Sunday, August 26, 2012

Rothbard is Conquering! --- Lew Rockwell on The Robert Wenzel Show


Today's Guest is Lew Rockwell


Lew Rockwell is Founder of The Ludwig Von Mises Institute and Editor of LewRockwell.com 

Topics discussed include:
  • The Republican National Convention
  • Romney / Ryan 
  • Where the Ron Paul movement goes from here 
  • The nature of politics 
  • Brandon Raub 
  • A fantastic tribute to Murray Rothbard


Here is the podcast version of the interview:


Direct link is here.





7 comments:

  1. Absolutely killer conversation with Lew Rockwell! I have now added an additional 2 years to my reading list.

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  2. So much for tough interviews. I can't imagine more softball questions and few enough of them. It was mostly a monologue by Lew Rockwell and the usual Rothbard worship.

    Certainly a big contrast with the treatment offered to Gary Johnson and Stefan Molyneaux. Even though these guys are in the anarcho-libertarian sphere, they aren't sufficiently politically correct to warrant fawning treatment.

    The problem with such obsequious interviews is that the listener doesn't learn a damn thing. It would really have been interesting to hear Rockwell defend his claim that the state can be defeated without violence and how he would propose to bring that about. But I suppose it's just too much to ask for the politically correct in-crowd to defend their positions intellectually. We're all just supposed to prostrate ourselves before the great Murray Rothbard and his minions and never question their wisdom.

    Of course there are plenty of interviewers out there who hold to the same double-standard of being tough on ideological opponents and easy with their friends. Bill O'Reilly comes immediately to mind. But, personally, I wouldn't aspire to be compared to Bill O'Reilly. And even O'Reilly doesn't unleash his venom on people who broadly support his positions but fail to fall in line on the smallest of details.

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    Replies
    1. I asked Gary Johnson what books he read. He told me Rothbard, How is it a hard ball question to ask him about an author he said he read?

      I also noted in a post that I asked Ron Paul the same question and he not only named specific Rothbard and Mises books but said he also owned books by Keynes.

      Same thing with Molyneaux. I asked questions about Mises and Austrian economics.

      In case, you haven't noticed, EPJ is about understanding the world from the Austrian economic school perspective.

      Lew Rockwell on the other hand is the founder of the Mises Institute and was a personal friend of Murray Rothbard. I happened to have wanted to get on record what Rothbard was like as a person.

      If you would prefer a show where Lew is questioned as to how he likes his eggs in the morning and where he is then debated on the subject, I suggest you start your own show.

      BTW, your last paragraph is contradictory, you say I have a double-standard with guests who agree with me and those who don't and then accuse me of "unleashing venom on people who broadly support my positions" but "fail to fall in line on the smallest of details."

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  3. My criticisms are blunt, but my intent is to be constructive. It is hard to imagine that anyone who reads this blog regularly learned anything from the Rockwell interview that they didn't already know. I certainly didn't. A few probing questions into the specifics of Rockwell's anarcho-capitalist positions would have been helpful. If the "revolution" is not going to come about through political action and if it is not going to come about through violence; how is it going to come about?

    You had the same opportunity with Molyneaux but turned the discussion into a flap over a minor issues of Austrian economics.

    Molyneaux and Rockwell are both anarcho-capitalists, and I have learned that you like Rockwell a lot but don't care for Molyneaux. What I haven't learned from these interviews is anything at all about anarcho-capitalism.

    What you don't seem to understand is that a good interview is not about what the interviewer believes. It is about what the interviewee believes, and your job is to bring that out with kindness or confrontation as the situation demands.

    Of course, you are not under any obligation to conduct such interviews. You are perfectly free to follow the O'Reilly path, but I don't think that path actually wins many converts.

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    Replies
    1. " It is hard to imagine that anyone who reads this blog regularly learned anything from the Rockwell interview that they didn't already know."

      Well then, you have a poor imagination.

      There have been 13 million page views at EPJ, if you think even half those views come from hardcore libertarians that,say, for example are familiar with Rothbard, you are sadly mistaken.

      But, again, if you think there is an audience for dissecting Rockwell, start your own damm blog or radio show and go for it.

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  4. Robert, what I have really wanted is a blog dedicated to economics. All of the 'economic' bloggers I have found seem to feel obligated to preach their politics and other beliefs alongside their economic beliefs. While I respect many of these writings, what I have wanted is a site to send my non-free market friends and associates to that strictly discusses the economic issues (no JFK, Marilyn Monroe, benefits of Anarcho-Capitalism, etc articles).

    I have friends who will simply never subscribe to all libertarian beliefs, but I do believe they would change their minds on many important issues, such as the Federal Reserve, the gold standard, Social Security, Medicare, sovereign debt, etc, if there were a site that addressed these issues from strictly an economic perspective and did not criticize their other beliefs. This way when I send them to the site and they browse around to find the hidden agenda of the site owner, all they find is people and articles dedicated to educating others on how economics really works, without all the politicking.

    I would be willing to set up, host, and manage such a site, but of course I am not capable of creating the content. Also, the content should not use any of the various nicknames that I throw into the schoolyard name-calling category which tend to create additional derision and do nothing to help the arguments ('repugs', 'statists', etc, though 'keynsians' is fine when it is used in proper context).

    These articles would not need to be purely educational starting from square one and I think a lot of them could just be aggregated from other sites like EPJ, LRC and mises.org.

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  5. Robert, is there any way to up the bit rate on the save files at all? It can be very hard to listen to at the current rate of compression.

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