The Culture War #68 Leftist Libertarian Party Nominee REJECTED By 3 State Parties w/Caryn Ann Harlos, Mike Rectenwald, Jeremy Kauffman
Host:
Tim Pool
Guests:
Caryn Ann Harlos @carynannharlos (X) | @PinkFlameofLiberty
Michael Rectenwald @RecTheRegime (everywhere) | Mrectenwald.Substack.com
Jeremy Kauffman @jeremykauffman (X)
Producers:
Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X)
Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X)
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The third state, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, announced that they would be rejecting Chase Oliver as their nominee.
He's still gonna be on the ballot, so we'll get into the nitty-gritty details of what that means.
But in the past couple of weeks, there's been a big controversy over the Libertarian Party's chosen nominee because he's viewed as a leftist who supports many woke ideas and ideologies.
We invited Chase Oliver, the nominee, to be on this show this morning, and we didn't get any word back from them for a couple weeks.
And at the very last minute, my understanding is they declined to be here to discuss and debate their ideas.
So, look.
This is the third biggest political party and I think with the expansion, with the popularity of some of the more prominent Libertarian Party members throughout the past couple of years, there was a real opportunity for the LP to hit some of its highest polling and percentage numbers in this election than ever before and now it will likely be the lowest.
Donald Trump showed up to speak at the Libertarian Party Convention.
He was booed, he was sometimes cheered, but now many members of the LP are saying they are going to be voting for Donald Trump because the nominee is so bad.
So we're going to break this down, but we will get into the finer points of what the Libertarian Party is usually about, what the individuals here think about it, because certainly I think there's going to be some very serious disagreements with Donald Trump, but then the fact that some people would be willing to vote for him over this guy Chase Oliver is very interesting.
And then many have said, The true winner of the Libertarian Party Convention as nominee was Donald Trump, because even though he never filed the paperwork to actually win the nomination, he's actually won over a large percentage of the Ron Paul libertarian type.
So, we've got a handful of people joining us today.
You want to go first, Jeremy?
unidentified
Sure.
I'm Jeremy Kaufman from New Hampshire, which just rejected Chase Oliver.
There's something about Leftist psychology that seems to, some aspect of them, get off on dressing up as something that they're not and pretending that they're something that they're not.
And I think that's what's going on here.
I think that's why Chase Oliver isn't interested in sitting down.
I don't think, I think he is not a libertarian.
I think he is a liar.
I think he is a subversive person who is enjoying the fact that he has pulled one over the libertarian party.
And I do think that leaves you no choice other than to vote for Trump.
I'm the National Secretary of the Libertarian Party.
I'll be going on my fourth term.
I think somehow here I've turned out to be the loyal opposition encounter to the last two speakers, but obviously have my own opinions and would just like to let your listeners know don't let the pink hair fool you.
The dye has seeped in a little bit, but I am not a progressive woke barking moon bat.
Well, I don't know if I'll have the opportunity to because I live in Colorado and the Colorado Libertarian Party so far has stated that they will not be placing Chase on the ballot.
But he's on the ballot.
Are you going to vote for him?
If he's on the ballot, I'm definitely going to vote for him because third party politics do not work the same as duopoly politics.
When you vote for third party politics, you are voting for the very existence of the party.
I always vote Libertarian.
Libertarian, down the line, always.
And I would encourage anyone who believes that we need other voices in.
I'm going to be realistic and some LP people will hate me for saying this.
We are not going to win.
But the fact is, we might win for your children.
And if you destroy the party by not voting for our candidate because you don't like certain aspects, there might not be a party next time to be there for your children.
Third party politics are different.
You have to put aside any dislike that you might have for some policies.
I mean Phil's here too, I don't know.
You all know me, it's still the same OG.
for our ticket, whether they like the ticket or not, if they believe that there needs to be a libertarian party.
Look, the fact of the matter is, I mean, not that Carrie Ann, not that you're wrong.
It's just that in for me personally, I am like a liberty guy first.
So I live in New Hampshire, most of you guys know my house is in New Hampshire, I got a place down here.
And I moved to New Hampshire before I knew that there was a Free State Project.
And I moved specifically for the same reasons that the Free State Project was created.
I moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire because I didn't like the laws en masse, and it wasn't a situation where I felt like I was free.
I felt like the state was starting to encroach, so I was like, well, I guess I gotta up and move.
I think the important thing, at least for me personally, I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally, the important thing is who is going to do the most to advance liberty, right?
I appreciate the Libertarian Party and I love all you guys, but the party to me doesn't matter.
Liberty matters, right?
If this time voting for Donald Trump means that we're going to have a more or have a better likelihood of libertarian policies, then I'm going to vote for Donald Trump.
Because even though Chase, even say Chase would be a more libertarian candidate, he has no chance of winning.
So just like Carrie Ann said, if you're voting because you want to make sure that there's a third party, more power to you.
I'm not hating on the idea at all.
But for me, the results are what matter.
Well, we've got to get Libertarians running as Republicans, though, right?
You've got Lily Tang Williams right here.
Lily Tang Williams was from Colorado.
She ran in the Libertarian Party of Colorado.
I'm not booing Lily, by the way.
No one knew who she was.
She moved to New Hampshire.
She's now leading Candidate for a congressional office under the Republican Party.
She has a huge following.
She goes on Tucker Carlson and this show all the time.
We have a hundred libertarians elected to the statehouse in New Hampshire.
We have a dozen people who are as radical as Ron Paul or more.
No one knows who they are and more people need to know who Travis Corcoran and Tom Mannion and Keith Ammon are.
I don't know.
If they don't know who they are, they can't stop them.
Right.
And so maybe, maybe stay under the radar.
Come to New Hampshire.
We have people, we got, we got at least like a dozen people, maybe as many as 50 people running as Democrats this year.
Well, freestaters, any way we can get it.
We got people underwater.
We got people in the AG office now.
We got people as cops.
We've got people running local libraries.
Take over like the woke.
This is how libertarians have got to do it.
Just quietly be pro-liberty.
Go and live your life like a normal person and then quietly be very pro-liberty.
Well, a couple people have got to do the gay pride thing like me.
That's what I do.
Look, the Libertarian Party is merely a vehicle to expand liberty, to broaden the scope of liberty, and I agree with that.
And I do think that it is necessary to have an integral, principled party that is a lightning rod for liberty.
So I do agree with Karen Ann that we must keep the Libertarian Party alive.
We don't need to really resuscitate it.
There are a lot of things about what happened in the convention that were very positive, actually.
But on the other hand, I will say that the Libertarian Party is merely a means to an end.
It is not the end in itself.
OK, listen, I'm going to interrupt here.
So, Jeremy, I know you're all about New Hampshire and you all have your own.
It's very unique there.
OK, so I'm speaking to everyone who's not in New Hampshire, perhaps, because what you're doing in New Hampshire is is a bit different.
So when you're talking infiltrate the Republicans and this and this, all I keep What I keep hearing is, I don't want any of those to exist.
Like, I don't want any of those to exist at all.
And all I see from my perspective, while this might not be going on in New Hampshire, while you might be saying, oh, we're getting pro-liberty candidates elected in New Hampshire under the Republican label, all I see throughout the country is that the Republicans are bending the Libertarians over the table without lube and screwing us out of ballot access.
So I do not want to support even a pro-liberty candidate in the Republican Party who are then tweeting in Texas that you guys have failed at your role at kicking libertarians off the ballot.
I will never ever support a Republican for that reason because their party is corrupt to the core and I will not give a second of attention to that party.
I just want to pull this image real quick if you could grab this one.
Everybody knows this image.
It's an old meme, but it checks out.
Libertarian Ideas and Libertarian Candidates.
For those that are just listening, you're not watching.
Libertarian Ideas is this gorgeous silver fox with red on his face, and Libertarian Candidates is this disgusting-looking, dirty, Muppet-like thing.
Why is this meme funny?
unidentified
It's funny because it's true.
I've been a candidate, so it's not always true.
But the reason that it's true is because of the system that we have.
The people that are charismatic, that are likely to make an impact, They're picked up long by one of the two big power brokers, whether it be Democrats or Republicans, they get picked up and they're put into the machine.
