The End The End The Hour of the Time is also carried on WRMI, Worldwide Shortwave Radio, 9955 kHz, Monday through Friday nights from 5 until 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This is my daddy's station. I'm Pooh, classic radio like you always wished it could be, 101.1 FM, eager. The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End Listen to your comments. Now remember, this interview was conducted in 1991, and it's going to floor you. And it's all true. And bear in mind that things are six times worse now than they were then. The End The End The End The End Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. has been getting smaller and smaller. To put it another way, the United States is in the midst of the worst recession in 50 years. We have the highest poverty levels in 30 years. We have the highest tax rate in history. Things are bad. They're getting worse in a hurry. The Democrats and Republicans have no clue as to what is causing this. And the problem is too much government, too much taxes, too much bureaucracy. And only the libertarians are talking about cutting up. For example, we're the only party that says repeal the personal income tax and abolishing, and abolish the IRS. We're the only people who are serious about that. Well, you almost overwhelm me with the dazzling vision that you put before us. But let me turn to the vice presidential candidate, Nancy Lord. What would you add to that, or what would you subtract for that matter? Well, basically, Andre's correct. The reason that the economy is falling apart is because the government is taking our money. There is no other reason for it. It's not the Japanese. It's not tourists. It's not congressional gridlock. It's the government taking our money. When you can't buy a new car because you spend too much on taxes, somebody at that dealership loses a job. I can buy a new car. I just don't want to. Because they cost too much. And my old car still works. Well, maybe it's not a car, but there must be something that you would buy that you can't buy because you're paying too much in taxes. And the product that you can't buy is somebody else's job. Okay, protest, if only to develop the argument, to give you an opportunity to develop the argument more fully. Yes, I have to pay those taxes, but I'm a good citizen. The taxes that I pay go to maintain our defense establishment, necessary for the continuing maintenance, in turn, of our national security. They go to provide all kinds of benefits for those who are indigent or comparatively so, compared to me, and that's a measure of my altruism, that I am willing to help support or maintain those who are in less fortunate positions in life. And then there are many things that the country needs, including, say, a total rebuilding of its so-called infrastructure. Now you're going to have a pot hole of the United States. Let me take your concerns each at one point. Not to mention education, which needs a great deal of upgrading. Well, education could be the cost, and the cost could be reduced and the quality improved by moving to a voucher system where the schools would make their own decisions without the interference at the state level, which is costing about 50 to 70 percent of our education dollar, is purely for bureaucrats. Military, yes, you're right. This is one of the essential functions of government. But it is essential for government to defend America, not Germany, not Japan, not Korea, because these countries are quite capable of taking care of themselves, and to take money out of the hands of struggling families and sending it over $140 billion for NATO is criminal. You also talked about the indigent. I hate to tell you, your money's not going to seek the indigent. It's going to the bureaucrats that are running the programs for the indigent, but the indigent get a very, very small portion, maybe 25 to 30 percent of the tax money. Let me pick up on one of those instantly, the foreign policy and our investment in enterprises around the world. We give foreign aid to various countries in the world. We also project American force structures forward where necessary. We did that during the many years of the NATO confrontation with the Soviet powers, with the Warsaw Pact, and that seems to have brought the Soviets ultimately to ruin, economic ruin, which indeed in turn led to the downfall of the communist system of Eastern Europe, and particularly of the Soviet Union. More recently, we found it necessary, if only to protect our general oil supply, which is important for the maintenance or economic system, we found it necessary to go in and stop an aggressor in the Persian Gulf, who was threatening to take over, who had taken over Kuwait, an important contributor to the oil supply that reaches the West. Also, one might be concerned, as indeed I am, of being an American Jew, putting the stress on Jew for the moment, with the security of the State of Israel, which has been surrounded for many years with enemies. It has survived only because, and I'm convinced this is really true, and if you look at the history of the last 20 or 30 years, it has survived because of the significant support, including financial support, that the U.S. government has extended, as well as the military aid that the U.S. has extended to the State of Israel. The kind of America-first sort of foreign policy that you talk about in your campaign material, and in your party material, would suggest that we would no longer engage in any such commitments, but would merely maintain a kind of festoon America against any possible invasions from, or assaults from, the rest of the world. That's not true. You don't think a Fischstern-Freitz, which would be a fortress Switzerland, and yet that's what we could be like in this country, only better. We could be friends with everybody, which the Swiss are. The Swiss will do business with anybody if you meet their price and terms. Everybody likes the Swiss. They have one of the high standards of living in the world, if not the high standard of living. They're so well-armed, so well-defended by themselves that even Hitler had enough brains not to invade Switzerland. They have the stablest currency in the world. They have the safest banks in the world, all of which we can do in this country, and yet we're not doing it. We're not talking about being isolationists the way that Pat Buchanan used to talk about it. We want to be internationalists. We want to be friends with everybody. Now, you've touched on several things here that I must take issue with. You have misstated the position. You have given a very good, shall we say, rendition of the propaganda coming out of Washington for the past several decades, but in fact it's not true. Look at Iraq last year. You are maybe not even aware, as the Reader's Digest reported a year and a half ago in a January 1991 issue, that during the previous 12 years, the United States government had sent billions of dollars worth of arms, guns, ammunition, rockets, grenades, you name it, over to this foreign dictator. His name was and is Saddam Hussein. After arming this homicidal maniac for 12 years, then we go to war against him. This is, let me finish it, this is crazy. We shouldn't have been there. You talk about defending our oil interests. We have virtually no oil interests in the Persian Gulf. We get 4, 5, 6, 7% of our oil and gas from the Persian Gulf. Yeah, but our allies, including Japan, get a great deal more. Okay, then they should be defending their gas and oil if they want to, not us. The Japanese, you're right, get a lot of oil and gas. How many Japanese soldiers were in that war? None. How many German soldiers were in that war? They get a lot of oil and gas from there. None. Wait a minute, let me finish here. We were not defending democracy. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are a few monarchies. They are by no stretch of the imagination democracies. Minorities, such as women and American soldiers, have no rights there. And on and on and on. Let me shift to the other case, to one of the other issues I mentioned. American support of and general partnership with the state of Israel. There was sometimes a tense partnership. There was a remainder of partnership. I would suggest that if Israel didn't have that over the last 30 or 40 years, it would have gone under. It would have been one of the problems. Tell that to the right. Conference of the state. Tell that to the really intense militant Israelis. I have met Jews in this country who were working towards going to Israel, libertarian Jews, who want to see Israel get off of the heroin needle of USAID and go back to taking care of herself in a way that nobody can mess with her again. Israel won the 1967 war without USAID. Israel used to make enough money to defend herself by selling weapons all over the world. Maybe we don't approve of that. But we had no right to come in there and destroy Israel's industry and make her dependent. It's like welfare for countries. All we need is for some fascist, some anti-Semitic person like a Pat Buchanan to get in. Then Israel is in the sea. But if Israel were strong, she wouldn't have to worry about it. The problem with Israel is the same as the problem in the United States, except it is more advanced in Israel. And that problem, as I've already stated, is socialism. Too much government, too many regulations, too high taxes. To go into business in Israel takes about two years, and you have to get dozens of permits and licenses in, and all this garbage is filling. Anyway, if Israel had a libertarian government, okay, if Israel had a libertarian government, they not only would not have to ask for $10 billion worth of loan guarantees, they would be quite capable of absorbing all of the immigrants they could possibly ever want. Would you buy the following generalization and half metaphor, or at least paraphrase, that the libertarian party stands with Mies van der Rohe and takes his basic maxim and applies it to politics? He said with regard to architecture, less is more, which is the basis for the aesthetic for the kind of modernist movement of which he was the exemplar. You are saying about government, less is more. Mies van der Rohe also said, if I remember correctly, that the form follows function, did he not? Mm-hmm. In his Bauhaus precept. In the Bauhaus precept. Well, perhaps, but we see clearly that the founders of this country wanted to minimize the amount of government. For example, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, was not written to establish rights. We already had rights by virtue of the fact that we're a human being. It was written to limit government, to curtail government, to provide for the fact that government should be limited only to protecting our rights as citizens, as human beings, not to establish rights. That's why they wrote the Constitution. That's why they wrote the Declaration of Independence. That's why they wrote the Bill of Rights the way they did, to limit government. And you stand with Jefferson, that government governs best, which governs least. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Virtually all of the founders of this country, except possibly Alexander Hamilton, was a libertarian. If Alexander Hamilton were alive today, he'd be a Republican. You may remember he was the man from New York who wanted to end up establish a central banking system. He wanted to establish paper money. He did all of this. And thank God, Thomas Jefferson finally got into office and did away with the mess that Alexander Hamilton had created. What are the outstanding problems that we face today? What's wrong with America right now? The economy. The economy is collapsing because the government is doing too many things. Now, government has some important roles, protecting us from foreign invaders, a police force, a system of courts to get redress against environmental polluters. But the problem we have now is that government is taking too much of our resources to do things that have nothing to do with government. Things like a welfare system. These responsibilities used to go to charity. Things like the Food and Drug Administration, which is not doing its job. See, they have this illusion. They have these imaginary goblins. They convince people that without them, buildings would come crashing down, cars would fall apart on the highway. It just isn't true. We're wasting billions and billions of dollars. Approximately as much money as we pay in federal income tax goes to the cost of regulation. And these regulations have no effect. Studies have shown that OSHA has not resulted in fewer industrial accidents. The FDA has not resulted in less dangerous drugs. The consumer product safety has not resulted in more safe products. And yet we're wasting our resources. And because of that, we're losing growth. And we're losing jobs. And we're losing productivity. And we're losing our standard of living. And we are going in the direction of, as Andre pointed out, socialist countries such as Russia. Well, you've mentioned a number of problems, which indeed are outstanding ones and are high on the national agenda. We've got to pause in just an instant for commercials. Before we do that, let's set the following scenario. You are elected, the two of you, this November. And I'm quite convinced. I like it so far. I know you do, but I'm quite convinced that neither of you expect that outcome this November. Well, I already beat George Bush and Bill Clinton on February the 18th. Why not on November 3rd? February the 18th being the beginning of the New Hampshire primary. Well, that was the day of the New Hampshire primary. I beat him in Dixfield, not in New Hampshire. In Dixfield. Which I was elected president of Dixfield. I know. They gave you nine votes against him. No, I got 11. 11 whole votes. George Bush got nine. That's the bunch up there. Clinton got three. That's the group that votes at midnight or one minute after midnight on Election Day and always makes the national news. But let's assume you are elected. The question I mean to pose is what would you do about welfare? The great persisting American underclass grows in some ways more and more desperate and more and more difficult and more and more problematic for our national future. The drugs problem grows ever more debilitating and more frightening in terms of not only public safety, but the millions we spend on it never seeming to make a dent in the degree of drug addiction, which has sent along this country like a persisting plague. It's worse than the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages in some ways. Some commercials coming. When we return, tell me what the two of you, if in office, would do that would more effectively handle the problem of the great underclass mired in its total inconsequence for or in competence in the American economy and what you would do to solve the drug addiction problem, the drug commerce, which now in many ways overwhelms our economy and also is a source of the high level of violent crime, which is its direct corollary. There's so much wrong in domestic life. And we return to Nancy Lord, who is the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party this year. You have an opportunity to vote for her as you do for Andre Maru, who is the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party. Andre, come directly to it. I said this a moment ago, and let me just quickly reiterate it. What would you do about the great welfare problem, the great problem of what in journalistic simplification is called the American underclass? Okay, I get asked about this fairly frequently, Aaron. Let me posit something back to you, and that is, why is there an underclass? Why are there poor people? And the answer is because the Democrats and Republicans created it from scratch by too much government, too high taxes, too many regulations. We do have a privileged ruling class in this country. There's a federal bureaucracy. They get paid $4,000 a year more than the rest of us. They on the average get $26,000 a year. The rest of us get $22,000 a year. There is a poor underclass in this country, which will continue and get bigger as long as Democrats and Republicans are in charge. When Libertarians are in charge, by and large, by and large, there will not be an underclass. There will not be poor people. How would you move them out of the underclass? By, first of all, there are a number of things we can do. Get rid of the income tax. The income tax, if we do that, the average American worker will have $300 to $500 a month or more to spend. It will be spent locally in places like Chicago, for example, instead of being sent to Washington to be spent by the bureaucrats. Another thing we can do, which I suspect will make you come right out of your chair, is to get rid of the minimum wage. The minimum wage is now $5.05 an hour. If we get rid of the minimum wage, I guarantee, and I'll put this in writing, I guarantee if we get rid of the minimum wage within six months, there will be millions of jobs available in this country. I don't know at what wage rate. It might be $4.75 an hour. It might be $4.50 an hour. But it's far better to have millions of jobs available at, say, $3.50 an hour than to have no jobs available at $5.05. Not if you have welfare payments which still persist and which maintain you at a higher rate than the minimum wage of $3.50 an hour would. Well, they already do that, and that's one of the big problems with welfare. That's why welfare has not lifted the poor out of poverty, but instead it's trapped them onto a permanent plantation of despair. Because even at above minimum wage, the average welfare mom pays a huge marginal tax rate just by going back to work. And the time that she has to sacrifice before she moves ahead enough to do better than she was doing is simply something most people would not be willing to undergo. So, for two of you who are in those offices, the one in the Oval Office and the other in the Executive Office building next door to the White House, would you then undo the welfare system and, in essence, make it necessary for the states to give up aid to families with dependent children? No. Well, yes, we will, but that's not what's going to happen. Read the book, Losing Ground, by Professor Charles Murray, 1984. Murray is a liberal, not a libertarian. He pointed out that after 20 years of government programs, everything got worse. There was more crime than when they started, more poverty, more illiteracy, more illegitimate births, more drugs, everything got worse. And it's not surprising, as he says towards the end of the book, when you pay a young woman in the ghetto to have illegitimate children, and you tell her that if she gets an education, the payments stop, then she's not going to get an education. If she gets a job, the payments stop. If she leaves the ghetto, if she has a husband, all of these things will cause the payments to stop. She will do what is necessary to get the money. And that's exactly what happened. Just last week, I think on Thursday night, we had, or was it Wednesday, we had three significant scholars on matters of this sort, namely the whole welfare crisis in this country, on this program. They were here attending the American Political Science Association convention. And they all agreed, though they came from different vantage points, they all agreed that what was required was something like what these days are called work fare. Would that be part of your program? No, that hasn't really worked either, because what happens is they get on the jobs program to get the extra bus fare, and they pocket it whether it's a good jobs program or not. What I would do is repeal the program, replace it with two years of emergency relief for those who are already on it. No new applicants. Most people actually get off welfare within two years. Now, for the hardcore people, I would leave them alone for those two years. I would say, look, you can own whatever you want. But the biggest problem is that they transition, I was talking about. Let them make a little money. If a woman wants to open up a daycare center in her house, let her do it and keep the money so that when the two years comes, she's got something. But to enable her to do this, you must undo those economic regs at the bottom of the economic ladder. There was a time that a poor person could scrape together some money and head for the street corner and start a business. And 20 years later, BJW Marriott. But now, you need $500 for a license, $1,500 for a tax bond, $7,500 for a card of government-approved design to sell hot dogs. So we need to undo these regulations, the regulations on the plumbers, the regulations on any profession, any trade, so that people can get an idea and go with it. Let me point out, too, that charity works far better than government welfare. For one thing, charity is voluntary. Government welfare is coercive. For another thing, charity is so much more efficient than government welfare that $1 that goes in a charity, private charity, does about the same amount of work as $5 to $20 that goes into government welfare. Now, to answer your next question, where is this money coming from, let me point out that even with the highest tax burden in history, 47% of all the money in this country is spent by federal, state, county, and local governments. Even with the highest tax burden in history, Americans this year alone will give the charity voluntarily an amount equal to the total sales volume of General Motors, which is about $122 billion. If we cut the taxes on these people, more money will go into charity, and it will take care of these people who need the help now. And as we get rid of, as Nancy said, get rid of this excessive regulations, people will be able to create their own jobs. Let me offer you the democratic socialists' ultimate exemplification of virtue and of workable, effective, strong government, namely the Scandinavian countries, Sweden, and also Norway, and to a lesser extent Denmark. In fact, in Sweden, they have better than twice our tax burden, and nobody goes hungry, and nobody is particularly in underclass status, and though there may be some drugs around, they seem to not be as burdened by that problem as others. To be sure, they don't have much of a foreign policy except to stay neutral, they being a smaller country than we are. But there you've got very active government involved in just about everything, and things seem to work rather well. But people are actually fighting it. Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world. Sweden has the highest insanity rate in the world. Sweden has one of the three highest alcoholic rates in the world. You want that kind of society? Herbert Hendon, a psychiatrist, addressed the Swedish suicide problem years ago in a major close study and determined that if they had a higher suicide rate, it didn't have to do with the quality of life or how they felt about life. It had to do rather more likely with the relation between winter and darkness and depressive things. That's his theory. That's a revisionist history. Why don't you look at Alaska? I live in Alaska 13 years ago. You were a member of their legislature for a while. And there is very, you know, the suicide and insanity rates are much lower in Alaska than they are in Sweden. Another thing with Sweden, the people are actually going in the direction of less socialism. I mean, there are... There has been some protests of that to it in years, I think. So they're not all thrilled with it. There's another thing of even if it was working there, they have a very homogenous culture. So they could get away with it longer. And the other thing is the reason Sweden's socialism seemed to be working is they were kind of banking on what they did before. They were still benefiting from their prosperity before they instituted socialism, and it hadn't caught up with them until recently. Give me a fix on the problem of people looking for a quick fix. That is the problem of drugs, which I think you will agree is the great devastating plague that our society has suffered in the last decade or two. Easy. We re-legalized all drugs as they were prior to... All drugs. As they were prior to 1914. You must understand that with drugs, there are two different things. One is drug usage, the other is drug crime. You can get rid of drug crime by taking the profit motive out of it. You cannot get rid of drug usage. However, if we re-legalized all drugs as they were prior to 1914 or as we did with alcohol in 1933, two things will happen. Number one, drug crime will