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Nov. 11, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:02
John Stossel | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 27
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Our basic freedom is important and we ought to be left alone.
And part of that is freedom to trade with people.
And generally, that brings good things. - Hey, hey, and welcome to the Sunday special we have on as our guest this week, John Stossel, You know him from Fox News and Stossel TV and all of his investigative reporting.
We're going to get into libertarianism and small government and regulations and all the rest of it in just one second.
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All right, John, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Good to be here.
So let's start.
For people who may not know your background, you started off as a reporter, and now you're seen as both a reporter and sort of a libertarian commentator.
How did you come to your political viewpoint, and how did your career progress in this direction?
I graduated college, and like a lot of young people, I thought capitalism was okay, it brings us some stuff, but it's cruel and unfair.
And I went to every job interview I could, and the longest free trip was to Portland, Oregon, where I ended up in a TV newsroom.
I'd never watched TV news.
I got my worst grades in English.
I was just taking a year off before going to grad school in hospital management.
I thought if I worked, I would learn to appreciate school more.
The opposite happened.
I appreciated work more because you don't feel guilty about not having done all the reading and they pay you.
And so I kept working in the newsroom.
I never intended to go in the air.
I'm a stutterer.
But they pushed me, and I eventually overcame the stuttering.
And I became, to avoid competing with people like you, who talk fast, I just wanted to cover something that other people weren't covering.
So, at the time, all people did was politics, the weather, crime, disasters.
That was news.
I thought there's consumer issues out there, psychology, medicine, companies ripping people off, I'll do that.
And I did that and won 19 Emmy Awards bashing business.
But I gradually watched the regulation that I was calling for and often getting.
Sometimes politicians would say, that was great, we're going to pass a law and fix that in Oregon.
They created a Department of Consumer Affairs.
But then I'd go back and do the same story.
We'd send a TV set out to 20 repair shops.
Eighteen with a loose part.
Eighteen would say, oh, loose part, no charge.
Two would rip us off.
I'd go back and say, would you ever do this?
Oh, no.
Yeah, well, watch this.
Play the videotape.
And it was great television bashing business.
And then so we do it again.
Now there's the Department of Consumer Affairs.
The results are the same.
Most people are honest.
A few cheat.
So what's the Department of Consumer Affairs doing?
They have a big dreary room with a bunch of dreary people at desks filling out forms.
Now you have to get a license to be a team of your impairment.
And supposedly that will screen out the bad guys.
But it doesn't.
It just lets in the ones who are sophisticated enough to know how to get the license.
The immigrant maybe works under Beyond the law in the black market, everybody has to pay a few pennies more to pay for the lawyers and consumers no better off.
So I started reading more.
I didn't love the conservative press because it looked like your people wanted to police the bedroom and police the rest of the world and I didn't like that.
And I discovered Reason Magazine, and that was an epiphany.
Oh my God!
These people get it better than I do!
And I became a libertarian.
Let's talk about your brand of libertarianism.
So, there are a bunch of different subsets of libertarianism, ranging from Gary Johnson, who's not really a libertarian, to other folks who seem significantly more hands-off when it comes to regulations.
For example, what is your view on when regulation is important or necessary?
Are there situations where you think regulation is something that needs to happen?
Yes.
I think the Constitution had part of it right.
We need rule of law.
The worst places to live is the African country where there's no rule of law and you're afraid to build a factory because your neighbor may just steal what you make or the dictator may take the whole factory.
So we need cops and a national defense, stuff that's in the Constitution.
I'd go one further and say we need government for pollution control rules.
Some libertarians would say, well, I can sue you if your smoke pollutes my air, but our legal system is so cumbersome, that's not practical.
So thank God for the EPA, the air and the water have gotten cleaner.
And beyond that, just about nothing.
Okay, so let's talk about The taxation regime.
So a lot of folks who are in libertarian circles are deeply concerned about the morality of taxes.
I consider myself basically libertarian myself when it comes to the involvement of government.
And I'm very sympathetic to the argument that taxation is generally theft, that when somebody puts a gun in your face and then says you need to give me your money for a purpose that I see fit, that that is a form of theft.
But when is taxation not theft?
Is there a moral line that we can draw?
Because obviously the government does have to provide certain services that you talked about.
If you're talking about the government providing safety for your property, you need a police force.
If you're talking about the government providing safety from foreign invasion, you need defense department.
Is that sort of taxation theft?
And how do you distinguish between what's theft and what's not?
I don't think about it much, but I would say no.
If I am a member of this country and this country needs national defense, which it does, and a local police force, and pollution control rules, government has to raise that money somehow.
That's not theft.
That's just the deal.
And one of the questions that often comes up in this context is, you know, so how far does that go?
So very often what you hear from folks on the left is the, the, you didn't build that thing that you got from Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren, that because the government provides roads, for example, and rule of law, that you didn't build that.
The government really built it.
The government contributed to your success.
How true is that?
And, you know, do we need things like government provided roads and post offices?
