 What better time than Memorial Day weekend to feature a great anti-war talk by our own senior fellow Tom Woods? Now you may not know it, but Tom used to consider himself a full-fledged neocon on matters of foreign policy. And it took the late Murray Rothbard to convince him that peace and liberty necessarily go together. So stay tuned for a great talk from Tom Woods and have a great Memorial Day weekend. What I want to talk about today, though, is another way that the Mises Institute has helped me and changed the way I think in very, very favorable ways. And that is it jolted me out of being a neoconservative, which I was as a college student, first couple years of college. I didn't realize I was a neoconservative because, you know, what do I know? I'm just some dumb kid. All I knew was I didn't like Hillary Clinton, you know, pretty good start. So I just concluded that therefore I guess I do like Rush Limbaugh. Like that was, those are the choices, right, as far as I could see. It was just process of elimination, basically. But that's because, you know, I'll be honest with you, I was not an original enough thinker to say, wait a minute, this choice is too narrow. There must be something other than Clinton and Limbaugh to choose from. No, I just thought, well, she's not him, so I guess I like it. And that was it. That was, that's what, and we all know this left-right thing, Democrats and Republicans, they present to you like, this is some gigantic choice when actually it's like a little three inch spectrum that you're allowed to choose from. It never occurred to me to look outside the three inch spectrum. So I dutifully found my place on the little spectrum. And I just, I looked around, I thought, well, let's see, I guess I'm a Republican, so let me find out what the Republicans believe. Well, they say they believe in the free market, so all right, I'm for that. But they also believe in a strong national defense, which we all know what that means, right? It doesn't mean a national defense at all because it needs a strong national offense, it's what it always means. But I went for that, I went for the whole thing and that whatever the Pentagon tells me is like Holy Scripture. And if you question any of this, you're obviously some Pinko leftist who hates America. I bought the whole package, I repeated all these ridiculous platitudes that would insult a third grader over and over again to anyone foolish enough to listen to me. When I moved into my dorm freshman year, the very first day, I'm yapping it up with one of my roommates about Operation Desert Shield, like, man, we got a, in the name of democracy, we got to restore that a mirror of Kuwait to his throne, or who knows? Well, I mean, I look back on it and I am absolutely mortified. Now, thank goodness my writing career didn't start until years later, so there's actually no evidence that I ever held these words. Apart from my complete admission of them right now. Okay, so how did I break out of this? Well, for one thing, I started to figure out a little bit just on my own because when that Persian Gulf War got started and Operation Desert Shield became Desert Storm, I watched that unfold and I watched what happened when, I don't know, maybe 100,000 Iraqi forces were basically burned alive while they were retreating in the desert. And, you know, half of these are young kids who don't even know what they're doing there and they're in an impossible situation. And then hostilities were over and there was a Bob Hope special on TV to commemorate this and everybody's cheering and laughing and joyful. And I'm supposed to feel joyful and I'm supposed to cheer because I'm a good little neocon. That's what I do. I say, yeah, USA. I'm supposed to get my giant USA number one foam glove and put it on my hand. But I just thought, all these people just, I mean, forget about the civilians. That's a whole separate matter. But technically, according to the logic of war, I'm supposed to either hate these people who were just killed or at the very least think of them as human garbage, not even worth my time. And yet I just couldn't do that. I just thought, this is a horrible thing that just happened to a lot of people. And now there are widows and orphans all over the place in that country, a country that never did a thing to me, wasn't even remotely considering doing a thing to me. How can I enjoy a Bob Hope special after this? Like something wrong. There's something callous about this and it ate away at me and it ate away at me. I didn't immediately change my ways. I rooted for the reelection of George H. W. Bush against Bill Clinton in the great Titanic struggle of the 20th century. And then I started reading more Rothbard. I was reading Murray Rothbard, The Economist, because of the Mises University program and its after effects on me. But I started reading his other work. I read his essay, Anatomy of the State. I read his essay, War, Peace and the State. You never look at the world the same way again. Because you can just chuck your civics books into the trash can after you read Anatomy of the State by Rothbard. Because he's not going to go for any of this stuff about, well, the state is there to provide for the common good and the people who staff it are selfless crusaders for justice who are innocently trying to do what's best for you and me. I mean, come on. No, to the contrary, what this institution is, is a parasitic institution that lives off the labor of its subjects. That's what it is, and it engages in activities that would be considered the greatest moral enormities if engaged in by the citizens. But when they are engaged in by the ruling class, well, this is just a matter of public policy. We can expropriate you to whatever limit prudence will allow. We can kidnap you if the cause is just in our view and only we can decide whether it's just or not. We can do all these very throw you in cages for arbitrary reasons. Anybody else doing this, we would immediately see there's