disappear almost immediately, as it did in 1933. Gangsterism disappeared. And secondly, the usage of the drugs will decline, as it did with alcohol. Today, the best-selling type of beer, for example, is light beer, which was not even on the market when I was a liquor wholesaler 15 years ago. And now in bars, you can buy non-alcoholic beer, which was not available three years ago. I guarantee, if we re-legalized all drugs, take the profit motive out of it, then drug crime will disappear immediately, and drug use will decline. But will we have a response of electorate and citizenry, or will they all be walking around soon? I'll be in something, Mel. Don't buy into the government's argument that we're such morons, that we're going to go out and use toxic substances that will kill us because they take away their silly war. Andre and I are not condoning drug use. We both agree that using drugs is stupid. It has its own consequences. If you look at the people who stopped using drugs over the past 10 years, it's the white-collar professionals who stopped using cocaine. They never faced a chance of arrest. They stopped because they saw the drug was bad. They saw people messing up their jobs, marriages, mortgages, whatever. The people who are still using it, the hardcore addicts, face arrest every time they go out. The government is just plain arrogant to think that their war on drugs has any relevance in the equation other than to drive the profits up and to make drug dealing more attractive and to make pushing drugs more attractive. Tell me a little bit about the Libertarian Party. When, in fact, did it begin? December 1971 in Denver. The guy who founded it, he called a meeting together friends of his in his living room. His name is Dave Nolan. He is still around. He lives now in California. So we've been around a little over 20 years. We've elected about 200 Libertarians, of whom about perhaps 50 are now in office. So you say in office, but what kind of offices? Most of them, counting local positions, including here in the Chicago vicinity. We have had or do have. I don't remember. City council members and Roselle. So we have elected people here in Illinois. You are a member of the Alaska legislature for one term at least. Yep. And there are now two Libertarian members of the New Hampshire legislature. Is that about it? Well, I was the third one in Alaska, so we've had five state legislators so far. And I must tell you that during the past few years, our candidates have increasingly been getting much higher vote totals. In 1990, our candidates received double to triple the amount of votes that any Libertarian had ever received before, including one woman in Texas running statewide for appellate court judge who got more votes in Texas in 1990 than our national ticket received nationwide in 1988. Did she win? No, she did not win. But the fact is that she got far more votes than anyone ever expected her to get. Your national candidate, who was on this program when he was running for the presidency four years ago, polled a little bit less than half a million votes. Is that right? That's right, 432,000. Yeah. One poll. Right. The best ticket so far in terms of votes was in 1980, 921,000 votes that were Ed Clark and David Koch. David is a multimillionaire himself, and he did write a check for $2.1 million, quite legal, and they bought national television. That was the only ticket prior to our ticket this year that did use television. We have been and will be using that. Let's say a word about who the two of you actually are in terms of your history and your background. You, Nancy, are a physician by training, an MD. I have a medical degree. My profession is an attorney. You're also a lawyer. You're also an LLD. Well, no, that's an advanced law degree. I'm a J.D. You're a J.D. But I work as an attorney. Juris doctor. Yeah. You work as an attorney. And you were, some 20 years ago, sort of a radical youth on the barricades, were you not? Right. I was involved in the anti-war movement and the women's movement, the civil rights movement. I went to the marches. I got gassed. I knew one of the women that was shot at Kent State, Alison Krauss. And it's not inconsistent with my libertarian positions today. There was a very anti-authoritarian streak in that. As you will recall, it wasn't all Trotskyites. There was also the counterculture, the making beads, the starting rock bands, the going off and, you know, farming, opening a bookstore instead of working for a corporation. And that's really the movement that I was a part of. And I really kind of kept the same ideas. I grew up. I became more involved with my own career. But as a business person, I saw the way government is in the way of people trying to start businesses, trying to provide someone else with a job. And it's not very effective at the kinds of things it does to guard our safety. It's not our parent. We have a right and an obligation and a responsibility to take care of ourselves. Andre, what's your background? You're an engineer by training, are you not? Mm-hmm. I have a degree in chemical engineering from MIT. I was born and raised in South Texas, graduated from high school there, went to MIT in Boston, lived as long in the Boston vicinity as I was in Texas, raised three sons there. They're now grown men. Two of my three sons were born in the Boston vicinity. They were all raised there. Then I moved to Alaska in 73, established two businesses, one in a wholesale restaurant and bar supplies. It was at that point, 1976, that I discovered the Libertarian Party and became a Libertarian. I am one of the few Americans who will admit that he voted for Dick Mishman twice. And the reason I did was because he said he was going to cut taxes, reduce regulation, roll back a bureaucracy, and so forth. He didn't. But he talked about it. So did Reagan. He lied. So did Bush. He lied. As a matter of fact, who said he was going to cut the government 25% and cut taxes 25%? Guess. Give me a guess. Richard Nixon, I suppose. No. Franklin Roosevelt. Oh, really? 1932. Mm-hmm. He said, and I have the documentation. He didn't quite pull that off, did he? No, he didn't. He did the exact opposite. That's the point. That Democrats and Republicans will say anything to get elected. It doesn't matter, does it? George Bush and Bill Clinton both this year have said independently that they would do anything to get elected. And I believe him. They will. What's the line of dissent of the general Libertarian view? Surely you weren't born from the brow of Jove one day in 1971. Who are your intellectual ancestors, would you say? Um, we go back to the free market thinkers in the laissez-faire era. John Locke, Ludwig von Macy's, within the Libertarian movement, some of the writings of people like Murray Rothbard. You don't mention Adam Smith? Adam Smith is another one. Adam Smith, for sure. Yes. As an economist. Ayn Rand in the 1950s. Ayn Rand, really? Any of these people who are in favor of individual liberty as opposed to governmental power, we see clearly that individual liberty, the control of your time, your body, and your money, is adamantly, diametrically opposed to governmental power. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. And do you believe, as Smith did believe, or at least as he states in one of the cardinal passages of the wealth of nations, that the interaction of separate selfishnesses or separate personal ambitions will, as if guided by an invisible hand, produce the most favorable outcome for the general good? Yes. Yes, indeed it will, except I hesitate to say that before and about liberal like you, because you'll jump on it. I'm not about liberal. I haven't allowed anything. Oh, okay. Well, you said earlier you were a socialist democrat. You said that. No, no, no. I did not. Nothing of course. Well, excuse me. It must have been somebody off at the mic here who said that, but if you didn't say that, then I hereby take it. No, I said a socialist democrat could argue that things work very well in Scandinavia. In fact, I'm not a socialist democrat at all. Okay. Well, what I'm getting at here is that if we say that, you know, enlightened self-interest is a good thing, then some people will jump in and say, oh, no, no, no, enlightened self-interest is no good. We need altruism. Well, of course, Ayn Rand took issue of that, that altruism could be a bad thing, and it is better to take care of yourself, and when you want to, you know, be kind to other people and that sort of thing. Don't use force or fraud against anybody. That's bad. But other than that, take care of yourself. Take care of your family. Take care of your friends and neighbors, and the world will be a better place. I find a good deal of what you talk about really quite attractive, and I always have. Though I've never voted libertarian. I will go for a time. Without saying who I have voted for. But the part that has bothered me most is the part that I started with, namely foreign policy. One thinks of the pronouncement by President Bush in the excitement and in the glow following the Persian Gulf victory, if indeed it was a victory, that we now had entered into a new phase in which America would be the guarantor of a new order. I was rather bothered by the phrase that Hitler used, though I think President Bush didn't know that, but a new world order which would ultimately serve the general purposes of democracy, liberty, freedom, and so on. And though we can't impose a new order upon all the world, it seems to me that without our protecting and nourishing the buds of liberty where they sprout, we aren't rendering such service as we potentially are capable of for the rest of the world, the rest of the rather benighted world. I absolutely disagree. There are three things that have marked the downfall of great civilizations throughout history. One of them is excessive taxation. The other is debasement of the currency. And the third one is acting as policemen of the world with troops in many foreign countries. The United States has done all three. Now, how clear does it have to be before we finally get smart? The United States cannot and should not even try to, as you say, guarantee liberty all over the place. For example, look at the... But the fourth group... No, no, no. Look at the former Yugoslavia where we now have the Serbians beating up on the Croatians and the Bosnians. And the Bosnians are Muslims. We're going to have a test on this later. I hope you're taking notes. The Bosnians are Muslims. The Croatians are Roman Catholic and the Serbians are Eastern Orthodox. They have been fighting among themselves, I'm not kidding, for 1,000 years. During World War II, it was the Croatians who were the pro-Nazis. They beat up on the Serbians then. Now the Serbians are trying to get their licks in. This is all crazy. For us to get involved in that would be absolutely insane. It would be worse than anything that the Russians got involved in in Afghanistan. What would you have us do? Very different case, but it's equally before our eyes at this moment, even before our eyes on television. What would you, if the two of you were now in office, what would you have us do about Somalia right now? Somalia is another... is a very tragic situation and my heart goes out to those children. For one thing, I would remove the regulations that prevent people from going over and helping. Do you know that it's illegal for us to get involved in a foreign conflict? Also, by reducing the taxes, people would have more money to voluntarily send. The problem is that for every Somalia, there's three or four more and where do you draw the line? Another problem in Somalia is that we were sending food over there and it's a real weird thing. Whenever we send food over there, a few months or a year or two later, there's a famine because when we send wheat, they stop growing it. We send corn, the distribution networks go away. Or maybe the dictator takes it and puts it in his palace. In the case of Somalia, it went to feed the troops who then were strong and healthy and could oppress the people who are now starving. So our aid programs don't work. It's like welfare for countries. It keeps them poor. It keeps them broke. It keeps them hungry. But a voluntary relief effort, I'm all for it. And I think we should get out of their way