 Ladies and gentlemen I'm joined by my old friend Daniel McAdams. Daniel heads up the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity in Texas. He's someone I've known for many many years. We worked together in Congressman Ron Paul's office and he is one of the speakers at our event this weekend. If you haven't made plans to join us, you're in Texas, please do so. We'll be in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. You can go to Mises.org slash Events. Daniel will be one of our speakers. We're also going to have some great conversations about the Fed with Nomi Prins and Daniel DiMartino Booth. But Daniel is going to be talking about foreign policy and the money we spend on it and the cronyist system in engenders. Daniel, I wonder if people who never lived in the D.C. area really understand how many rich contractors there are in places like Potomac, Maryland and Great Falls, Virginia. I wonder if they understand the scope of it. It's pretty staggering. Well, it's incredible because you can find someone that can supply one small little thing that the Pentagon needs and wants. Maybe it's a widget. Maybe it's a little bit of information. Maybe it's a tiny process. That person gets an ongoing contract. They build an entire company out of just having that one client, that one customer that does something that they need. And that person's salary is staggering. Absolutely staggering. And I've known many people like this, otherwise good people. But the quality of life they have versus the quality of life for those struggling with no pension and paycheck to paycheck, the chasm is just unbelievably wide. Yeah, and imagine if you supply a little part to Honda, Honda could change its design or a competitor could come along. But if you supply a little part to the Pentagon, it's a political matter for your lobbyists to make sure that that gravy train continues. Yeah, you have to keep those contracts fresh. You have to keep finding new ways to supply some little thing, some little process. And sometimes people do drop out and they don't have something and the contracts expire. But it really is incredible to see how this machine has to self-perpetuate. And there's so much joint interest in perpetuating this machine. And to do this, you have got to have a steady supply of enemies. You have to create a steady supply of enemies. You have to create fear to force people to part with their money, fear and propaganda. Absolutely. And let's just call out the left for their Russia hysteria that's going on right now. This is completely dovetailed with their hatred for Trump. The left were the same people who were excusing the Soviets throughout the Cold War. And now they found a new boogeyman. Well, it's very frustrating as well because as you well remember, Jeff, when Bush was in power and we were working for Dr. Paul, we had a lot of good allies on the left, the progressives and the left and even the liberals. And we thought we had some sort of an alliance with them. And if anyone who watches the Ron Paul Liberty Report, which we do every day, will understand that we're absolutely no apologist for Trump. In fact, we're probably, and I know we are a lot harder on him than the left because we don't sit around calling names. We don't accuse him of being a Russian spy. We simply pick apart the policies that he's pursuing that go against the principles of peace and prosperity and criticize them. But these people have just, I don't know if it's intellectual laziness. I don't know what it is and what has happened, but there is no intellectual critique of Trump. And in fact, ironically, they make him stronger by being so irrelevant intellectually themselves. Yeah, well, you don't drain this swamp by appointing Michael Bolton to your administration. You know, I want to trigger your memory. I remember sitting in Ron's office and we were watching the House floor, and former Congressman Barney Frank from Massachusetts was speaking, and he used the term military Keynesianism. And I had never heard the term used, and I thought that's so brilliant, the idea that we use war and foreign policy to stimulate the economy. What a sick concept, but he was absolutely correct. Yeah, and it turned the tables on the conservatives, I think, who endlessly, when they talk about fiscal responsibility, they talk about cutting welfare, they talk about cutting Medicare, they talk about cutting Social Security. Okay, we can agree that these things are bloated. But if you look at the elephant in the room, it is the military industrial complex. It is this machine that creates wars, that creates fear, that creates propaganda. And look, if you fire 100 missiles into the desert, that's 100 more missiles that about a million bucks each or so that you're going to have to buy. You've got to call up Raytheon, hey, we need some new missiles. That's going to be some new jobs. You've got to hire some new lobbyists. So the gravy train rolls, it's all artificial. In some ways, it's more of an evil Keynesianism than the fiscal, and the fiscal Keynesianism because it carries with it the possibility of nuclear war. Yes, we're going to post something on the Mises.org site. I asked David Gordon to look in the term. And the great anti-war conservative, John Flynn, used it in the 1940s. David thinks the term may have actually been coined by the Polish Marxist, Michael Kolecki, who at least used the concept as early 1940s. And of course, John Kenneth Gailbreath used it. So it's really, I think it's such a succinct term, and it frames what we're talking about so well. Daniel, I just want to ask you one more quick thing. I'm very interested whether anyone out there is looking into all of the projected VA costs. We are going to incur as a country for all of these young men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan now the longest war in U.S. history. People coming back not only with physical injuries, but mental and psychological injuries. Suicide among former veterans over 50 is skyrocketing. Do we have any sense of how many trillions of dollars VA is going to need down the road? Well, that's where you have this disconnect because people, we just had Memorial Day and people love to put flags up everywhere and they love to thank the soldiers for preserving our freedoms, which is unfortunately not true. But when it comes time to taking care of people, to fulfilling promises made, the stories are so rife, Jeff, of soldiers who come back and are denied care that they need. What they're given is a cocktail of psychoactive drugs, which essentially puts them into kind of a stupor, because we don't want to see the products of war. We don't want to see how war destroys people's lives, how it's destroyed thousands and thousands of young men and women's lives. We don't want to see it. So we dope them up and put them in a corner somewhere and don't want to deal with it. There are no parades anymore. There are no heroic soldiers being blown up in Iraq. So our attention now is gone from these soldiers. Oh, Afghanistan, 17 years, who cares? So they've even lost that sort of sense. So I think the costs and the willingness to pay those costs in the future are both going to be critical aspects coming into the next 10 years or so. Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't met Daniel, be sure to come to our event in Dallas this weekend and meet him. He'll be talking about this unholy nexus between government and the Pentagon and the Defense Department and military contractors and hawks, frankly, within the Republican Party who keep these wars going and going and going. And from my perspective, there's no constituency outside of Washington, D.C. for us to be anywhere in the Middle East, whether that's Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan. We blow things up and we don't put them back together very well. Daniel, I look forward to seeing you. Follow Daniel on Twitter. Watch the Ron Paul Liberty Report every day on YouTube. And come see him this weekend. Daniel, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Joe.