No, we certainly don't need government post offices in the age of UPS and FedEx.
It was interesting that the government could not get it there overnight, and then FedEx did, and now even UPS sometimes does.
If the private sector was building roads, they would have more roads, they'd be smoother, they would be better.
It's become a role for government.
It would be better if they contracted it out.
Not that people in government aren't necessarily just as bright, but the incentives are different.
You can fire the private road builder if you don't like what he did.
If he's great, he makes more money.
In government, everybody gets paid the same and it's almost impossible to fire somebody.
So even if they're great at the beginning, say when the Peace Corps began, all eager people looking to help people.
Ten years later, when nobody can be promoted or fired, that just eats away at your wish to do better.
So one of the questions folks have about libertarianism very often, this is usually the key question used to quote-unquote debunk it, is the what do you do about the folks who fall through the cracks argument.
So libertarianism is based on a certain notion that you have the capacity to reason and you have the capacity to make decisions about your own life and that you should bear the consequences of the decisions that you make in your own life.
But what about the folks who are not capable of making those decisions?
Children, people who are ill, people who are handicapped.
What do we do about those folks?
Does government have a role there or is there something else that should pick up the slack?
Something else should pick up the slack.
And it depends what you mean by what should we do.
Is we government or is we individuals?
I think we have a moral duty to help those people, both the ignorant and the mentally ill.
When government steps in, it crowds out the voluntary organizations that do that better.
Think about the Depression.
Think how much poorer America was then.
25% unemployment.
It was way back when we had less money anyway.
How many people starve?
Almost no one.
Why?
Because there were 20,000 mutual aid societies around the country, all voluntary, many of them racist.
It was Koreans helping Koreans or blacks helping blacks, whites helping whites.
But those groups knew better than government ever could who needed help and who needed a kick in the ass.
And it's just much more efficient charity.
Now, I realize it's not going to happen that we're going to get rid of all this welfare we have.
We've spent 71 trillion since it began.
And I, coming out of Princeton, I was going, oh yes, we know how to solve poverty.
My professor said, it's an outrage in this rich country that some people are poor.
But then I watched these programs fail.
They just teach people to be dependent.
And if you look at the graph, I have used this in my videos, of the war on poverty and the poverty line.
The war on poverty began and the poverty rate dropped for seven years.
And after that it's gone up and down.
Improvement stopped because the government teaches people to be dependent.
If you've got a man in the house, your check goes down.
And then, most interesting, look at the chart from before the war on poverty.
The slope of the line was about the same.
Americans were lifting themselves out of poverty.
The war on poverty, trillions of dollars, continued progress for five years and then stopped it.
So what do you make of the new kind of left argument with regard to the countries they admire?
So for a long time, for decades, the Soviet Union was a place where they were kind of interested in the experiment.
And then for a little while, they were interested in Hugo Chavez and they were interested in Cuba for a while.
But now the modern iteration of the of the socialist movement is in favor of social democracy.
So they like Norway, they like Sweden, they like the Nordic countries.
This is the one that Bernie Sanders likes to trot out all the time.
What do you make of the argument that those countries are cohesive, that they are functioning well, that they have high standards of living, and they also have massive governmental burdens that are driven by enormous regulations and tax rates?
Well, first of all, they're not really socialist.
And the Denmark prime minister went on TV to say, look, we're a market economy.
We're not socialist.
Government does not control the means of production.
And that's the most important thing.
Scandinavian countries don't even have a government minimum wage.
They do have a big welfare state, and they can afford that because they have a homogeneous culture and they have a fairly free private market to pay for it.
And the economic freedom indexes, they come out ahead of the United States.
I don't know how Bernie calls them.
Socialists.
Do they innovate?
Do they produce anything?
Is it an accident that Facebook, Google, and all these exciting wealth-creating companies, your podcasts, have come out of Silicon Valley and California, places far away from Washington, D.C.? ?
I don't think so.
Yeah, and that I think is always the big distinction that folks fail to make, that socialism freezes things in place and redistributes them, and capitalism generates new and innovative methods.
But when it comes to things like health care, where the left really is putting its heavy focus these days, what they say is, OK, well, fine.
So we sacrifice a little bit of innovation, but there's an entire group of people who have preexisting conditions and they don't have a capacity to pay for the health care that they need.
So what's the best system for providing health care if we're not going to have some sort of baseline government provided health care?
It would be presumptuous for me to say what the best system is.
But what I've learned is that the more market there is, the better.
And poor people with a pre-existing condition are not going to have a market solution.
But we have in America Medicaid for poor people, Medicare for us old people, and no hospital emergency room turns away any poor person.
We don't really have a free market system because the rest of it is paid for not by individuals, but by insurance companies or governments.
So what really works is when you go to the doctor and you say, she doctors really have to cost 200 bucks.
I'm paying for this myself.
And this is starting to happen with the health savings accounts.
Instead of just having the insurance company pay for it, they give you some money and you make some of those decisions.
And doctors often say, really?
You're paying yourself?
Like now?