something wrong with it. But we've been taught that, well, these are special people. We're all equal, but these like are super-duper equal, super-duper special type people. Rothbard just says, no, this is like the most grotesque superstition and yet we are all taught to absorb this. Moreover, the state is looking to protect itself more than it's looking to protect you. And if you doubt that, consider the severity with which it treats crimes against itself and compare that with the dispatch with which it goes after somebody who stole your $10. I mean, I remember being in New York City once and my friend and I were eating dinner and we came back and his car had been vandalized and some stuff had been taken. And a policeman just happened to be driving by, we flagged him down and we told him what had happened and he said, well, that's just a real shame and then he drove off. I'm not kidding. No interest whatsoever. Now, if that were a private service, we would never hear the end of this. The guy just drove off and he didn't even care whereas that goes on every single day in New York and people just think, well, you know, they can't solve everything. So, like, we hold the private sector to this very high standard. Like, you know, we're going to complain and gripe to the government. We just sort of figure, well, you know, what are you going to do? It's just the way to stop thinking that way. You know, quit it. Just break out of this. But think about the way they treat, like, evasion of the income tax. They don't just say, oh, well, you know, that's too bad you did that. No, they fine. You know, like, and you wonder, there are parts of the Constitution. You know, why don't they enforce the 10th Amendment? You know, they don't enforce, but you know what? They do enforce the 16th Amendment. They're counterfeiting its money. They go after you for that. If you don't register for the draft, they're going to come find you. I mean, you know, they want to protect themselves. They want to protect the institution. Now, how does it get away with all this? And Rothbard said, it's the bamboozling of the public, okay? It's the intellectual class that has a special relationship with the state apparatus. And it's their job to explain to us why we need these people and how necessary this all is. And it comes in different forms. We have economists who tell us, well, the government activates the Keynesian multiplier, which allows us to be prosperous. Or it's other people who say the government protects you from those bad people on the other side of that mountain or whatever it is. And if it weren't for them, well, you would just be thrown on your own devices and where would you be? And you know, whereas today, of course, if there's an intruder in your house, well, the government is right there. 45 minutes, are you picking up that phone and being dead on the floor? So anyway, so we get this whole thing from the intellectual class and we just accept it. We just go on. It takes an incredible amount of imagination to imagine a different way of living. And I certainly didn't have that kind of imagination. I wouldn't have been original enough to think the way Rothbard thought about alternatives. But then in war peace in the state, he applies libertarian theory to foreign policy and explains why the non-interventionist position is the correct one from the point of view of libertarianism. And what also impressed me is that here's a free market economist who's speaking out against war. This is a rare combination. And yet today it doesn't seem rare at all. But that's just because we're enjoying the fruits of the ground that was planted. The seeds that were planted by people like Rothbard now are beginning to blossom. But the key thing to me getting out of the Rothbard work on this is that there is no we in all this. We often hear even people on the left who may be sometimes good on war, they'll say, you know, we keep bombing these people and we shouldn't do it. And I say, what do you mean by we? I haven't bombed anybody. What are you talking about? I've done everything I can to stop them from bombing people. Or we starved them with our sanctions. We? Our? Stop talking like this. They starved those people with their sanctions. The state is a separate entity from us. It is not part of us. But this whole, we are the government thing. That's a great propaganda breakthrough. Because it makes you begin to think, well, you know, this really is an expression of my own will. It's an extension of my own will one way or the other. And so if you insult the foreign policy of my government, you are insulting me. You know, it's brilliant in how rotten and deviously fiendish and clever it is that it makes people feel like they have an emotional and personal stake in the policies of that government. But there is no we in Rothbard. It's always they and it's always them. And this finally penetrated my thick skull. And I realized that I had been caught up in this we. I had been watching these wars on TV like they were video games. And I felt like, yeah, we're sticking it to those bad guys. We are dispensing summary justice to the bad guys around the world. Instead of what was obviously going on, which is that the regime gives these ridiculous third grade rationales for its wars that it itself doesn't even believe. But the diluted right wing masses will go to their graves defending these completely preposterous explanations for these war. And what's actually going on is for various other reasons these conflicts take place. And real live people are suffering in ways we can't even imagine. And we're taught to cheer this. And the people who tell us we should cheer this are the conservatives who are always lecturing us about moral relativism. And they are the worst moral relativists of all because they defend moral outrages because their ruling class is perpetrating them. But if the Soviet Union starved hundreds of thousands of kids to death, well, we'd never hear the end of it. But if