Last week I had the good fortune of appearing on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Internet program “Freedom Watch.” You can see the video here. The topic was “Auditing the Fed” but most of the discussion revolved around ending the Federal Reserve System.
I pointed out how the Fed is an engine of government confiscation of wealth, one that enables this omnipotent government agency to steal people’s money secretly and surreptitiously.
I also pointed out that the reason the Framers had chosen a gold standard for the American people, one in which people used gold, silver, nickel, and copper coins for their money, was to protect them from monetary debasement, which is precisely what the Fed is all about.
The gold standard, of course, was abandoned by the generations of Americans living in the 20th century, resulting in decades of monetary chaos and continual debasement of the currency. (See my recent series “Gold and Freedom” in Freedom Daily.)
Given that Judge Napolitano is a libertarian rather than a conservative. I think it’s impressive (and, well, surprising) that Fox News has him there.
Conservatives love to rail against Big Government but you can almost always tell that it’s just a knee-jerk, standard, superficial position that’s designed to defeat Democrats and get Republicans elected to public office. As soon as there is a Republican president or Republican-controlled Congress, for example, the conservative voices exclaiming against Big Government, Big Spending, and Big Debt go silent, especially when Big Government is dropping Big Bombs overseas and engaging in Big Assaults on civil liberties here at home.
Andrew Napolitano falls into a completely different category, a libertarian one — one that understands the real nature of government and its role in a free society. There’s no freedom claptrap with this man.
I’ll never forget my reaction as I was reading his book The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land a few years ago. I was expecting a standard conservative book with the standard conservative tripe.
Not so! As I turned each page, it quickly became obvious to me that here was a man who truly understands the threat that the federal government poses to our freedom, and how the federal government has been taking away people’s freedom especially with its war on terrorism, and how the Constitution was intended by the Framers to protect us from such infringements. The book was filled with no-holds-barred, pure, distilled libertarian perspectives on freedom, government, and the Constitution.
Thus, when we began planning our 2007 conference “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties,” Andrew Napolitano was on our list of speakers to be invited. His speech, delivered on the same evening as Ron Paul’s speech, was one of the best-received at the conference. You can see it here. As you can imagine, the conference room that evening was filled with electricity!
I’ve just started reading Napolitano’s newest book Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America. After reading just a couple of chapters, it has quickly became clear to me clear that Napolitano has maintained his sharp libertarian edge in this book. Pulling no punches, he points to one major culprit when it comes to slavery — government — federal, state, and local.
With John Stossel’s upcoming switch to Fox, it will be interesting to see if a libertarian synergy develops between Napolitano and Stossel. The libertarian movement is fortunate to have both of them on our side spreading libertarian ideas on television and on the Internet.