Even if you're a pro-liberty candidate or a libertarian candidate, if you are very charismatic and you're making inroads with people, the Republicans or the Democrats are going to notice and they're going to say, hey, we can we can work with you on these things and they're going to bring you into the existing structure.
People wonder why it is non-profits pay their executive directors millions of dollars.
If you're a non-profit, shouldn't your executive director be making a small amount of money for the betterment of your cause?
No.
Because if you're a non-profit, and you're expecting someone to work a CEO-level job, and they can go to a corporation that's going to pay them $10 million a year, they're not going to come and work for your non-profit, and you will get failed leadership.
So what Phil is saying is basically the Libertarians aren't offering, and it's a political issue, they're not offering a path towards success and expansion for their candidates the way the Democrats and the Republicans are.
unidentified
Well they can't.
Libertarians are very delusional about why other people aren't Libertarians.
And the truthful answer here is people have different Moral tastes and different moral preferences.
So actually I will disagree a little bit with the left half of that image.
There are people who sincerely understand libertarian ideas and they hate them and they will never be persuaded of them.
And so I think the idea that libertarian ideas are great if only everyone could understand them, I actually think that's a bit of a cope from libertarians.
I think libertarians are a bit closer to gay men who want to persuade everyone that having sex with men is great.
And it's like some people are like, well, Well, having sex with men is kind of great.
People are like, I tried it!
Even libertarians, you can see that at times they're implicitly uncomfortable with acknowledging the outcomes of some of their claims.
The one that really, I guess, got under the skin of Chase Oliver's supporters is that he is pro-vaccine mandate.
What does that mean?
So, Chase Oliver has a tweet where he said he opposes the government forcing people to get vaccinated, but he thinks private businesses can do that.
See, that's a vaccine mandate.
It's just whether it's coming from private power structures.
This is important, real quick.
Most of the mandates that we saw during the lockdown were private.
It was large corporations with 5,000 locations and 100,000 employees and they're saying you have to get vaccinated if you want to work here.
It was private venues, music venues for instance, that were only owned by like two or three guys or whatever and they said if your band wants a player you have to be vaccinated.
This created a chain-link fence over the country.
I'm not a libertarian and so I don't know what your guys' thoughts are but this is why I think the government should be able to restrict infringements of our liberties.
unidentified
Yeah, this is one of the things that I ran on, in fact, and none of the other candidates ever addressed this.
These companies are not purely private enterprises.
They're extensions of the state.
And so they're going to enforce the state narratives and things like that.
This is why I talked about a regime rather than just the government.
There's more to the state than the government.
It has appendages that it uses.
To enforce its laws, its rules, its mandates, and so forth.
And that's why I said that none of these other candidates had the slightest idea about what I was talking about.
They don't understand the nature of the beast.
The mandate thing is a very interesting thing, because I do understand why Chase's supporters are saying he wasn't enforcing government mandates.
I think there's this narrative in the Libertarian Party that we need to do some coping with, and that's allegedly that libertarianism is culturally neutral.
And as I was saying out in the green room, in some kind of like sterile Petri dish, that is true.
But in the real world, that's not true.
So when you start saying things like you're having a socially distanced Thanksgiving, that's not culturally neutral.
You are promoting some kind of cultural narrative that then filters down into these allegedly capitalists, but they're not, corporations that then put in these mandates.
So if you go in this roundabout way, I hear what you're saying.
But most libertarians will vary, I think, And I'm autistic, by the way, so I have autistic privilege, are very autistically focused on, oh, it just wasn't the government.
It's very narrow.
I call it narrow libertarianism.
And I think it's a mistake.
I think that, you know, the Libertarian Party and libertarians have to understand You've got to maintain private property absolutism, so it gets very conditional in terms of what you're talking about here.
I think actually Karen gets to the heart of it, which is that the cultural issues are intertangled with the private property issues, and so you see all of these people who are giving what feel like moral defenses, Of absolutely morally abhorrent behavior, even if this behavior is at least sometimes consistent with private property rights.
And so what we really need to be rejecting is the moral approval.
That I think is where we can universally agree that this is not okay.
Real quick, and to shout out Ron Paul, because I do like this idea, when he was talking about abortion he said it should not be illegal, it should be unthinkable.
