's going to bring us peace, prosperity, harmony, morality, and most important, freedom.
You know, along that line, when I get involved in these subjects, I remember two things.
One is that liberty shouldn't be defined as group rights.
You know, you belong to a group, you have the right to do this or that.
I think we should remind people that liberty is individual.
Individuals have liberty, and that narrows the problems down, and it gets rid of all the discrimination.
If everybody has their liberty because they're an individual.
Also, the other point has already been mentioned, and that is a non-aggression principle.
That if you remember where liberty is an individual thing and that nobody's supposed to commit aggression, you really can come down and solve most of these problems.
Barbara, if you could go ahead and just make a quick comment on that, because I think that's a basic thing that you actually have talked about very often over the years.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is the core principle of libertarianism: that you don't initiate force against someone else.
You don't murder, rape, steal, and so forth.
But absent that, absent the initiation of force, you should be free to live your life any way you want.
The problem with foreign interventionism is that the government is initiating force against foreigners.
I mean, that's what this assassination program is all about.
This is what these invasions are all about, these undeclared wars are all about.
The initiation of force against people that have done nothing against the United States.
Nobody in the Middle East, nobody in Afghanistan invaded the United States.
Even the 9-11 attacks were just retaliation for what the U.S. had been doing in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East for decades.
So what we're talking about as libertarians is reigning in the government, bringing all these troops home, stopping the foreign wars, stopping the foreign adventures.
People say, oh, that's isolationism.
On the contrary, it's reigning in the government.
It's making the government a limited government republic, which was the type of government that America was founded on.
And then liberating the American people to travel and trade and interact with the people of the world.
Get rid of the sanctions, the embargoes, the terrorists, the trade restrictions.
People love the private sector all over the world.
People love Americans.
They just don't like the federal government.
Reining In The Government00:00:50
And I understand their feelings about that.
Okay, we're going to need to wind this down right now, but Daniel has another comment and maybe a question.
Just to sum it up, I would say a better life is possible, and we're trying to chart that course.
Find more out about the conference.
FFF.org is the Future of Freedom Foundation's website.
RonPaulInstitute.org slash conference.
You can go to to get more information on the conference.
These are the four speakers that will be there, Professor Ebeling, Jacob Hornberger, Dr. Paul, and myself.
And we really look forward to seeing you.
And both Bumper and Richard, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
Oh, it's our pleasure.
Great.
Thank you.
We can't wait to see you guys today.
Yeah, we're looking forward to it.
And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in to this report.