I don't have to wait two months for the insurance company?
Okay, well, $100.
And then they don't even know where to put it because they haven't had a cash box for so long.
But moving toward more consumer-driven, and that means high deductibles, which nobody wants to hear about.
Everybody hates that.
That's the only answer.
Single pay in Europe, you don't pay for anything.
That's true in England.
Forget about Norway.
England, Canada, Australia.
And it's true, you don't pay.
But the National Health Service in England was created the year I was born.
And in some cases, they still use that kind of technology because innovation stops in government.
You don't get in trouble if you do what you did before.
So I'm kind of going down the litany of things that folks think government is necessary for.
One of the other aspects that folks say that government is necessary for is the public education system.
They suggest that without a public school system that children will be illiterate, that parents will not put their kids in schools, Poor parents won't be able to put their kids in places where they can get educated.
What do you make of the argument in favor of public education?
I certainly would have believed it when Horace Mann said, this is going to end crime.
We just need, we have experts.
We need to have government run this.
But it's the same problem.
Innovation stopped.
We're still teaching kids the way we taught them 100 years ago.
Kids are, boys especially, are all itchy, sitting at the desks and miserable in school.
The girls do better.
And then you look at success academies in New York, these private charter schools where the minority kids are getting top grades.
There are better ways to do it.
And there, too, the only thing that works is competition.
Attach the money to... In New York, they're spending like 15,000 per kid.
Do the math.
That's 300, 400,000 per classroom.
Think what you could do with that money.
Hire three great teachers.
Where does the money go?
Nobody knows.
It's a government monopoly.
It just disappears.
But if you had vouchers or some system that attaches the money to the kids, schools would compete to get the kids.
To get the good kids, they would shun the slow learners.
The state can set up a system where if you are a special needs child, your voucher is larger.
But that kind of competition will always do better than one size fits all government.
So in a second, I want to ask you about why libertarianism hasn't really become more popular in the United States, at least politically.
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Okay, so... Plots!
I've never heard plots.
Oh yeah, Yiddish.
Plots.
Yeah, you know, keel over.
I get it!
So, why is libertarianism not more popular?
It seems to me, again, I have heavy libertarian sympathies and leanings.
What I've always said is that I think that the future of the conservative movement is in a basic conservative-libertarian merger where conservatives acknowledge that libertarians are right about government and libertarians acknowledge that conservatives are right about the necessity of a social fabric.
Because it seems to me that one of the problems I see in talking to a lot of libertarians is there's so much focus on what the government shouldn't do that there's very little focus on what we should be as human beings Where virtue comes in, where are social institutions necessary?
There's a sort of negativism that's directed at sometimes religious institutions because so many libertarians feel that religious institutions are ignorant or promoting ignorance.
Why do you think there is a crossover between libertarianism and a certain sort of secular atheism, it seems like, in a lot of areas of the libertarian movement?
Because most of the argument is economics.
That's what it was for me.
It was my aha moment that I became a born-again free marketer.
Clearly, with life, I see how religion keeps families together and brings people together, and that that does wonderful things.
And religious people are happier.
I wish I was as religious as you are, because it brings people a lot of good stuff in life.
Why hasn't libertarianism become more popular?
Maybe because of that.
Or my basic answer is, I don't know!
It's killing me!
My wife is a leftist.
Well, it was when I married her.
Now she's moved, she would say, to the middle.
But she still wakes me up with, can you believe this?
Look at this, what the New York Times said.
What about these people?
Government has to take care of these people.
And I sort of convince her with my argument.
But the next day it happens again.
It's in certain people's women more often, in their gut, there's this feeling that government has to take care of people.
It's government's job.
And that's where I think that this is where, if the libertarian movement were to focus a little bit more on the creation of that social fabric, they would do better just in terms of the pitch.
Because the reality is that human beings exist in terms of identity, both as individuals and also as members of community.
Libertarians, seeing the government as an overarching threat, which it is, they say, well, you know, we are individuals primarily.
But that neglects the fact that we do have this gut instinct to try and help other people, and we want to get together and help other people, and so One of the things I've urged libertarians to do is reach out to religious communities and make a libertarian argument for why religious communities are necessary, why you do need those backstops, those charities, why you do need a social fabric built outside of government, because I think the picture folks get of libertarians is basically the Libertarian Party Convention, which is a bunch of people talking about legalizing pot, getting rid of seatbelt laws, and everything will be okay.
What do you think the forward-facing pitch for libertarianism should be?
Because that is, like, I saw just this morning, I saw a clip of the 2015-2016 primary debates among the Libertarian Party candidates, and Larry Elder was moderating it, and Larry was asking, you know, about seatbelt laws.
And everybody sort of solemnly proclaimed that there should be no seatbelt laws except for Gary Johnson, who said, well, maybe people should have to have a license before they drive.
Now, I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that, or it was a driver's license question, that driver's license laws are silly, and this is what tort law is for.
If you hit somebody, then you get sued, and that's just the way that it works.