the U.S. government does it and you object to it, what are you, some kind of Pink Okami? And I finally woke up from this. And I thank the Mises Institute for basically for exposing me to Murray Rothbard because I certainly wasn't going to find Rothbard in the Neocon magazines. He doesn't even exist. He doesn't even exist. He has more scholarly accomplishments than every neo-conservative who ever lived. But he doesn't even exist. Now, you may find this corny, but I try to find a providential hand in some of the events of my life. And I've wondered, you know, why did I go through this period where I was pro-war and I absorbed all the propaganda and I unfortunately imposed it on other innocent parties? Well, I think to myself that the fact that I myself used to believe this means that I can relate to and understand people who still buy into it today because I was there once. And instead of having this feeling of superiority that they're just stupid, well, look, I was stupid too. You know, I was in those shoes too. And so instead of giving up on these people, I try to reach them in various ways. And so I've done what I could. And at a Mises event this very year, we had a wonderful event called War, Big Government's Best Friend in South Carolina. The reddest of red states, I love that. And my talk on YouTube actually is called War, Big Government's Best Friend. A lot of people, I'm shocked at this, say that that changed their minds because I basically gave my whole story. And then apart from just my personal story, I went through and gave some reasons that you should be skeptical of the warfare state. And I've had people tell me that that changed their minds. The reason that surprises me is the talk is like 45 minutes. These people must have very open minds. They sat through 45 minutes of something they didn't agree with at the beginning. But the thing that I'm most pleased with in my public speaking career was an event last year in Los Angeles. And you can find it online, Nullify Now and then Woods. This was an event where, and I'm wrapping up, I have an extra couple of minutes, remember, and I start a couple of minutes later. But this is an event where we had all different types of people, not because I see anybody in the corner of my eye, you understand. There's a blind spot over there. But there was an event that had a lot of different types of people at it. And it also had, there were people at this event walking around with Operation Desert Storm Hats, like veteran, you know, Desert Storm veteran hats. And I thought, whoa, this is not the audience I was expecting. And I had a speech that 10 minutes of it was absolutely laying into U.S. foreign policy. And I'm going to be honest with you and tell you that for a brief moment I thought to myself, maybe I won't talk about that stuff tonight. Maybe this isn't the place to do it. And then again, I know this is going to sound corny, but this is the honest of God truth. I actually thought to myself, I thought about my heroes, I thought about Ludwig von Mises, who comes to the U.S., basically empty-handed in 1940, having more or less been forced out of Europe, can't get a paid teaching position, lives out his life in relative obscurity, even though he's doing unbelievable work. He could have taught anywhere he wanted to if he had just said what they wanted him to say. And he refused to do it. And the result was ridicule being thought of as some backward old Neanderthal right out of the 19th century. And yet he just kept on doing it. He did it. Or Ron Paul. Ron Paul, a guy who is up there on that debate stage in May of 2007, and he goes after Rudy Giuliani saying things that no one's allowed to say on American television. He doesn't know there's an audience of people out there who are going to support him. That would have made it easy. It was hard for him to get up there and say those things. And he walked off that debate stage, dejected that the whole country's against me. Little did he know. And I thought to myself, shame on me. What do I have to do compared to what these men had to do? I got to talk to these people and have 10 minutes of it be on foreign policy. And I did it. And it's one of the best things I've ever done. And then people came up to me and said, you know what, you really made me think. Because in the first half of that speech, I was anti-Obama. I was pro-free market. And so they were right on board with me. And then I had built up some capital with them and I used it. What's the point of building up capital with people if you don't use it? Well, finally, there are a lot of places on this earth that will generically cheer on the free market. And that's wonderful. But how many of them are going to stand up to the entire regime, to its intellectuals, to its media when the chips are down and the war propaganda is flying? Well, I'll tell you, the answer to that is the number is vanishingly small. But the Mises Institute is among that very small number. And in recent years, we in the Institute have made huge strides. We've got Austrian scholars being hired on economics faculties now. To a degree, we couldn't have dreamed possible even 10 years ago. It's not career suicide to be an Austrian economist and these young bright Austrians absolutely amaze me. It's possible to be anti-war and free market now. In fact, this almost seems like what it should be, the logical position to take. We are seeing a revival of interest in Mises and Rothbard that none of us could have expected. This is no time for us to let up. We've got to keep pushing forward. We're actually having victories that Rothbard didn't live to see, Mises didn't live to see, Ron Paul's a lucky man. He's lived to see his own vindication. But we owe it to them, to those people who struggled and fought and fought and didn't see anything, any return for what they did. Now we're starting to see it. Now we, with your help, have to press on with more determination than ever. Thanks for supporting the Mises Institute.