 This weekend we welcome Jim Bovar, author and self-described muckbreaker. Jim is a well-known and prolific libertarian writer, appearing in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reader's Digest, and many other publications. He's also the author of ten books, including Attention Deficit Democracy, Terrorism and Tyranny, and the apparently semi-autobiographical public policy hooligan. Jim and I discuss his incendiary career as a journalist, the American people, as Makin's bourgeoisie, and why the Nandy state has him stocking up on cigars. Stay tuned. Welcome to Mesa's Weekends. I'm Jeff Deist. We're very pleased and very happy this weekend to be joined by none other than the great Jim Bovard. Jim, how are you this weekend? Doing fine. Thanks for having me on your program, Jeff. Well, no, no. Thank you for the time. I'd like to open, if you'll allow me, we just sort of have a little bit of an anecdote. So when I was first working for Ron Paul, this would have been the early 2000s, you know, all of us in Ron's office, myself, Daniel McAdams, Norm Singleton, we had this view of you, you know, that you were sort of this incendiary bomb thrower. You came in and you'd write these articles for, let's say, Wall Street Journal, and they'd be these scorched earth articles. And we never really had a good feel for you. We had some sense that you didn't live in the Beltway, that you sort of lived out in the mountains of West Virginia or Virginia. We were never quite sure. And you were always, you know, skewering the executive state in a way that made Ron very happy. But we never, I don't think we ever actually saw you. You were sort of like a unicorn or something. So does that sound like your experience or am I wildly inaccurate? You know, that's a great one yet, you know, I mean folks have certainly got the impression that I'm, you know, way out there in the mountains. I was raised in the show in the valley in the mountainside there, so I haven't lived there in a long time. But I mean, maybe there are certain attitudes. I mean, it's the old saying that it's false to take the boy out in the mountains and you can't take the mountains out of the boys. But I think I did run into some of your folks. I think I ran to Norm every now and then, even back then. So I mean, I guess I didn't spend that much time at Washington events because most of them seem kind of odious. So when you bring up being raised in the mountains, was there anything about that experience? Your family, your parents, your hometown that you think might have turned you into a natural or reflexive libertarian? Sure. I mean, I was raised in the south of a time when the south was getting hammered heavily by the federal government for a lot of different reasons. I was raised outside the town where Stilwell Jackson won one of his biggest victories during the 1862 Valley Campaign. And I was also raised in an area that was the General Sheridan, the northern General Sheridan in 1864 burnt to the ground when he was basically trying to start the south in the submission towards the end of the war. And I was always puzzled why it would be so easy to portray Lincoln as this great moral hero and liberator when, if you looked at what the orders that he approved for or what his generals actually did, there was so much that it was targeting civilians that was killing, I'm sure, tens of thousands of folks were severely harm if not killed by those orders causing starvation going in there and burning down the crops and the barns and the mills just at a time of harvest in Georgia and Arkansas and Virginia towards end of the war. So another factor was I was coming of age in the 1970s and I was very interested in coin collecting and that was about the time that President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard and also imposed wage and price controls. And I was starting to follow some of the political commentary back then and some of the folks I was reading did a very nice job of explaining how Nixon was so devious and what he had done and how it was an absolute breach of faith with the American people and how Nixon was exploiting those wage and price controls that try to boost his own re-election chances. And at the same time, the Vietnam War was sputtering through a ignoble close. Nixon was starting to caught up in Watergate and it was easy to reach the conclusion that the politicians were a criminal class and that the less power they had over Americans, the better off this country would be. Well, Jim, it's interesting in reading an old interview with you. You mentioned the influence of Hayek's Road to Serfdom on your early development. And most journalists tend to view economics with at least distinterest, if not disdain or even contempt. But it seems like at a pretty early stage in your intellectual development and your career, you were already thinking about money and economics. Yeah, well, I was during my high school time, I enjoyed willing and dealing with coins and later with gold and silver, and I had some very lucky timing getting the silver market just before Nixon got impeached or just before Nixon was forced to resign. So some of those early experiences. And plus it was striking to me, Egyptian and journalism, I was puzzled that most journalists seem to have little or no curiosity as far as Econ 101, when I started running about farm programs in the 1980s, simply looking at how the price supports worked and how the government would set these prices higher than market clearing prices, there would be a surplus. And then the politicians would say that the surplus proved the government needed more power. Well, anybody who knows anything about markets knows that that's complete BS, and yet the Washington Post