But the enthusiasm in the room for get rid of driver's licenses I agree.
And I'm frankly okay with driver's licenses because you sue the person, the reckless person.
He doesn't have any money to pay.
He has no disincentive to learn how to drive.
So when you're potentially threatening a lot of other people, it's pretty amazing we allow I mean, they would never be allowed today if we were using horses still, and someone said, I have a new form of transport.
It'll be less solid waste pollution, but more air pollution.
Good trade-off.
Less stuff on the street that needs cleaning.
But people will drive them at 50 miles per hour, inches from pedestrians.
It would never be approved today.
The seatbelt laws, I think, are a more interesting case, because that's your own body.
And studies have shown that when people wear seatbelts, they drive faster.
These things have unintended consequences.
One economist made the point that the biggest car safety device would be a spike coming off the steering wheel.
It would cause you to drive more safely.
But it's my body, I should decide whether to wear a seatbelt.
It's interesting that you think that about driver's licenses.
Where do you draw the line on occupational licensing?
So you've talked about how... No, there should be none.
Even for doctors and lawyers.
People assume that if the government doesn't protect us, we're unprotected.
But if it weren't for that licensing, Consumer groups, underwriters' laboratories, Consumer Reports, somebody would set up a private testing operation.
They would rate doctors and lawyers, and you wouldn't just pick one.
You would go check the guide, and you'd know something.
Maybe this guy gets a B, but he's cheaper, and that's my choice.
But now you just assume the government is doing it.
Usually they're sleeping, and they aren't, and we're less safe.
So why do you think the Libertarian... What can be done?
Are you a Libertarian Party voter, first of all?
How do you vote?
I generally vote Libertarian Party.
I'll vote for Larry Sharp this year in New York.
He's an unusually sharp Libertarian.
And he'll lose!
Because voters are stupid or something!
I don't know why.
I mean, again, is it possible that it's just a lack of internal cohesion among Libertarians?
I mean, it's always hard to group individuals.
And any time you try to get people into one box, people tend to climb out, particularly if they're Libertarian.
Let's say you were running the Libertarian Party and you wanted to fix this because it was a source of great frustration to me during the last election cycle.
I was looking at both of these candidates and going, you've got to be kidding me.
And then I looked at the Libertarian Party and I've got Gary Johnson over there flubbing Aleppo.
I mean, can anything be done to save the Libertarian Party, or is it basically just a giant scam for the leadership to make a certain amount of money?
No, it's not a scam.
They are dedicated people who believe in this stuff and are trying.
But it's tough.
It's a two-party country.
People... We pay attention.
The people listening and watching now pay attention.
It said 1% of the people make things happen.
9% watch the Make Things Happen, and that's your audience and my audience.
And 90% of the people wake up the next day and say, what happened?
I think it's true, because people are thinking about their families, and their religion, and movies, and music, and making money, and their friends, and sports.
And they're not paying attention to politics.
Suddenly, they're asked to vote, and half those people then do vote.
They vote who?
It's Republican or Democrat.
They don't pay attention long enough to hear the libertarian argument.
So is it a better move to try and take over the Republican Party from within, as opposed to try and running a libertarian party from without, you think?
Maybe.
When I first woke up, I thought the Democrats would be more willing to embrace these ideas, because you religious conservatives, it's moral.
You can't argue with that.
And I went to a father of one of the kids at my kid's school had a radio show.
I said, he's a smart guy.
I went to Harvard.
I can convince him on this radio show about the folly of the welfare state.
I got the facts.
And that was Al Franken.
He ended up screaming at me.
And I could never make a dent with the left.
The anchorman in the hallway at ABC would turn away when he saw me.
Because after years of being a liberal basher of business, I was now defending capitalism and criticizing government.
Suddenly I was no longer objective.
And I never won another Emmy Award.
And they were angry.
People were Somebody came up to me in the street in New York and said, you John Stossel?
I hope you die soon.
Wow.
And the anger was from the left, that I was a consumer reporter criticizing government protecting people.
What I'm seeing is a big libertarian move, at least philosophically, if not politically openly, among young people.
Because there's basically a consensus that's been reached on social issues other than abortion, in which people basically say, go do what you want, nobody cares, leave us alone.
And that has extended to drugs, which I'm going to ask you about in a second, drug legalization.
Do you think that there's hope with young people?
Because the Leave Me Alone theme seems to be picking up some ground.
I mean, it's a theme that I spend an awful lot of time pushing myself whenever I go to college campuses, which is, stay out of my business, I'll stay out of yours, and, you know, you don't have to worry about my religious institution because I don't care about yours.
Just do what you want, basically, as long as it's not hitting anybody else in the face.
I think that's a resonant message with a lot of young people, but...
You know, getting bogged down in details is always a bit of a mistake.
Do you see a moving, a kind of creeping libertarianism that's rising up a little bit?
Creeping?
Yeah, that's not good enough.
And far more are showing up at Bernie rallies with their fantasies about socialism.
I want to move into the drug area for a second.
