LewRockwell.com today posted the transcript for Joseph Salerno's podcast with Lew Rockwell about war and the state:
ROCKWELL: And, of course, as Hayek’s chapter in the Road to Serfdom on how the worst rise to the top — I mean, these are — as you say, these are the people who are the best at demagoguery, the best at lying, the best at fooling people, are the ones who have the comparative advantage. And so once being in that position, why are they not satisfied to simply rip off their domestic? But why do they want to conquer? Why do they want war?
SALERNO: Well, that’s a very good point. And the reason, of course, is that, at some point, the population becomes very, very — some of the population — dissidents, the Libertarians, the anarchists — notice that this is a big con game and they begin to spread, disseminate these ideas to the rest of the population. The way to keep the population in line is always to have a tiger, a figure of a tiger at the gates. So you always want a foreign enemy. And so that is the reason why we’ll always have wars, the state will always engage in wars. So imperialism, in a sense, is a logical implication of having a state, and the fact that the state has to lie to cover the fact that it’s just a minority and it’s benefiting itself and not providing any sort of public goods or collective goods.