and a lot of other places would simply fall for one bogus government crisis after another. And people can see the same thing now with foreign policy as far as the government creating bogus prices, bogus crisis and using that to see more power. But to take a step back, Hayek had a huge influence on me. Hayek, I was interested, I was gung-ho on free markets before I read Hayek, but then reading The Road to Serfdom gave me a much better intellectual and philosophical framework to understand both how markets worked and how how politicians and governments tend to go downward. Would you say that that a particular strain of Austrianism or free market economics is what turned you into a writer or was just sort of part of the development? No, I was interested in becoming a writer before that. Shortly after I turned 18, I decided I wanted to be a writer and I was kind of taken and confident and kept that for a number of years when the articles did not sell. Eventually, the articles kept selling, so I kept writing. But I was I was a lot more interested in philosophy than I was in journalism or in economics, but trying to sell articles and philosophy was really difficult. So I said, OK, well, let's let's figure out what sells. So moving forward, flash forward a few years. I have a copy of your book, Attention Deficit Democracy, which you were kind enough to sign for me, apparently came out in 06. So one of the central themes in this book is sort of you've got these these evil federal agencies that are getting away with, in some cases, literally murder, but you also have that the twin evils that make a possible one is what you described as a docile media. And the second is this sort of overly credulous, uninterested American public. And to me, anyway, it sort of harkens to Mankin's concept of the the buboise. And I'm just curious as to as to whether or not you're a Mankin fan or whether he had any sort of influence on you. I'm a huge Mankin fan. He's someone who I came to a little bit late. I really didn't get into him until I was in my mid 20s. I'd seen some of the stuff earlier, but there was some of his political stuff is a little bit bombastic. And it seemed like it uses the same phrases over and over. And that was what I was first exposed to. But then at some point when I was 25 or 26, I bought a copy of his Cresto Matthew, which I'm probably mispronouncing. It was his collection of his best writings. And I was stunned to see his grace and his fluency with ideas and with history. And he was an absolute master of epigrams and he could spear a subject or spear a politician. It was almost like someone being hit with a javelin thrown a hundred feet away. Some of the stuff he did on President Wilson, on William Jennings Bryan, on some of the other rascals of that period, it was just magnificent. And he was I was very impressed by his stalwart opposition against Franklin Roosevelt. He started out as a Roosevelt supporter, but he quickly became one of Roosevelt's most outspoken critics. And almost certainly as far as domestic policy, he was spot on. So but Macon had a big influence. It was part of what I liked about Macon was he was able to convey a joy of ideas when he wrote about the government politics and and public policy. Because so much of the political writing, it's obvious that the journalists or the professors or whatever don't have a passion for ideas. And that's part of why so much of it's so flat and kind of doesn't have any lasting value. Whereas H.L. Macon could find ways to take some, you know, some events, some temperance rally or whatever and to find the the lines were like there was a lasting lesson from that, you know, fiasco or from prohibition. Jim, your own writing career has kind of straddled the pre-internet age and now the internet age and this social media age. You know, I think if Macon were alive today, he would say that technology has not saved us. That maybe social media is making me a stupid. I'd like your perspective on on, you know, your writing career and the American public before everything was available instantly, digitally. And then today where it seems like we've got so much educated, so much information available to us, but we seem less intelligent than ever. Yeah, well, it's it's interesting to see how people's reading habits have changed. And my impression, they have not changed for the better that people have got a much shorter attention span now that that from what I've read and heard, folks tend to read articles. Definitely folks tend to skim an article instead of actually reading it. And that's frustrating to me because I always try to craft an article so that at least the first paragraph or the first few paragraphs is going to be smooth and clear and have some ideas and hopefully raise some principle. But if folks are just kind of skimming, that doesn't doesn't hold people. And also I think that folks tend to look at things that folks are just glancing at articles that they're almost looking for the for the article that screams the loudest. And as usually, that's not not the most substantive article. Flipside is a back prior to the Internet age. There were a lot of gatekeepers that kept a lot of hard line ideas or a lot of facts about government abuses, kept them from reaching a broader public. So if people are curious now to learn about the fellow reserve or to learn about some of the abuses of the ATF or the FBI, a few Google searches and they can pull up a lot of hard information that's far more easy to access than what they could have gotten 20 years ago. In your view, do you think an individual can truly be educated if they're not reading books, can just read articles being active online? Is that enough to be informed and educated