So this is obviously one of the areas of serious contention, and it's weird because it's cross-cutting.
There are some people on the right, like me, who are in favor of marijuana decriminalization.
There are some people who are still drug warriors.
On the left, you see a lot of folks who are still drug warriors, and some people who are in favor of legalization.
When should drugs be decriminalized?
When should they remain criminal, if ever?
I think they should all be criminalized today.
And there can be rules.
States can pick what the age of majority is.
Is it 16, 18, 21?
But do we own our own?
Once you're an adult, don't we own our own bodies?
And you make the marijuana point, which is easier to digest.
But I've come to think that if you own your own body, it's your choice.
And the scares about the worst of them crack.
are not accurate.
There always are going to be surges of good and bad drugs, legal and illegal.
They'll go up, people will see the harm from the bad ones, they'll go down.
The laws only make it worse by driving it underground and creating a criminal network.
It's too powerful and too rich.
So here's the libertarian counter-argument, or quasi-libertarian counter-argument, with regard to things like heroin.
This is an argument I first heard articulated by Jonah Goldberg.
The fundamental basis of libertarianism is obviously the capacity of each human being to reason.
I mean, you do stuff for Reason Magazine.
It's the idea that we all have the ability to think, make rational decisions, and then live with those rational decisions.
Drugs, at least hard drugs like heroin, rob you of that.
Like, if you're on heroin, you're not thinking, you're not capable of fully rational thought, you're not capable of making choices.
Addiction has basically taken over the rational centers of your brain.
Where are you supposed to go from there?
Do you think that there's a decent Well, if you've been robbed of your capacity for choice, yes.
on this based on the idea that once people have been robbed of their individuality and capacity to function as human beings by these drugs, that we've now moved out of the realm of it's your body, your choice?
Well, if you've been robbed of your capacity for choice, yes.
But no, because did prohibition work well?
Alcohol can rob you of your ability to make good choices.
And banning it made things worse.
Are there gradations though?
I mean alcohol, you have to imbibe an awful lot of alcohol to be robbed of your choice.
And apparently there are plenty of people who are heroin addicts in Europe who go to work.
I mean, meth is probably the worst, but I would still say, in a free country...
It ought to be your choice if you want to poison yourself.
So let's talk a little bit about the American Constitution.
So, in my view, the American Constitution is the single greatest piece of governmental literature ever written.
It's a brilliant way of attempting to balance out some checks and balances.
I know there's some libertarian skepticism, certain elements of the Constitution.
How do you feel about the system that the founders put in place?
Do you think that it was stringent enough in reducing the size and scope of government?
Is it that we've strayed from the Constitution, or is it that the faults were built in that we now have this gigantic, massive, overarching government?
I think it was pretty good, except for the lack of pollution rules and slavery.
When I read what they wrote, they were vigilant about the growth of government.
We have to guard against this.
How can we guard against this?
Because it's the natural progress of things, said Jefferson, for government to grow and liberty to yield.
And they wrote it down, but a piece of paper isn't enough to stop this trend.
Because wherever there are rulers, wherever there are Donald Trumps, people will want to say, Yeah, let's do this.
I ought to be able to.
And let's make more happen.
And it's very hard to fight that.
That's part of the thing that I found so fascinating about some of the Trumpian sentiments on the right.
So, you know, I think that Trump has governed much more conservatively than I thought he would have, you know, based on his— Or his appointees have.
Yeah, correct.
But there are a lot of Trump fans who are, in some ways, almost indistinguishable philosophically from Bernie fans.
We had on Tucker Carlson a couple of weeks ago, and Tucker was extraordinarily interventionist when it came to the economy.
He was talking about how he wanted – he actually said outright that he would ban self-driving cars, for example, because it gets rid of trucking jobs.
He's very much in favor of tariffs and all the rest of it.
Tucker, what happened?
He used to be so good on this.
Yeah, and I wonder if it's just human nature that we're fighting against.
In essence, libertarians are basically fighting against the natural drive of human beings to look for man-made solutions to problems that cannot be alleviated by man-made solutions.
Is it possible to fight human nature?
And if so… What are the sort of, let's say you're constructing an educational system for a young person, and I get this a lot, which books should people read?
What are the ideas they should engage with?
So you're talking to a kid who's five years old, or their parents, and you're trying to educate them to become a free market, free-minded individual.
What's the literature you start them on?
What's that diet look like?
Economics and One Easy Lesson by Haslip.
Atlas Shrugged is a good guy.
Give Me a Break by me!
Milton Friedman's Free to Choose book.
But, you know, most young people won't read books.
That's why I'm making videos.
You mentioned Tucker.
I just released a video on Amazon and Jeff Bezos and it was I started it with a video defending Bezos against Bernie, saying, how dare Bernie attack this man who, yes, he's the richest man in the world, but he's made us all richer by lowering prices so much the Fed even lowered its inflation rate.
And they pay vast amounts in taxes and their investors pay lots of money in taxes.
He's good for America and he's being trashed.