and let people do it. One of the things we can do is what I in fact did when I was in the legislature in 1985. I was asked to head up a group of people to raise money to send to a country that at that time was in a famine, Ethiopia. And we did. Out of a population of only 30,000 people in my district, we raised over a million dollars, which we bought food with, to send over there. But we got smart. We didn't just send it over there because we knew that if we did, the bureaucrats would take it for themselves and either eat it themselves or sell it at 10 times what it should have been so far. So we sent two guys over there with it to make sure that the food is distributed actually to the poor people. That worked. That's the way to do it. Do it through volunteerism and send people over there to make sure that it goes to the poor folks, not to the bureaucrats. We are tonight talking with the candidates for presidency and vice presidency put up by the Libertarian Party. They are Andre Maru and Dr. Nancy Lord. We'll get to the phones almost instantly. The number 5917200. A basic matter that's been, I think, at vertitude tonight, but I want to get very, very clear on it. What really would you do with the tax structure of the United States? These days we need an awful lot of money to meet national budgets. And if we don't meet them, we go in the hole every time. And we build national deficit, which is now running upwards of $4 trillion. Is it not? Well, the national debt is $4.2 trillion. The deficit this year alone is $400 billion. Exactly. And a billion here and a billion there, pretty sure you're talking about real money. We would... National deficit doesn't do come to real money. The problem with the country now is, as I've said several times, there's too much government, too high taxes, too much regulation. We've got to cut taxes. Well, you're going to knock out the income tax completely. What's that going to do, our national revenue? The income tax only brings in about one-third of federal revenues. If we get rid of that one-third, we still have two-thirds to operate the government on. And two-thirds of the budget this year is equal to the entire budget just seven years ago. All we have to do to get rid of the personal income tax is to get rid of the excessive government that the Democrats and Republicans have created. You're in office. Again, I put it dramatically. You're in office at the beginning of next year. What do you knock out? What do we knock out? What do you mean? In terms of taxes? No, you're going to cancel the federal income tax if you can get Congress to agree with you. What do you then knock out by way of government programs? Okay, one of the first things we can do is just simply stop replacing federal bureaucrats. Okay? Four to seven percent, excuse me, seven to ten percent every year leave of their own free will. They retire, they resign, or they die. Just stop replacing them. And in four years, you haven't hurt anybody. You haven't had to die in employment. You can get rid of 28 to 40 percent of the federal bureaucracy. Another thing is to bring our troops back home to defend the United States of America. That alone is, say, $50 to $100 billion a year. Another one is to end all tax finance subsidies, including those for harmful drugs like tobacco, which is so harmful as a drug, it kills just about as many Americans every year as died in combat in all of World War II. Well, I certainly offer that instantly. Good, good. Another thing I can do as president is to release from prison those people who shouldn't be there. We have more people in jail today, per capita than any other country in our world. Who should not be there? People who should not be in prison are those people who never hurt anybody, never defrauded anybody. People like tax resistors, for example, or prostitutes or drug users, or for that matter, drug dealers. Unless they hurt someone, unless they defrauded someone, they should not be in prison. We have three times as many prisoners in jail today as we did ten years ago. You don't think that drug dealers have hurt anybody? No, I don't. No, it's a voluntary transaction. People may have hurt themselves by abusing drugs. Now, we're not talking about a drug dealer who may have shot somebody as part of a drug transaction. That guy belongs in jail for a long time. But someone whose only crime was selling drugs to a willing buyer of adult age, No, they do not belong in jail. And because we're putting these people in jail, we have more people in jail per capita than any other country in the world. We have a million people in jail, half of them for nonviolent drug crimes. And they're costing us about $40,000 a year apiece to keep in jail, to keep locked up. If the libertarians were in power, and of course that means not only in the executive office, but also dominating the legislative party. We will not be in power. No, we will be in office. That's the problem. You don't like the word power? No, because that's the problem we have today. Government should not have power. It should be a servant of the people. Right. I'll change my vocabulary. If the libertarians were in office, including a libertarian Congress, essentially they would reduce the significance of federal government to the point where we wouldn't really need a full-time executive or legislation. Right. We could be so lucky. That's not going to happen, though. The federal government is still going to need the federal government for national defense and for the federal courts. We need state government for state courts and for police in the areas of cleanest cities. Then we need police at their local level. However, the police should be going after the bad guys, the murderers, the rapists, the robbers, the con men. They're not. 83% of murderers get off scot-free. 95% of rapists get off scot-free because the Democrat and Republican police are chasing speeders like Rodney King. They're chasing prosecutors who haven't hurt anybody. They're chasing drug users. They're chasing other people like that, like gamblers. And they shouldn't. They should be chasing the people who actually hurt someone. Last question. And I must apologize to those who are waiting on the phones. I'm taking too much of your time or taking too much time away from them. But I can't resist this last one. Do you find any government in the world these days that at least approaches, in approximate terms, the kind of minimum governance that you've got in mind? Yes. Well, as Andre was saying, Switzerland is closer to it than we are. Also, other countries are going in that direction. One is Argentina, which has reduced the size of its federal bureaucracy by 20% and has experienced an improvement in their inflation rate. And then you have the Eastern Bloc. The most important thing that happened in this century is the collapse of communism, that we have learned that communism's central planning does not work. And the Eastern Bloc countries are moving in the direction of left government, whereas we seem to be hell-bent on repeating their mistakes. There is a joke going around as to what is the difference between Eastern Europe and the United States, and the answer is in the United States we still have socialism. And we have an active Communist Party, which is now illegal in Eastern Europe and what used to be the USSR. And with that, let us go to the phone. The number 5917200, the area code 312 if you're calling long distance, and here's the first caller. Good evening. Hello? Yes, sir. Yes, I have two brief questions. Number one, if you're elected in November, what would you do about the intelligence agencies, the CIA, the NSA, and the State Department? Would you keep them? And if you would, do you really think that you could successfully dismantle these agencies? Sure, we could successfully dismantle them. We do need an intelligence-gathering apparatus, but it doesn't have to be the size and influence of the same as we have now with the CIA. We can probably do it with just a few people in each one of our embassies and also do it with satellites. There are satellites today which are so good that they can determine literally the brand of cigarettes you smoke on the ground. That's how good they are. They can see just about anything they want to see with satellites, so we really probably don't need the CIA. If I may, just on one point, those intelligence systems require a lot of people to interpret the data. In fact, they say, explained at any rate, that the data just gets unattended for months before it's analyzed, and that's a part of our problem. Well, part of the problem has been not so much not analyzing it. It's been ignoring it. For example, George Bush was repeatedly warned about Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, and he chose to ignore it. There are other things that people were repeatedly warned about, such as the downfall of the Shah in Iran. And what we need is people in office, leaders in office who will listen to what they're first telling. Okay, well, thank you. Thank you, sir, for the call, and let us go quickly to another. Hello, you're on the air. Hi. My comment and kind of a question is that I feel that 40% of the common people in our society, in America at this time, are not able to, do not have the intelligence to take part in the free enterprise that you seem to be speaking of. And I would say that that in itself creates a necessity for government beyond what you think that we need to use it. Where'd you get that figure? How do you know it's about 35% or 45%? Well, I'm a laborer. I've been around, probably had 100 factory jobs, been around many professional people, and I'm saying my, from what I see and from what I take notes on, I'm saying that 40%, if it's a little high, I'm saying I know it's a good salary, but I feel 30% cannot, do not have the intelligence to take part in maintaining health programs, health programs in themselves, insurances, housing, mortgages, and things like that. And therefore, I'm saying that it's just impossible for free enterprise to function for these people. Let's get a comment from Nancy Lloyd. That has been disproven. Studies done of welfare mothers. Well, I'm not talking about welfare. Well, let me finish, though. These are people you would think could not take part in the free enterprise system. But when you study their selection of the various programs and the smorgasbord that's offered, because welfare isn't just one program. There's food stamps, there's AFDC. Even the welfare mom will be very self-preserving in her selection of programs. And it is, in fact, the poorest people in this country who are the most injured by this system. A person making $20,000 a year, if he could keep it, I would accept a mandatory plan if you're worried about it. Fine. But if he could put into some reasonable investment the money that Social Security is going to rob from him during his working years, would have three-quarters of a million dollars when he retired. You're talking about desperation, breathing, corruption. I'm talking about let's achieve a society where people think rationally. Inside of a rational society, I'm saying the intelligence of the human species does not cross the board. Go across the board. Well, it seems to me that the libertarians... ...a free enterprise system that you are speaking of. Hold on a minute, sir. Hold on. Don't hog it now. Don't hog it now. It does seem to me that we're not arguing so much for intelligence as for self-interest. That's absolutely right. People can be of any intelligence they want to be. Why would we assume that a federal bureaucrat or a state bureaucrat or a local bureaucrat would be any more intelligent than the rest? Any more intelligent than the rest of us. In fact, they are not necessarily. Many people would argue that they're less intelligent. That's why they work for the government. But whatever the case is, just being intelligent doesn't mean that you can or should have business for yourself. I mean, there are many professional people. I can speak from experience. There are many engineers out there who don't work for themselves and work for somebody else. That has nothing to do with it. My father had a fifth-grade education that it took him six years to get, and yet he made more money in the late 40s than I may ever make. Here's a