today? Well, you know, those are two different questions. The question of being informed. I mean, yes, a person can get a lot of information if they go to some good credible websites. Unfortunately, there's a lot of websites out there that kind of miss their rabies shots and spend a lot of time barking at the moon. As far as whether a person is educated, that's a different standard because it's very important to be able to have the to have a mental or to have a philosophical or even implicit philosophical framework in which you're able to process information which comes to you. One thing that had a big influence on me when I was, I guess, coming of age, I started out in college at Virginia Tech. I dropped out and I later came back about a year and a half. But a neighbor had given me a book list in the University of Chicago. Their great book list, which was very fashionable in the 1950s and 1950s and then not so much afterwards. But that was a guide to a lot of the classics of Western thought, political thought, philosophical thought, historians, some theology, which never fetched me, but and I was captivated by that and read a lot of those books on that list. And that probably had more influence than anything else and kind of waking up my dormant mind because prior to that, I'd been interested in, well, let's just say that my interests were quite narrow and having spent 12 years in government schools, it was the most brain-numbing experience of my life. And from that, I lost my natural love of reading, which came back very quickly after I graduated high school. But it was reading some of those classics, which gave me a paradigm and helped me appreciate some of the other later writers, like a Macon or Hayek or some others. So so how is that for a long ramble? Well, the question is, do you still have the list? I still have the list. Indeed, I still have the list. And I was actually looking at a few years ago because I'd gone through and annotated it as far as the books had read a lot of them. And there were so many books that really snapped my head back and opened my eyes, especially a number of the philosophers who are quite skeptical of, well, of government, of politics and sometimes of humanity per se. And it was such a different view than what I'd been exposed to because there was not much intellectual simulation where I grew up. So let me ask you this. Your books, your articles are known for their uncompromising, no holds bar delivery. Do you feel like there was ever a point in your career where you just sort of softened around the edges if you had just been a little bit more willing to write something that perhaps one party or the other would favor that this would have helped you on a personal, professional or financial level? Oh, that's a difficult question. Hell, yes. I mean, there's there's there's plenty of times plenty of times that I could have cashed in by selling out. But if I was going to sell out, then what's the point? I might have become a damn lobbyist. So no, I mean, there was, you know, I mean, I there were there were certain periods. I mean, like after 9-11 that there was, well, I mean, after 9-11, I was saying some of the same things which I'd said before. And that's a point I was trying to drive home was nothing happened on 9-11 that made the federal government more trustworthy than it was before 9-11. And yet there was this this mass adulation of government. And that was one of the things that was impressed me most about Ron Paul is he was one congressman who stood against that fervor and spoke out against the Patriot Act and spoke out against the new money money laundering rules and spoke out against the war in Iraq. And not only was he right. He was eloquent. He was on point and he was credible. And it was it was such a novelty. I mean, it almost made me doubt my conclusions about politicians. Almost almost, we'll have a we'll have a qualifier there. Jim, I'll leave you with this. You're a guy who is known for enjoying a cigar now and then. So my question for you is is is my final question for you is concerns the nanny state. We're at a point now where with the Obamacare law, we've given folks on one side the ability to say, well, aha, your decision to wear a motorcycle helmet to smoke cigarettes to eat pizza and ice cream all day doesn't just affect you. It affects all of us because, gosh, we're all in this together. We all pay. Where do you think this ends? Is there ever an end to the insatiable desire of the nanny state or it seems as if the only logical end is put everybody in jail because that's what that's the direction it's trending in. And there's so much intolerance by a lot of these so-called paternalists and it's it's it's not simply it's not simply a question to be concerned about health. For instance, on the cigar smoking, I think a number of the policies are driven by intense animosity towards the cigar smokers and to a lesser degree against cigarette smokers and there's other habits as well. So but it's this there was a wonderful line from H.L. Macon. He said something to the fact that in most cases, folks, folks who want to claim that claim that they want to help humanity actually want to control it. And I think that's what we're seeing with Obamacare and a lot of the other policies. And going back to the attention deficit democracy theme, I hope that at some point enough Americans will wake up that we can pull them to leash on this on government out of control. But I'm not holding my breath and I'm stocking up on cigars. Ladies and gentlemen, before there was Glenn Greenwald, there was Jim Bovart. Check him out at JimBovart.com. And Jim, we deeply appreciate your time this weekend. Hey, thanks so much for having me on. I really enjoyed it.