But I'm midway through writing this piece and Bezos caves in to the progressives and says, yeah, I'm going to raise all my workers to 15 bucks an hour, cutting off performance bonuses, stupidly perhaps.
Still, it's his company.
He can do that.
He'll find very good workers for that.
But then he goes on and says, I'm going to lobby like another craven opportunist rather than a capitalist.
I'm going to lobby government to force every company to pay $15 to get rid of the competitive advantage my competitors would have.
And since I got lots of robots replacing workers, I'm going to really crush these guys if they have to pay $15 an hour.
Capitalism's biggest enemies are often capitalists.
Yeah, and this is, I think, a great point that libertarians I wish would make more often, because the kind of pie-in-the-sky, rosy view of free markets is always that people are going to act morally within free markets.
But the truth is there are a bunch of people, as long as there's a big government capacity out there, who are going to take advantage of that.
This is why when folks say, well, big business is capitalist, like, have you been watching big business?
Have you been watching any business?
Human beings are willing to take advantage of each other, which is why you do need, and I always, I keep coming back to this, and I think that this is the, not to promote my own ideology, but I'm going to because it's my show, that you do need a tremendous focus on bringing up virtuous people in a free system if the free system is going to last, because otherwise people are just going to try and pervert The system for their own ends, which is exactly what you're talking about with Bezos.
And when people say crony capitalism, that's not crony capitalism, that's economic fascism.
It's exactly the same sort of state-sponsored monopolism that you were seeing in early, you know, post-Weimar Germany.
So it's really... I think it's necessary for libertarians, and I include myself in this number, to spend an awful lot of time teaching people that virtue is necessary.
And that's why, you know, the markets are great.
But this is where I think Adam Smith differs from the Lord Mandeville bees metaphor.
Adam Smith recognizes... I don't know the Lord... So there's a very famous... There's a tract that was written right before Adam Smith all about... I forget the name of the tract.
It was written by Mandeville and it was basically the... It's a piece of poetry.
It's like 500 lines about the economy of the bees.
And his basic idea is that economies develop because people have vices.
Private vices become public virtues.
In other words, you want to buy a nice piece of jewelry, and therefore this creates economic growth because you want something that you didn't have before.
And maybe it's coming from selfishness or greed, right?
It's sort of an objective position.
So my wanting it is a vice.
So my wanting it would be the vice in this particular scenario.
But what Adam Smith says, and he's correct, is that while that's true with regard to vices that are not inherently damaging to the system, they're vices that are inherently damaging to the system.
And so we have to teach people that freedom can only be preserved by people who actually spend an awful lot of time thinking about virtue.
Wow, that's bigger than I can digest.
Or put into one of my five-minute videos.
Yeah, well, let's talk about, for a second, the changes... It's hard for a Bezos to resist.
He's almost not doing duty to his shareholders.
When there's this monster government over here doling out... Put your headquarters here, I'll give you a tax break.
In some ways, he'd be a fool not to ask for it.
The only solution is to shrink the state.
And why did Japan and Germany do so well after World War II?
Because we bombed them to smithereens and they had to start over.
And they got rid of all the guilds and the special interests that were holding progress back.
And then they grew so fast.
It's a horribly depressing idea to say that's the only way to stop the growth of government, but Maybe it is.
I'm not advocating that.
You keep asking me, how do we convince people?
Can we teach virtue?
And I don't know that you can.
So let's talk about foreign policy because this is an area where there's wide differentiation between Sort of conservatives and libertarian positions.
Rand Paul made this most obvious in 2016 when he was seen as sort of an early frontrunner for the nomination in 2016.
And then he started focusing in sort of his father's fashion on foreign policy more than he was focusing on domestic policy.
Because when it comes to domestic stuff, Rand Paul and probably Ron Paul and I agree on 90% of things.
And when it comes to foreign policy, then we have a parting of the ways.
So where are you on foreign policy?
What do you think the role of the US government is Keep us safe and fight moral wars on rare occasions and get out as quickly as you can and don't nation-build and don't have troops in the 70 countries we have troops in now because we make more enemies than we kill.
What do you make of the argument that Basically, we are, whether we like it or not, this has been thrust upon us, that we are the most powerful country on the planet, that we have trade connections with states all over the world, that those foreign markets, in order for them to remain open, we actually do have to have a somewhat stable international system, and that the externalities of things around the world have
Pretty significant impact on America, more so than maybe we want to acknowledge, because there are just too many situations in which something bad happens and we say, OK, well, how is that possibly going to affect us?
The next thing you know, it is.
Take, for example, the situation in Syria, which really has no impact on us except for the massive migrant wave that has now swamped governments in Europe.
When I say swamps, I don't mean the Syrians are coming in and voting people out.
I mean the reaction to that has actually toppled governments in Europe and created all sorts of new issues, particularly with regard to trade, because a lot of the parties who are standing against immigration are also standing against free trade.
What do you make of that argument?
We don't have a choice, basically.
Well, we ought to decide what the mission is and make some choices.
