James Bovard

Transcription

-Deist: This weekend we welcome Jim Bovard, author and self-described muckraker. 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 10 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 Mencken's "Booboisie," and why the nanny state has him him stocking up on cigars. Stay tuned. Welcome to Mises 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 ? -Bovard: Doing fine, thanks for having me on your program, Jeff. -Deist: Well, no, no, thank you for the time. I'd like to open, if you'll allow me, just sort of 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 that you were sort of this incendiary bomb thrower. You came in and you'd write these articles for, let's say, the Wallstreet 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 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, you were sort of like a unicorn or something. So does that sound like your experience or am I wildly inaccurate? -Bovard: Oh, you know, that's a great vignette. Folks have certainly got the impression that I'm way out there in the mountains. I was raised The Shanendoa valley on the mountain side in Veres. I haven't lived there in a long time, but I mean, maybe there's certain attitudes, there's the old saying that, "It's possible to take the boy out of the mountains, but it's impossible to take the mountains out of the boy" But, I think I did run into some of your folks. I think I ran into 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. -Deist: So, 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? -Bovard: Sure, I mean I was raised in the south. The south at a time when the south was getting hammered havily by the federal government for a lot of different reasons. I was raised outside the town where Stonewall Jackson won one of his biggest victories turned during the 1862 Valley Campaign. And I was also raised in an area that the northern General Sherman (1864) burnt to the ground when he was basically trying to stave the south into submission toward the end of the war, and I was always puzzled why there would be such a- 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 to what his generals actually did, there was so much- It was targeting civilians, it was killing, I'm sure, tens of thousands of folks were severely harmed 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 the end of the war. Another factor was that 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 US 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 good 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 to try and boost his reelection chances. And at the same time the Vietnam War was sputtering through an ignoble close, Nixon was starting to get caught up in Watergate, and it was easy to reach the conclusion that politicians were a criminal class and the less power they had over Americans, the better off this country would be. -Deist: Well, Jim, It's interesting, in reading an old interview with you, you mention the influence of Hayek's the Road to Serfdom on your early development. And most journalists tend to view Economics with at least disinterest if not disdain, or even contempt, but it seems like at a pretty early stage in your intellectual development, in your career, you were already thinking about money and economics. -Bovard: During my high-school times I enjoyed wheeling 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- Just before Nixon was forced to resign. So, those are some of my early experiences. Plus, it was striking to me, I was interested in journalism, and I was puzzled that most journalists seemed to have little or no curiosity as far as econ 101. When I started writing about farm programs in the 1980s, simply looking at how the price supports work and how the government would set these prices higher than the 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, a lot of other places, would simply fall for one bogus government crisis after another. People can see the same thing with foreign policy as far as the government creating bogus crises- bogus crises and using that to seize more power. But, to take a step back, Hayek had a huge influence on me. 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 itellectual and philosophical framework to understand both how markets work, and how politicians and governments tend to go downward. -Deist: Would you say that a particular strain of Austrianism or free market economics is what turned you into a writer? Or was it just sort of part of the development? -Bovard: No, I was interested in become a writer before that, shortly after I turned 18, I decided I wanted to be a writer and I kept at it for a number of years when the articles did not sell. Eventually the articles kept selling so I kept writing. But I was a lot more interested in philosophy than I was in journalism or economics, but trying to sell articles in philosophy was really difficult, so I said, "Okay, let's figure out what sells." -Deist: 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 it came out in '06. So, one of the central themes in this book is that you've got these evil federal agencies that're getting away with, in some cases, literally murder. But you also have the twin evils that make it possible: One is what you describe as a docile media media, and the second is this sort of overly credulous, uninterested American public. And to me anyway, it sort of hearkens to Mencken's concept of the "Booboisie." And I'm just curious as to whether or not you're a Mencken fan, or whether he had any sort of influence on you? -Bovard: I'm a huge Mencken fan. He's someone I came to a little bit late, I really didn't get into him until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd seen some of his stuff earlier, but some of his political stuff was a little bombastic, and it seemed like he used the same phrases over and over. And that was what I was first exposed to, but then, at some point