thought for you. I was developing it only last night in another context. We put great stress in this country, in our history, upon individuality and liberty. Indeed, you call yourself a libertarian party. That's very American in a significant and meaningful way. However, you could argue that the ultimate consequence of stress on liberty, individuality, and self-interest is a kind of narcissistic self-indulgence which may undo rebuilding of community standards and communal values which are necessary to maintain, ultimately, the weaker, but are necessary also to maintain some workable meaning in life. Ours, if anything, is a society which grows in its culture increasingly nihilistic or at least so individualized that there is no common consensus which binds us together and gives us a sense that community will sustain us. I'm very worried that in a libertarian world, community will be totally defeated and thus a special kind of anarchy may come upon us even if the Smithian vision of the common economic good being served by the interaction of selfishness is born out. You left out a very important part of the equation here and that's why you believe that it would lead to this anarchy. I worry about it, at least. It's individual responsibility. That's the key from Cohen, that one must be responsible for their actions and must also be responsible to their family and their community. This does not mean the government and one of the problems we face in our society is that the government has usurped the role of responsibility to our communities and our families when a woman walks into a homeless shelter and says, my sister threw me out, she said, go to the shelter. Part of that family has been destroyed. When a young man leaves his young bride because he wants her to get a welfare check, he has been denied the opportunity to be a father and be a provider and to be responsible for his woman and his offspring. This is the kinds of responsibility we would like to foster with our program. Well, here's the lemma that we have been in the contemporary American scene and on the contemporary American scene and in contemporary American life, the standards of let it all hang out and do your own thing and so on has led to a kind of cultural nihilism which has produced much that is destructive of lasting traditional significant values, including, by the way, what the Republicans now call family values. What has happened is that the amount of government that we have has in fact destroyed the family. This has happened again and again and again. When we have too much government, it does interfere with how people conduct themselves in their own businesses. Now, 30 years ago it used to be just daddy who worked and then, well, let me finish here, and then 20 years ago it was daddy and mommy who worked just to pay the cotton-pig and taxes and then nowadays it's daddy and mommy and one or two teenagers again just to pay the taxes. Well, I'm suggesting it isn't necessarily government or government alone that has destroyed the family or weakened the family. It is the indulgence of individualism and of individual self-interest and self-fulfillment which may have led to a kind of selfishness and thus a kind of artistic isolation from family and community concern which may also have undermined the family. If that's the case, then there's nothing government can do about it. Government cannot force people to value their community but as Andre was saying and that we're both trying to explain here when government takes on the role of a family when government becomes your parent your spouse your provider you move in the direction of a more nihilistic individualistic attitude because you don't have to care. Government has taken over that very important responsibility and what we're saying is it's an affirmation of the importance of morality not to turn this important role over to the government but to keep it within the families but let me remind you of one thing which is standard in conservative philosophy can easily be found in Edmund Burke and on from him and that is the notion that the government is the moral at its best can be the moral exemplar that governments through action and through law can represent communal values and can indeed reinforce them in a way which will influence or should influence individual love. It can be and it used to be when the founders of this country wrote the Constitution wrote the Bill of Rights wrote the Declaration of Independence that is the kind of exemplar we should restore in this country. We've gotten far away from that. Starting in roughly 1913 the Democrats and Republicans as I've already mentioned have instituted essentially 50% socialism in this country. They have put into effect the entire 1928 socialist party platform they have put into effect 70 to 80% of the Communist Manifesto and they have in fact transgressed 9 of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights. We've gotten so far away from the kind of government that we should have very limited government so as to maximize individual liberty. I'm a little baffled when you tell me that they have put into effect 70 to 80% of the Communist Manifesto. I don't really know what to mean. Well if you'll give me a minute I'll show you. Please. I was saying that 70 to 80% of the Communist Manifesto roughly have been put into effect by the Democrats and Republicans. Here are the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto. Number one abolition of property and land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes. The federal government now owns 30% of the land in the United States and it's not supposed to own any. Number two a heavy progressive or graduated income tax. Lord knows we have that. Three abolition of all right of inheritance. Part of our right of inheritance is taken away by heavy taxes on inheritance. Let's see. Four confiscation of the property of all immigrants and rebels. If you have a million dollars you can immediately become a citizen of this country but not if you have very little money. Number five centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of the National Bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. Does this sound like the Federal Reserve System or what? Six centralization of the means of communications and transport in the hands of the state. We have the Federal Communications Commission. We have Amtrak. We have Conrail. We have the Federal Aviation Administration. Number seven extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state bringing into cultivation of wastelands and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. We have the Tennessee Valley Authority which competes directly with private enterprise and such things as the fertilizer factories. Eight, equal liability of all for labor. Establishment of industrial armies especially for agriculture. We have that in a sense with regard to the agricultural subsidies which I've mentioned before. Agricultural subsidies make milk in this country about double the world's price and sugar about triple the world's price. Nine, combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of population over the country. That is about the only one I would say that the federal government really hasn't been too much involved with. Ten, and last, free education for all children in public schools, abolition of children's fractured labor in its present form, combination of education with industrial oil production. Certainly that has been happening too. Although it's not free, there is no such thing as free education any more than there is a free lunch. But all of these things have been put into, not all, but most of these have been put into effect plus the fact that if I had a copy of it here, which I don't, the entire 1928 Socialist Party platform which I have read has in fact been put into an effect on this country. But the key to the communist dream for reorganization of the polities of the world was of course state ownership of the means of production or rather proletarian ownership of the means of production vested in the proletarian state led by the vanguard of the proletariat, namely the professional intellectuals who were the Bolteviki and ultimately the Stalinists. And surely that has not happened in this country. This is a bastion of corporate free enterprise. Actually it is happening. In my home state of Georgia, these communist apparatchiks would be very comfortable going from the government-owned airport, getting onto the government-owned train, staying in the government-owned hotel, sending their kids to the government-owned recreational park while their wives shopped in the government-owned farmers market. We have a number of state-owned industries competing with their own citizens. Well, if you were in power, you'd have to... Office. Office, again, I beg your pardon. If you were in office, you'd have to set in motion a process which would return all of those institutions to private ownership. How would you do that? Sell them. Sell them. Sell them to whoever wants to buy them. Right. At the highest price. No sweetheart deal. Interestingly enough, they're doing this in Philadelphia. They're looking at it. And you know what the government employees' union said to them? If you contract out our jobs, we are going to burn this city down worse than what happened in L.A. Now tell me, the government we have now is any better than a band of armed thugs forcing us to pay them. Let us go back to the phone. 5-9-1-7-2-0-0. And you are on the air. Good evening. Well, I didn't really inject a note of pessimism, but it seems to me that the American psyche isn't really ready for the development of like a minimal or libertarian state. It seems that we've had a culture of interventionism for several decades, at least, and that we're really disconnecting individual rights and liberties with the responsibility for our own actions. And it just seems to me that it'll take a major change in our way of thinking to truly appreciate our natural rights and liberties as we're secured by a free market and the rule of law. You'd be surprised how much support there is for what we have to say out, so to speak, away from the major cities of the Northeast, cities like New York, Boston. I lived many years in Boston. I lived, actually, a couple of years in New York. Nancy's originally from New York. Places like that, yeah, it may be difficult, but other places, especially west of the Mississippi River, there is a lot of support for the kind of liberty and individualism and self-responsibility that we talk about. Sir, I thank you for the call. Let's go quickly to another. Hello, your own name is... Good evening, if you're in good. I'd like to ask you, just now, how long has the Libertarian Party been in existence, would you say? 20 years. 