 My name is Chris Coyne and I'm the F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Associate Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Today I'm joined by Robert Higgs who is a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and is the editor-at-large of the Institute's quarterly journal The Independent Review. Bob, welcome. Thank you very much, Chris. Another related theme in Christ and Leviathan that I think is very important that you emphasize this notion of institutional possibilities. And so even when you have some retrenchment, things lay dormant. There's a precedent there. In some cases there's an actual bureaucratic apparatus which might shrink slightly but it's there still. Yes. And when that will emerge again, it's unknowable. It might be years, it might be decades. And you know the NSA is a very good example of that. It was created in the 50s but its history is much further back than that. No one could have predicted at the time how it would look in the post-911 world. Now I'm curious what you think about what you just said about the post-911 world because where many of the national emergencies that you discuss in Christ and Leviathan seem to have somewhat of a clear endpoint. Right now the United States is engaged in a war that has no clear end. Numerous wars that have no clear ends. The main one what people call the war on terror but that's linked up with the war on drugs and all the other ongoing wars. So how do you see that fitting into your framework in terms of the fact that there, you know, it's unclear if there'll ever be a retrenchment or a clear end point because it's unclear what victory even means. I think it's a very troubling development. I think one needs to understand that in all these episodes there were people who didn't want the retrenchment even after an episode such as World War II. There were people for example who didn't want the government to abandon its price controls for example at the at the end of the war. There were always people sometimes that those who managed the government agencies and sometimes outsiders who benefited from the operations of these agencies who wanted to keep the government doing whatever it had done for a war purpose or an anti-depression purpose during the New Deal for example. So there are always people in or close to the government who would like to have the government operate at a higher level that is reached as a result of emergency actions. Now the question in the past has always been can the people who want to keep the government operating at this extraordinary level succeed because there are others who want retrenchment. They want to get rid of for example price controls in 1945. A lot of businessmen then were sick of price controls. They didn't like to file reports with the Office of Price Administration. They didn't like to have people snooping on the prices they charge or interfering with how much they could charge customers. So there was a lot of opposition to keeping the price controls. Now if we come up to the present and the post 9-11 developments we have in a way a similar give and take there. We have some people who want to keep the government operating at a very high level of action overseas just as the government used 9-11 as a pretext for attacking Iraq and occupying the country for over a decade and of course US forces remain in Iraq even now although in diminished numbers. But US forces operating still in Afghanistan as they have since immediately after 9-11 operating in many other parts of the world supposedly because of the threat that was manifested on 9-11. Now obviously some people think this is overwrought. They think this is inappropriate. They think it's not really connected with the perpetrators of 9-11. They think the United States has used this as a pretext to become involved in foreign civil wars that are unrelated to anything that happened in 9-11. So there is some opposition to the idea that government should continue to do everything it did immediately after 9-11 on the basis of reacting to that horrible event. However the war on terror is an unusual kind of crisis or reaction to crisis because obviously conventional war has to end at some point. Even historically the 30 years of war went on a long time but it ended. The 100 years of war ended. It took a long time but if you have something like a war on terror it's not a war on a definite enemy. It's a war on a tactic. A tactic that can be carried out by virtually any adult. You or I could commit a terroristic act. We have automobiles and we could drive into a crowd and kill people. Terrorism is available to almost anybody who wants to carry it out. It doesn't require that we blow up an airplane or a hotel or a government office. It can be done in a variety of ways just to create terror. So the whole idea of fighting terror is senseless basically. Now it's always linked in the past 15 years or so. It's always linked with the Islamist radicals in various parts of the Middle East and African Asia who have been characterized as the great devils of the day. The threat de jure. We don't have Hitler anymore. We don't have Stalin anymore. But now we have Islamist fanatics. We don't know who they all are, where they are, what they plan to do. We do know that there are some people in the world who are intent on committing acts of terrorism against Americans or Europeans or in some cases Asians, Africans. There are some people that would like to commit acts of terror as part of a political program to seek power in these places or in many cases to eject American and other European forces from their countries. So there's no doubt that there are terrorists and would-be terrorists in the world. But that's been the case for a long time. And terrorism can be and would more profitably be treated as a form of crime. To treat it as a form of warfare in the same way that conventional warfare takes place is a recipe for enlarging the state, sacrificing people's liberties in a quest that never ends, as you say. How can anyone ever be sure that terrorism has been defeated? It's not a foe. We can't kill every terrorist because some new terrorist could come into being at any moment. So it's an ideal mission for those people who do not want retrenchments of government-sized scoping power and particularly for those people who enjoy or profit from the government's operation of the war and terror at a high level. We need to understand that it's not just the people who run the NSA or the CIA that gained from having a war on terror. It's also the many, many, many companies and consulting firms that contract with the Pentagon or the CIA or the NSA and there are thousands of them where people are earning large amounts of money for carrying out some research or some production activity, ostensibly related to fighting the war and terror. And so this activity now has built into it a very large and well-heeled private sector of crony capitalists tied to the government agencies most responsible for conducting the war and terror. And for that reason it's much harder to bring about a retrenchment. Every time some retrenchment is proposed the people who stand again from its continuation cry out that that would be undesirable. It would open us up to attack by enemies. It would place us at greater risk. We would be asking for harm. Which is a very cheap form of talk because they don't have to do much to justify it but it's the kind of talk that has some effect. That's why they talk that way again and again and again. All crises managers are familiar with using fear to manage the public. During crises government wants to impose costs on the public in a way that it hasn't before or wants to require them to take actions they weren't taking before. And in order to gain compliance in order to get people to to acquiesce in the government's exercise these new powers at the expense of people's liberties it needs to make them afraid. That's the best way to make them desist from resistance or evasion. So all crisis management is tied up with fear management and anybody who even watches daily television programs knows there's a fear desure. There's a fear almost every day and practically every one of these fears has tied to it some government response or some proposal for a government response. Whether it's a new epidemic on the horizon or a new geontist group and some far far away part of the world the solution or the response is always seen nowadays as some government response not just leaving it to other people to take care of it. So I think the the war on terror has been a disastrous development because of the way the U.S. government and allied governments have responded to it and because these responses have among other things had the effect of continually creating new terrorists. Every time the United States drops a rocket on a village in Yemen or Afghanistan they kill a lot of innocent people and they they make people who otherwise wouldn't have hated the United States and Americans enough to engage in terrorism they make them hate the United States that much. The United States any terrorism program grows its own new crop of terrorists virtually every day.