when I 25 or 26, I bought a copy of his book, Chrestomathy, 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 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 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 certainly as far as domestic policy, he was spot on. But Mencken had a big influence. Part of what I liked about Mencken was he was able to convey a joy of idea when he wrote about government, politics, 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 is so flat and kind of doesn't have any lasting value. Where as H.L. Mencken could find ways to take some event, some temperance rally or whatever, and to find - like there was a lasting lesson from that fiasco or from prohibition. -Deist: Jim, your own writing career has kind of straddled the pre-internet age, and now the Internet age and this social media age, I think if Mencken were alive today he would say that technology has not saved us; that maybe social media's making us stupid. I'd like your perspective on 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 information available to us but we seem less intelligent than ever. -Bovard: Yeah, well 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 from what I've read and heard folks tends to read articles differently. 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 at least the first paragraph, or the first few paragraphs, is gonna be smooth and clear, and have some ideas, and hopefully raise some principle. But if folks are just kind of skimming, that doesn't hold people. And also, I think folks tend to look at things- Folks are just glancing at articles and they're almost looking for the the article that screams the loudest, and I usually that's not most substantive article. The flip side is, 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 Federal 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've gotten twenty years ago. -Deist: In your view, do you think an individual can truly be educated if they're not reading books can? Can just reading articles, being active online is that enough to be informed and educated today? -Bovard: Well, those are two different questions. The question of being informed, yes, of course, they 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 missed their rabies shot and spend their 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- to a 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 for about a year, a year and a half, but a neighborhood had given me a book list from the University of Chicago. They were great book lists, which was very fashionable in the 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, and I was captivated by that and read a lot of those books on that list. That probably had more influence than anything else in waking up my dormant mind because prior to that I had been interested in- Well, let's just say that my interests were quite narrow, and having spent twelve 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 Mencken, or Hayek, or some others. So, how's that for a long ramble? -Deist: Well, the question is, do you still have the list? -Bovard: I still have the list indeed! I still have the list, and I was actually looking at it a few years ago because I had gone through and annotated it as far as the the books I'd read, and what I'd thought of them. There were so many books that really snapped my head back and opened my eyes, especially a number of the philosophers who were 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 stimulation where I grew up. -Deist: Let me ask you this, your books, your article s are known for their uncompromising, no holds barred delivery. Do you feel like there was ever a point in your career where you just sort of softened around the edges, if you'd 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? -Bovard: Ha, that's a difficult question. Hell yes, there's plenty of times that I could've cashed in by selling out. But if I'm going to sell out, what's the point; I might as well become a damn lobbyist. I mean, there were certain periods like after 9/11 that there was- Well, I mean, after 9/11 I was saying some of the same things which I had said before and the point I was trying to drive home was that nothing happened on 9/11 made the federal government more trustworthy than it was before 9/11. And yet there was just this mass adulation of government, and that was one of the things that impressed me most about Ron Paul: He was one congressmen who stood against that fervor and and spoke out against the Patriot Act, and spoke out against the new money laundering rules, and spoke out against the war in Iraq. Not only was he right, he was eloquent, he was on point, and he was credible. And it was such a novelty, I mean, it almost made me doubt my conclusions about politicians. -Deist: Almost, 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- My final question for you 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-staters? -Bovard: It seems as if the only logical end is to put everyone in jail because 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 not simply a question of being concerned about health. For instance, on the cigar-smoking, I think a number of the policies are driven by intense animosity toward the cigar smokers, and to a lesser degree against cigarette smokers and those other habits as well. There was a wonderful line from H.L. Mencken, he said something tp the effect that, In most cases, folks who claim that they want to to help you, may 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 so that we can pull on the leash on this government that's out of control, but I'm not holding my breath and I'm stocking up on cigars. -Deist: Ladies and gentlemen, before there was Glenn Greenwald, there was Jim Bovard. Check him out at www.jimbovard.com, and Jim, we deeply appreciate your time this weekend. -Bovard: Hey, thanks so much for having me on. I really enjoyed it.