20 years. I think maybe you're about 40 years too late, but I would also say better late than never. As a conservative Republican, I do agree with, and find very attached in many of the ideas that have articulated here, but I see the problem, whereas I do in your positions, I think your strategy maybe is at fault. I would like to see you take all your supporters and maybe help, if not take over, the Republican Party, maybe do what the also liberals have done to the Democratic Party and certainly make them a much stronger part of the policy and practices of the Republican Party. We'd be wasting our time there, because the problem with the system as it is, is that the politicians have too many cookies to spread out and give to their friends. But you want to... Let me finish. There's a reason Clark... Government contracts to give away. They will go to the rich and the powerful. The Republicans are no more likely to give up these powers than the Democrats. The only way we are going to fix it is to get them out of office. I would have to disagree. I would say there is a certain yet substantial wing of the party which would certainly be much more closely ideologically aligned with your thinking than certainly you would find in the Democratic Party. Absolutely disagree, ma'am. Asking a Libertarian to become a Republican is almost as bad as asking a Jew to become a Nazi in order to reform the party. It just isn't going to work. Wait a minute. George Bush did read my lips. No new taxes. He broke his word. He lied. He said no new restrictions on guns. He broke his word. He lied. So did Nixon, whom I voted for twice. So did Reagan. Every time he ran for office he said he was going to cut government. He didn't. He increased it. The Democrats are left-wing socialists. The Republicans are right-wing socialists. They have gone far beyond redemption. They cannot be redeemed. They cannot be reformed. You don't believe politics is the art of compromise then? No, politics is the art of compromise with the Democrats and Republicans but politics should be the art of principle. Now I think things will be worked out and things will be worked out if we maintain our principles and if we have more people with the Americans who will be in it. But it might be 100 years and I can't feel we're at the precipice again as you were when Diddy Carter was in office. We are and things may have to get worse but I would encourage your friends who consider themselves libertarian-leaning Republicans to join us because we'll have a lot more strength even for compromise as a strong libertarian party than being muted out in the Republican Party. They won't fix it. I have to disagree but it's an interesting program. Ma'am, let me point out that in the days of the revolution only approximately one third of Americans were in favor of the revolution. One third were Tories they were in favor of the monarchy and one third didn't care and it's something like that today. There are some people like obviously yourself who think we can work to the existing parties I absolutely positively 100% disagree. I served with these people the Democrats and Republicans two years and always in the legislature. I have one ma'am. I was elected in 1984 to the Alaska House of Representatives that beat a Democrat and a Republican. I beat George Bush and Bill Clinton earlier this year in Bixville, not New Hampshire. We can win. We have win when the playing field is level. The playing field is almost never level. There is almost never a fair fight. I have to get 800,000 signatures to get on the ballot in the 50 states. George Bush and Bill Clinton don't have to get any because your party the Republican Party and the Democrats have made it so bloody difficult for us to get on the ballot and at the same time exempted themselves. This is wrong. Let's thank that caller. By the way, how many state ballots are the two of you on at the moment? 48 plus D.C. We still lack Minnesota and North Dakota but we do expect to get there. What kind of vote do you really expect? What will you be happy with? We don't know. We can't judge on the basis of votes. What we're here to do is to bring our message to the American people to build the party to get permanent ballot status in more states. Now as it is now we'll be on by petitioning in all 50 states but we'd like to see equal status with the Republicans and Democrats in more states. We'd like to see more of our local people get elected. We'd like to see our local chapters grow. The number of votes unfortunately will depend in many ways on how close the election is between Bush and Clinton. You speak of local chapters. How many more or less registered or official or loyal libertarians are there in this country? I'm glad you asked that question. Do you know that it is illegal to be a libertarian in about half the states? You can't because the Democrats and Republicans passed laws of states you cannot register as a Democrat or Republican in about 25 of the states. We don't really know how many. We do know that all of our candidates together added up in 1990 about 5 million votes. Some of those are duplicated so there may have been 3 million people who voted libertarian in November 1990. We don't really know how many they are. We know how many people voted on party libertarian on tickets obviously. Well They voted for somebody that was libertarian. And voted for somebody else who was Republican or Democratic. Presumably. In different offices. Yeah, presumably. For what? This is my daddy's station. I'm poop. Classic radio like you always wished it could be. 101.1 FM. Eager. Why is it that a number of leading members of the libertarian or some at least important members of the libertarian party including your last presidential candidate have not remained fully loyal to the libertarian party. Paul who was on this program I know he's now returned in a way to the fold but indeed has flirted with various other parties and was incipiently going back to the Republicans. Ron Paul lost patience I guess. He wanted things to happen faster. He wanted the libertarian government to be established faster than it was being established. Ron by the way is not sort of the way back. He's all the way back. He is head of our campaign in Texas. So he is definitely libertarian. He's never actually left the libertarian party. We'll go back to the phones. 591-7200. Good evening. Yes, I think this program is consistently anti-labor and if I can point up two things that would illustrate this. First off, they're against minimum wage and ten years ago I lived in the minimum wage and it's darn near impossible if I didn't drive a cab at night four hours a day extra to make ends meet. I couldn't have lived. And the second thing is that they're in favor of the so-called right-to-work laws which of course is like saying that since capitalism... Wait, you're wrong already. You're wrong. You're wrong. We don't support right-to-work laws? No, we never have supported right-to-work laws. Do you feel that any kind of agreement between an employer and an employee should... the government should stay out of it? If an employer, for example, wants to sign a closed contract with a union then he or she has the right to do that. So we don't do that. With regards to whether we're anti-labor, let me warn... let me, excuse me, repeat what I said earlier and that is if we really, truly are serious about instantly generating millions of jobs the way to do it is to get rid of the minimum wage because that will instantly, almost instantly produce millions of jobs. Jobs that probably won't pay 505 which is the current minimum wage but they might pay 450 or $4 or 350 and it's far better to have millions of jobs available at even 350 than to have no jobs available at 505. I think what a lot of people miss on this minimum wage argument, sir, is that you can forbid someone to pay less than the minimum wage but you cannot force them to pay the minimum wage for a job that's not worth it to them. If you were making $5 an hour you were worth it to your employer otherwise you wouldn't have had the job and what we're saying is if you allow people to pay less when there is a situation where it's not worth so much at least they get some job and these low-paying jobs traditionally have been the kind of apprenticeship jobs that teach people skills for the future. People coming onto the labor market for the first time do not have the skills to make themselves work the minimum wage in many cases and that's why people can't get a foothold onto the economic ladder. I really don't think we need a lot more sweatshirt labor. What you're saying is that people are not going to work in sweatshops. They can't even get people to flip burgers at McDonald's. People in America in 1992 are not going to work in sweatshops. What you're saying by saying that you're not in favor of no government regulation of labor visitors are in favor of things like the yellow dog contract and stuff like that. What you're saying is that capitals will be able to band together in corporations and then deal as one voice of labor but that the working man will have to deal individually one man against each corporation. Corporations will never be able to do that because when you have a cartel it is in their interest to cheat. And the one thing that we would never do for the reason that the powerful industrialists got a foothold in this country and have been controlling it ever since is because the government didn't leave them alone. It came in on their side with regulations to prevent people from those labor unions to go into competition with them. That's how it all started. J.P. Morgan said to Congress in 1907 I'd rather have regulation and control than free competition and they have been keeping us out of it ever since. I think people deserve more than the chance to work for some powerful overlord. They have the right to have their own company and see it grow if that is what they desire. Sir, we have to move along but I'll give you the last word. What's your last word? Consistently, this sounds like you're trying to secure a source of cheap latest to large corporations. All right. We thank you very much for the call. Tell me, settling for me, it's a matter of vital curiosity or voyeurism. Assuming that you're not going to win, though I know you don't want to entertain that assumption, which of the two... Wait a minute, earlier you were assuming we were going to win. Well, that was one way to play it, now I'm assuming the opposite. Which of the two other candidates for the presidential office would be the least unacceptable of the... Neither one. Neither one. It doesn't matter. They're both socialists. They're both... Tweedledum, Tweedledee. Yeah. Tweedledum and Tweedledummer is more like it. No matter who's elected, either George Bush or Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Dan Quayle, it's all going to be the same. You get left-wing socialists versus right-wing socialists. What's the difference? They both are going to increase the government, add taxes, add bureaucracy, and on and on and on. They're both going to throw gasoline on this flame of recession that we have now, and it's going to get worse if they're elected. I'm not kidding. Mark my words. Write it down. Andre Marou said this. 1991. Nancy Lourke said it. Put it on the mantelpiece and check back with us in five years. See if what we said was true. Well, there are those who argue, and I'm not going to try to reproduce all of their arguments. In fact, there is a judicious way to use government. Government, indeed, is a way of getting things done. It can't be done through individual enterprise and individual initiative. That's true. Government can, in fact, pay for a battleship. That would be very difficult for us individually to pay for. That's true. But other than that, you know, government just gets in the way. Government, when they try to control our everyday behavior, interferes with our right, and it interferes with our happiness. You favor prosperity, don't you? Of course, for any given nation. The less government, the more prosperity, by the way. In fact, what about Japan? What about Japan? In Japan, the government has played a major role in fostering industrial enterprise and research and development, has worked in concert with the private sector. Government has no, Japan's government has no taxes on savings accounts, which we do. They have no capital gains tax, which we do. Americans save two to three percent of their income. The Japanese save twenty-three to twenty-five percent of their income. The Japanese government does not go into death four hundred billion dollars every year. We do. And in Japan, while their products may be killing us in the marketplace, in terms of their standard of living, they are not ahead of us. I've had some very, you know, I've known some Japanese people who've come over here for various corporate jobs, and they tell me they work much harder than we do. Even the men are out till twelve, one in the morning, the women are home waiting. They have to commute huge distances to live in tiny apartments. If they want to buy property, they take a hundred-year mortgage and leave their kids to finish paying it. It is very, very rough. They have been totally controlled by their government in a way that I don't think or want Americans to put up with. You do seem to be primed with all sorts of answers. I can't penetrate your convictions, but then after all, you are presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and you ought to be well prepared on these matters. Here's another caller. Good evening. You're on the air. Good evening, very interesting show. I would like to wish your guests much luck and many votes this November, and I would like them if they could to outline what the primary education system would be like