And I don't presume to know what we should do about Syria in a lot of these hard cases, and it's not my area of specialty.
I try to stick to economics.
But policing the sea lanes.
China wants to keep them open, too, because if there isn't free flow of traffic, that hurts their people.
Europe wants to keep them open.
So does Brazil.
It doesn't need to be all up to the United States.
And how would you feel if you came home to your neighborhood drugstore and there are foreign troops speaking a foreign language?
Wearing foreign uniforms in your neighborhood, and they have some power over your cousins and uncles.
I'd be pissed off, and I would hate America for that.
And John Bolton, the fox, is a friend, and he, I assume, agrees with you, and I would argue with him on this.
The Ron Paul argument.
What about blowback?
Didn't we, when we drone And kill an alleged terrorist in Afghanistan.
Don't we make enemies of all of his cousins and little brothers?
And as technology gets better, soon they're going to put some atomic bomb in something this small.
It'll be easier to kill us with.
Isn't it better if we don't make as many enemies?
And Bolton brilliantly would answer with things like, well, when I was sitting with Nixon and when I was in the cave in this place, and I would just get lost in the fascinating story, in several shows and one long dinner, I don't think I ever got a good answer.
I mean, I still think the best answer to that is a lot of these folks want to kill us anyway.
I mean, that you drone a terrorist.
You know, there's a decent shot that that terrorist was interested in killing you and his friends were interested in killing you in the first place.
And again, I'm not an interventionist in a lot of these areas.
I was against the war in Libya, for example.
But by the same token... Interested enough to come here and do it?
I don't think so.
Well, I mean, but wasn't that what 9-11 was to a certain extent?
Because they— I mean, we weren't involved in Afghanistan before 9-11.
And they weren't from Afghanistan.
They were Saudis who were mad that American troops were all over the Middle East.
But it was directed from Afghanistan, obviously.
I mean, it was bin Laden in Afghanistan being housed by the Taliban.
Right.
And that justified our going in there to take out bin Laden and the people who directly assaulted us.
But I think they wanted to kill us because we have troops in the Middle East.
So do you think that the best approach with countries like China, for example, which is seen by a lot of folks as a real foreign policy threat, is open trade?
Do you think that economics converts these countries to better ways of life?
Or it's just, who cares?
We may as well trade with them.
I don't know.
I think it might open them up to a smarter way of life.
It said if goods cross borders, armies don't.
And you don't want to kill people who you trade with.
And in general, it improves things.
I don't think it'll work miracles.
They still may want to crush us in some other way.
But unilateral trade disarmament, and I think Trump is very wrong in his tariffs, would benefit them and us.
Well, I think that the, so the counter argument on there, on that would be that the kind of McDonald's theory of foreign policy, which is, you know, the Golden Arches theory, that countries that have McDonald's don't have wars with us, that in the lead up to World War I, there actually was significantly increased world trade, including with Germany and within Europe, and then World War I broke out, and ideology still has a tremendous role to play in human action.
And human beings are not necessarily driven purely by economic concerns.
And I think this links up with a broader critique of libertarianism that I've heard from folks in sort of mainstream conservative circles, which is libertarianism is relying on a view of human nature that is not inherently conservative.
It's relying on a view of human nature that we are essentially materialists.
Malleable.
Well, malleable and materialist.
Not only are we malleable in terms of our nature, that systems will make us better, but also we are materialist in that if we experience better economic times, then this makes us less likely to do bad things.
Actually, kind of fundamentally non-conservative in a certain way, right?
Because the linkage between poverty and crime is, to my mind, less significant than the linkage between values and crime.
And the same thing would hold true on foreign policy.
You can have rich countries that are pursuing tremendous evil against their own citizens, and you can have poor countries... Well, you can't have poor... Let's put it this way.
You can't have poor countries pursuing tremendous good for their citizens.
That doesn't really work.
But you can have rich countries that pursue tremendous evil, obviously.
Yeah, I don't claim that trade is going to solve, that making people richer will solve these problems.
Revolutions, the poor are more likely to rise up when their incomes are going up than when they're suffering in misery.
Libertarianism doesn't claim to have the answer to all these problems, but it does say our basic freedom is important, and we ought to be left alone, and part of that is freedom to trade with people, and generally that brings good things.
Okay, so...
Okay, so let's talk about trade for a second.
This has obviously become deeply controversial.
I'm a free trader.
The only time I ever think that trade should be curbed would be for actual national security reasons.
You're at war with somebody or something.
But there are a lot of folks who have been focusing in recently on the idea that the downsides of trades outweigh the upside of trade.
And they look at towns.
Orrin Cass has a new book out that is kind of along these lines.
And I was fascinated by it.
He has a chapter in his book where he basically says that we've missed the boat in the Western world in thinking that material prosperity is the goal of the economy.
Without a certain amount of job involvement or employment, material prosperity doesn't solve the problem.
What he means by that is he suggests that there are two main models that are now being pursued by people who are not libertarian.