in a libertarian United States. What it would be like, it would be like it was more or less, now don't misunderstand me, a hundred years ago, and that is to say many small schools, they're inexpensive schools, very high quality. If we're serious about getting high quality, low cost education, there is only one way to do it, and that's to privatize the schools. Government schools always cost more than private schools and always provide lower quality. The average private school grades paid through 12 cost $2,000 to $5,000 per student per year. The average government school costs $6,000 to $10,000. Andre, is it not the case that the Republican Party and indeed the Republican platform has essentially come out for a sort of voucher system which would foster the development of private schools? They have also come out in terms of cutting the government and they haven't done it. I'm telling you, they're lying. They will say anything to get elected. They will say anything. If it takes libertarian rhetoric to get elected, they'll say it. Bush did that. He used libertarian rhetoric. So did Reagan. So did Nixon. And as I mentioned earlier, so did Franklin Roosevelt. They don't say anything to get elected and they don't care what they say and they're not going to keep their word. That's the way they are. There is no particular ethic to what they do. They have a set of relativistic moralities that is shared only by the mafia. That is to say that they'll do anything provided they can get away with it. All right. Thanks for that caller. Let's go to another. Hello. You're on the air. Mr. Rosenberg and Jeff, thank you very much for a very interesting show and like previous callers, I want to wish the candidates the best of luck. Are you going to vote for them? I hope so. Could the candidates summarize the positive role that the government might be able to play? We've heard a lot of negative aspects and those things that the government should withdraw from. What should the government do in a positive way if anything? Could they summarize that? Well, one of the things we can do is to have the police go after the bad guys and get that incarceration rate for murder up from 17%. Get the incarceration rate for rate up from 5%. Those are some of the things that government can do. They can protect us against force and fraud, but they're not doing it now. The other important thing is the court system is to have a system of redress, and this would be a lot more effective in solving, say, pollution than government regulations because if we have the kind of property rights that would forbid anyone to dirty them, whether it be our land, our air, or our soil, this would have a lot more effect on stopping pollution than regulations because when they go in and talk to a regulator, they can control them, and they do control them. Big corporations are a lot more afraid of an angry plaintiff than they are of a regulator. Another thing we can do is to bring back gold and silver, which is coins and certificates, which not only is required by the Constitution, is required by the Monetary Act of 1790. This would stop inflation in its tracks, especially, and probably only if, actually, we get rid of the Federal Reserve System at the same time. Hello? Yes, sir. Could you explain that last point a little further? Okay, the Federal Reserve System every year causes a given amount of inflation. They actually do plan for this. They create inflation out of thin air. We would get rid of the Federal Reserve System, which would get rid of inflation, and we would bring back gold and silver coins and certificates. This also would get rid of inflation and would provide for prosperity in this country, and the Federal Government can ensure to do that. Sir, thank you for the call. We have about a minute left. And what are you going to do if you don't win? Go back to law. You are utterly incorrigible. The Lord Leberchari will be glad you did it. But seriously, the American public actually voted for what they believed in. I'd be the next president and Nancy would be the next president. But seriously, Andre, with about 45 seconds left, what's the thing in you? You're not going to win this time. You won't be too offended by my making that. I was told that in 84 when I got elected. I was told that in Dixit Al-Nash this year and I got elected president of Dixit Al-Nash. Yes, indeed. So we never know what's going to happen. Well, let's face it. We're not going to win, but we will win eventually. You really do believe me? I think we have to win because if we don't win, this country is going the way of Russia. The question is what we can do here is how much worse does it have to get before people wake up? That's all we're trying to do. We're trying to make it a high bottom as opposed to a low bottom. Well, it's been indeed an exceptionally interesting discussion and I thank you very much for joining us. Our guests have been the presidential and vice presidential candidates put up by the Libertarian Party this year, respectively, Andre Maru and Dr. Nancy Lloyd. And my thanks to both of you for joining us. My pleasure. And thanks to all for listening and for some excellent questions that came through from some of the callers. Here we are. Some here are dead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is the Voice of Freedom. The Voice of Freedom. The Voice of Freedom is a production of the National Public Television. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is my daddy's station. I'm Pooh. Classic radio like you always wish it could be. 101.1 FM. Eager. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. well who I can't read the way that you dig dig dig With a shovel and a fruit Dig dig dig The whole thing through Got to dig dig dig What would I turn in a mine In a mine A twelve million thousand shots Dig dig dig dig Where I'm all in here Dig dig dig I'll go ahead I'll go ahead and see I'm in a mine Dig dig dig Got to go Now here I'm at a lot, I'mfighting girls Got to go how Is enabling 끝 To walk down Eag Can show I'm afraid Eag Feel G A Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Randy Weaver, when he was ultimately brought to justice, was acquitted. In other words, he was never guilty of anything, ladies and gentlemen. Since then, we've had Waco. The Waco Massacre. The murder of an entire church congregation by federal officials. We've had NAFTA. We've had GAP. We've had a list of things that if I were to take time to enumerate them all, would be so oppressive that most of you would run out and commit suicide. So I'm not going to go through that. Recently, a sheriff's deputy shot a young man 14 times in the chest to prevent him from committing suicide. And I could go on and on and on and on and on. You see, since that interview was conducted, things have grown at least six times worse than they were then. And I'd like to hear your comments on what you heard in that interview, what you think about it. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not endorsing the Libertarian Party. Not at all. Simply because they're for NAFTA and GAP. So a lot of the things they said about being able to create more jobs and industry and things in this country were destroyed by their support by NAFTA and GAP. They believe our borders should be open and anybody should be able to come in anytime they want to or leave anytime they want to, whether or not they're a citizen or work in this country if they want to. I disagree with all of those things. I think that that's wrong. I don't think that you can have a free society and allow that kind of shenanigan to happen. I think we must protect our industry and our labor markets. But they said an awful lot of things that are absolutely true. For instance, that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are just different, actually not different at all, but if you put two mirrors facing each other and you stand in the middle, what you're talking about is when you face one mirror, that's the Democratic Party. You turn around and face the other mirror, that's the Republican Party. There's no such thing as left-wing socialism and right-wing socialism. Socialism is socialism. And this right-wing, left-wing thing is a tremendous deception that's been worked upon the American people. It does not apply at all in this instance. So I'd like to get your feedback. Yeah, 520-333-4578 is the number. Please call and let me know what you thought about what went on in that interview and what you think is going on now. And, you know, if that interview was conducted in 1991, how come no one listens? I would like to know that. And the number, well, there's an awful lot of questions that are brought up by that. And I think that somebody needs to get their head out of the sand and start looking around. Because there's no doubt about it. We are being propelled into a socialist, totalitarian, new world order so quickly that it's just around the corner. I mean, just around the corner. It's like we're three feet from the corner. And we're getting ready to turn the corner. And, uh, most people don't even understand that we're there. They think that we're back on the other block somewhere. And, uh, you know, they just, they don't have a clue. It is absolutely amazing to me that these things are taking place. That, uh, this interview was conducted in 1991. And it was, it was, it was at such a, a level of identifiable, um, intrusion, a despicable interference in our lives. And, uh, since then we've done nothing but go downhill. The Oklahoma City bombing. The passage of the omnibus counterterrorism bill. Every year we've had another omnibus anti-crime bill, which has become more, uh, infringing upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In fact, if you want to know the truth, the Bill of Rights really doesn't exist, uh, anymore, uh, for anybody, unless they want to give you the illusion that you still have those rights. Um, they, they disregard the Constitution on a, on a, such a routine basis. Um, well, I've already proven to you that it's not in effect. So why am I even going through this little, this little talk here? 520-333-4578. That's the number. 520-333-4578. I'd like to have your comments on what was, uh, discussed in that interview in 1991, over six and a half years ago, ladies and gentlemen. And, um, what was discussed in that interview applied then. Can you imagine the same interview being conducted now, uh, with people of, uh, of like intelligence and, uh, people who were, uh, on, on a, on a, um, uh, par level awake as those people were in 1991? And, uh, you, you realize, of course, that that was a tremendously important, uh, interview in light of the fact that, that, uh, the libertarian candidates, Andre Moreau and, and, uh, Nancy Lord were, uh, were being sort of courted by the press. And they were being invited to the debates. And they were being interviewed by the press. As soon as this interview was conducted and the dreaded S word was mentioned over and over and over and over again, and I'm talking about socialism, you never heard any of the communist news networks or the major communist print media in this country ever again mention the names of Andre Moreau and Nancy Lord as presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 92 election. And, uh, that's significant. The same thing happened to Alan Keyes. Remember Representative Alan Keyes, who was running for president, um, in the, uh, the last election? And, uh, as soon as he, uh, he, he, he was, he was president, all the debates. He was, again, was being courted by the press. He was a black man. And then they just loved that a black man was running for president. But during one of the debates, after all of the candidates had given their spiel, including, including Pat Buchanan and, and all of the rest of them, he said, and I quote, you all sound like a bunch of socialists, end quote. After that, he was never invited to another debate. The press never mentioned his name again. He was never seen or heard of on the communist news networks. Uh, and he was not, uh, none, he was not covered by any of the communist print media. So this word socialism is, uh, doing more than just affect us. It is blackballing people who recognize it and speak out about it. Because let's face it, folks, the communist news networks, the communist print media in this country are, by their very nature, socialist. And they don't like people to talk about that or to tell the truth about it. Good evening. You're on the air. Hi, Bill. This is Jerry from Connecticut. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. How are you, Jerry? All right. Uh, they did have a debate this time around, uh, with, uh, the Libertarian Party, Right Way Law Party, and, uh, Howard Phillips? Yes. What party he was in? Taxpayers Party. Yeah, there you go. Can you imagine a bunch of people getting together and calling themselves the Taxpayers Party? But, uh, the only one that was, uh, closest to, uh, the Constitution was Howard Phillips. The rest of them, I mean, Perot never even, uh, wanted to show up. Let me ask you something. Did any of them, at any time, ever mention the word socialism? Uh, no. No, that's right. So they were all, by omission, lying to the American people. They knew that once they mentioned the word socialism, they were history as far as debates and coverage and, uh, being covered in the press and quoted and, and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's, uh, the Libertarian, like you said, is, uh, they, they wanted NAFTA and GATT, and, uh, that's what, uh, we were listening for, and they, uh, they wanted free trade, so forget them. And, uh, well, it's not free trade, you see. Oh, no. True free trade is, is, is, is where you give someone the opportunity to sell their goods in your country, but you charge them a tariff rate that makes the sale of their goods competitive with the sale of our goods so that they can't undercut our industry and labor markets. I agree. See, tariffs and, uh, and export taxes and excise taxes are not unfair. They just level the playing field. What they call free trade today is actually unfair trade, where they allow people in other countries who don't have to pay very much for labor to come in here and destroy our industry, manufacturing, and our labor markets. And, uh, GATT, NAFTA and GATT enabled, um, uh, our manufacturing and industry to go outside the country to these third world nations and pay people like, uh, 25 cents an hour, uh, where they were paying American citizens a fair wage, which allowed them to have a decent standard of living. Instead of doing that, they should have put in post, uh, tariffs and taxes, um, on the, on the goods from these third world nations coming into our country in order to level the playing field. It's not unfair to them, and it certainly isn't, uh, unfair to us to do that, but, but that's not what they want, is it? No, it's not. It's, and plus it kind of, I think it kind of pushes you, uh, the foreign government to maybe change their standards a little bit, and that way they'll help those people as much as it does us. Sure, if they've got to pay those, and it's not the governments, by the way. They talk about this trade deficit and stuff like that. It has nothing to do with the government. A trade deficit means that we purchased more from foreign corporations than they purchased from us. Mm-hmm. And that's because of this free trade nonsense. Right. That's because of NAFTA and GAP. If you level the playing field, that trade deficit disappears, and the government is not responsible for making up any trade deficit or anything like that. It has nothing to do with the government. It simply means that we have purchased more than we have sold if we have a deficit. If we have a surplus, it means that we have sold more overseas outside this country than we have purchased from foreign governments. Uh, countries. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Most Americans don't even understand it. They think the trade deficit means that in our trade with foreign countries, somehow the government has something that they have to make up and pay these foreign countries because we're in the hole with them or something. And it's nonsense. Well, Canada's is going up and China's is going up and Mexico's is going up. So we're doing good in this so-called free trade. No, we're going down. I mean, the deficit between these three countries has increased. Well, I'm not sure that that's correct. I think what is happening, NAFTA and GAP have opened the door so that so that there's going to be a leveling of the standard of living between Canada, the United States and Mexico. So the standard of living of the average Mexican citizen will come up some. How far, I don't know. Ours is going to go down. The Canadians is going to go down. And somewhere we're all going to meet in the middle because the purpose of most of this is to eliminate the middle class in the United States and Canada. There is no middle class in Mexico. Never has been. And there's the rich and there's the dirt poor. And when the new world order comes about, there's still going to be the rich and the dirt poor. The rich will be the rulers. The poor will be the workers. And, you know, it's like in Russia. It's like in the old Soviet Union. Everybody was supposed to be the same and have the same and each according to his needs and contributes according to his abilities. But that wasn't true. The higher you went up in the Communist Party, the more possessions you had, the better home you had. You had a car, sometimes with a chauffeur. You had a vacation college called a DACA in the mountains or by a lake somewhere. And, of course, you got to travel to the Western world and had money to spend and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it's a lie on the face of it. But, nevertheless, we're being saddled with it, aren't we? Yeah, you get that right. Okay, Bill, have a nice evening. Thank you for calling. All right, bye. 520-333-4578 is the number. Give us a call. Give me your input. What do you think about what you heard there? Remember, that interview was conducted in 1991. It wasn't, you know, most people listening to it would think that it happened yesterday. It happened in 1991. Think about all that has transpired since that interview occurred. And if things were that bad then, how bad are they now? How come you don't know about it? And what's even more important, how come you're not standing up yelling your head off about it? I mean, is this really what the American people want? Do you really want to lose your rights protected by the Constitution? Do you really want a big daddy called the state to take care of you, paddle your little behind, and change your diaper, and tell you when you can work, and when you can go to bed, and when you can travel, and when you can't, and where you can travel, and where you can't, and what job you can work at? You know they're trying to funnel our children into work education programs where they are tested at a very early age and channeled into certain professions, whether they like it or not, whether they want it or not. And once they're channeled into that line of work, they can never change it their whole life. Some children will be destined to be auto mechanics, others will be destined to be doctors. If the doctor never wanted to be a doctor, but just wanted to be a bum on the beach, he's going to be a doctor regardless. And if he bucks the system, or complains, or causes problems, there could become a time in his life where he'll be in prison for that. And what if the auto mechanic really wanted to be a doctor? You know? And nothing against auto mechanics or doctors. I just believe in freedom. Freedom of choice. And, you know, that's not where we're headed. We're headed into full-blown socialism, where nobody has a choice of anything. We're all dependents, victims, and Big Daddy will take care of us. And there won't be anybody who's not a victim. Even now. I mean, listen to the news. Watch what's happening. You'll find that every single class of people, every profession, every person, every whatever, is in some way becoming a victim that must be protected by Big Brother, who will then dictate to us what we have to do and how we have to do it in order to stop being victims. The only thing I've got to say about that, I'm not a victim of anything. I'm responsible for my own actions. And, by golly, it's always everybody else. And I think, you know, we better wake up to reality. Smell the coffee. You know, it's burning. Good evening. You're on the air. Yeah. Hi, Bill. This is Ken from Iowa. Hi, Ken. I was just listening to you talk about how they're funneling the kids into different programs, how they're going to have them be just, you know, trash man or whatever. They're already doing that here in Iowa. There is just an article in the paper about it today, how they're having kids in their, what do they call it, like career days. And they get the kids interested in one career. There's also something that the state of Iowa started up called the employee registry, where now whenever you get a job, you fill out the W-4 form. They send a copy into this employee registry. And as much as I can figure, now they're going to document all the different type of work you've done through this registry. Sure. Just like they're doing the documentation on all the rest of your life. People don't understand really how much information that the government has on them and how they get it. It's really pathetic, to tell you the truth. Yeah, it is. It is. But that's all I have to share. Okay, thank you. Okay, you bet. I forget the name of the program that they're instituting in the schools. It's like a birth to work program or something like that. I forget the exact name of it. Maybe one of you can remember it and give me a call and tell me what it is. And it's part of this, well, never mind. 520-333-4578. You see, I can stand here and do all the talking and not take any calls, and that's not productive as far as getting your input. And I really would like to have it about what you heard tonight. Remember, that interview was conducted in 1991. 520-333-4578 is the number. What do you think about what you heard? How does it compare with what's happening now? What are your comments? You know, what do you think we should do? Do you think we should do anything? Think we should do nothing? Sit back and wait for a knight in shining armor on a great white steed to come along and rescue us? I recommend that all of you go and rent the movie Braveheart. Watch it again. I watched it again last night. And you'll see that everything that happened in that movie, except for the way they dressed and the way they lived, is happening again today. And it's being done to us by the same people. You know, they get the money, we get the shaft, and so on and so forth. So, 520-333-4578, if nobody's going to call, I'm going to go off the air in exactly one minute, because I'm not going to stand here and waste my time. You know, I've heard from so many people that they just love this broadcast, they want more call-in shows, they wanted me to get back on shortwave. I've done all of that, and in fact, I've devoted my life to educating the American people in order to try to prevent some of the hardship that I know is coming. And if you're not going to participate, then, you know, why am I doing it? Just like before, when I was on two hours, if this isn't going to be a participation sport, then I'll cut back to one hour, and I won't take calls at all. I'll just do one hour of broadcast of what I think you ought to hear, and whether you like it or not, it's never going to be a consideration, simply because you don't want to participate. So, since that's the case, folks, good night. God bless each and every single one of you. Tune in tomorrow. If you're lucky, you'll get two hours. If not, you'll only get one. I will blow in the unemployed. Why is everybody always taking on me? I know that's him Yeah, that's seven from eleven now And the boy's him Try to crown Try to crown See the crown That's not a crown He's gonna get tough Just to wait for me Why is everybody always taking on me? Why is everybody riding on the wall? Who's always moving in the hall? Who's always going to be tall? Yeah, it's true We walk in the bathroom Cool and slow Who calls the English? Did you daddy look? Try to crown Try to crown He's a clown He's gonna get tough Just to wait for me Why is everybody always taking on me? He walks in the classroom Cool and slow Who calls the English? Did you daddy look? We'll see you next time. Thank you.