Model number one is There are a bunch of rich people, there are a bunch of poor people who are being left behind because of advances in the economy as we move to an IQ-based economy as opposed to a back-breaking labor-based economy.
And that means those people are gonna get left behind.
What happens to all of those people?
Okay, well, we let the economy spring ahead, but we redistribute some wealth from here to there, and that sort of placates everybody.
That's theory number one.
Theory number two is that we actually put in place regulations to prevent the economy from springing ahead far enough so that those people are left behind.
So, what's your view on what we do with folks if The singularity is coming.
If we're moving toward a more service and intellect-based economy, what do we do with all the folks who could be out of a job in 10 years as automation takes over for them?
We've had more trade than ever, up to Trump, and unemployment is at a remarkably low number.
People worried when 90% of the people worked on the farms.
What are all those people going to do?
What are all the secretaries going to do if they lose their jobs or their telephone switchboard operators?
They all lost their jobs and more people got employed.
Human ingenuity is such.
The beauty of the human brain to find new things to serve people.
Now, a lot of smart Artificial intelligence people say, this time it's different.
And this time they're all, we need a guaranteed basic income, which I think would be a terrible thing because we get purpose and work.
But, I mean, until that happens, to try to manipulate the economy to prevent growth, I just think is cruel.
Okay, so let's talk for a second about the technology companies.
So you mentioned earlier Amazon.
There's been a lot of talk in right-wing circles recently, and left-wing circles always, because there's always talk in left-wing circles about regulation.
They talk more.
They write more.
That's why they're all over the media.
About regulating companies like Google and Facebook, these kind of massive companies that have all sorts of information on us that we've voluntarily given them, but now they have, you know, in the view of some sort of a monopoly on this.
What do you make of the argument in favor of regulation of companies like Google or Facebook and their manipulation of informational access?
Bad idea, because whoever does the regulation will make things worse.
And we voluntarily gave them that information.
They have it.
They sell it.
People steal it.
Except for identity theft.
So what?
I've lost my privacy.
I already have enough enemies in New York as a man from the left who's moved to Libertarian that I figure there's some 18-year-old kid in the apartment next door who's stealing my emails anyway.
The idea that the government is going to make that better is terrifying.
Also, if it gets really bad, if Google starts doing horrible stuff, and look, I tried when they fired James Damore for saying something reasonable about gender differences.
I said, screw them, I'm going to go to Bing and I'm not going to use, I'm going to be a consumer reacting.
I couldn't even do it.
So they're too big.
Government has no way to make it better.
And if they get horrible, government does have the guns.
And in the end, government could always step in.
Okay, so one of the other areas where folks talk about kind of global regulation, you mentioned it in the context of the environment, is in the area of global warming.
So people are deeply concerned over the climate changing.
It seems that the vast majority of scientists agree that the climate is growing warmer, to what extent we still don't know.
And the vast majority also agree that whatever warming has occurred over the past century or so is at least majority attributable to human activity.
How worried are you about global warming?
What role does government have in regulating environmental emissions, for example, in this particular area?
Because libertarians have basically been called skeptics and climate deniers because of their hands-off approach.
Where are you on this?
Well, I don't see how you can deny a climate because we have climate and climate changes and it is getting warmer, has been getting warmer.
I don't agree that it's so clear that man does most of it.
Certainly man does some of it, but I don't think there's necessarily agreement on that.
But the next two steps are the important ones.
Will it be a disaster?
And can we do anything about it?
So, the disaster part.
I mean, we have disasters.
We have a million people dying of malaria and dysentery in the world.
We have problems where economic growth would really help.
And stifling that in the name of this possible problem.
And there are smart people who say, it may be good.
You'll grow more stuff in Canada.
There are fewer deaths in heat waves than in cold waves.
We can adjust.
We can pull back from the oceans if it keeps warming.
There may be natural things.
More warm water means more evaporation, means more clouds.
Maybe this will stop naturally.
We don't really know how big a crisis it is.
But certainly, no crisis is big enough to waste money doing nothing.
And that's what the billions of dollars we're spending now is doing.
Nothing.
The earth won't notice.
It's arrogant for man to think that by buying a Prius, as they're driving all outside your studio here, that that's going to make any difference.
I mean, even if China and India weren't continuing to build coal plants, with the technology we have now, it's not going to help.
But if we don't bankrupt ourselves on stupid mandates for wind power and nonsense like that, in 10 years we'll be much richer.
And then if we know more about the problem, then maybe we can do something about it.
Okay, so, John, I do have one final question for you.
I want to ask you why you don't just run for president on the Libertarian ticket.
But if you actually like to hear the answer, you're going to have to subscribe.
To subscribe, all you have to do is head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, and then you'll be able to hear the end of our conversation there.
So, John Stossel, thanks so much for coming in.
Really appreciate it.
Go check your stuff out at Stossel TV, where we have a new video coming out every week, correct?
Every week, yes.
Libertarian videos, short enough not to be boring.
Well, appreciate it.
Thanks so much for stopping by.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.
And title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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