I think the problem is that the Libertarian Party, for the most part, is a collective of people who have an...
Who have a singular thing they want to do that's illegal.
So there's a guy who's like, I just want to smoke pot!
So he joins the Libertarian Party.
There's another guy who's like, I want to print my own money!
And then he joins the Libertarian Party and they don't agree with each other.
unidentified
Every single person's political preferences are just a way to raise the people that they like in status and lower the people that they dislike in status.
And this just explains every single person's politics.
So yeah, I'm a Libertarian because I'm like a hardcore right-wing radical capitalist that wants like, Intense competition between corporations and like people to go to the moon.
Oh God, you used the corporation word and you promised- We're not going to do that one.
I'm a little bit teary because I just want to be left alone.
Yeah, exactly.
There's different types.
Corporations are state entities.
They're created by the state.
See, I'm agreeing with you.
We're now ganging up on you and the corporations.
This ends up being a semantic argument.
What I mean is groups of people working together to achieve impossible things is something that's very appealing to me and I see government as substantially inhibiting that.
I find it kind of silly that someone's going to come in and sign a contract.
It's implicit.
But it's not even that.
I mean, if there was a big piece of contract on a window and I walked in, no judge is going to be like, that's legally enforceable.
So I think the idea of corporations as isolating entities for a specific purpose and limiting liability is a good thing.
unidentified
You end up with the same thing.
You already do have the very long thing already exists.
You just didn't get to agree to it.
So all you're doing is making the agreement to the very long thing exist.
There's no avoiding the very long thing.
But so then you're agreeing there should be a law that basically limits the liability from corporations to... No, I think you want to make private property as locally owned as possible.
That's your atom.
You build up from there via contract.
And I am doing what Aaron McIntyre calls the libertarian atheist thing of recreating...
- You know, everything from its smallest atoms, but yeah.
Like that's what you wanna do.
It's private property as local as possible.
You do end up building much larger structures out of these atoms.
I think you end up being able to recreate large corporations from these atoms. - The idea that some people have that everything large is bad, there is a danger with large things because of the power that they have.
When big things move and big things move in the world, there are massive repercussions just because of the size.
But that doesn't mean everything big is bad.
There are things that we need that need to be scalable because there are things that are going to affect larger portions of the population.
Example.
So, there's nothing wrong with a large company that's building skyscrapers.
Building a skyscraper is a big job.
It's going to take a big company.
You're going to have to finances, you're going to have to have all kinds of work, you're going to have to have all this stuff.
And people will look at a company that's a construction company or, so, and this is, so the name is going to set everybody on edge.
Halliburton.
Right?
Halliburton's a massive company.
But they go and they build, like, infrastructure for state-level, they build state-level infrastructure.
In countries which we've blown up, yeah.
Not all the time.
No, see, now you're distracted.
Now you're totally derailing it.
That's totally a bad, that's a crap thing to do.
Because the point that I'm making is that things that get big are not inherently bad.
And when you tie it to, oh, it's large and it has, the only reason I use that, the only The reason that I brought up that as an example is because people understand the size and because of the work that it did.
As in, infrastructure work.
I'm not saying that it's like, oh, just because I brought up Halliburton doesn't mean that I'm endorsing it.
And I can say the fire department keeps me safe from my buildings burning down and the police department keeps me safe from the guys trying to break in.
unidentified
Local government does tend to be more effective.
The larger it gets, the less effective it gets.
If you look at how effective your municipalities are, they actually tend to be... The schools suck, but your police department's not wasting tons of money.
I am so anti-war and I am so offended by this government and Ukraine spending and all that stuff, so I had any opportunity to rip on the US government for wasting our money on that stuff?
unidentified
I mean, hate the 10-20% that suck.
Hate the 10-20% of corporations or rich people or whatever that take advantage of government, that lobby, like hate those.
Corporations and government are so deeply entrenched that they're the same thing.
And let me explain.
So why do we get mandates?
Why do we get vaccine mandates?
I'll tell you this story.
I say, I want to put on an event.
Timcast IRL, we want to do a live event.
I'm pro 2A.
If you want to show up to my event and you want to be armed, go ahead and do it.
That's Second Amendment.
If I have concerns about appearing on stage in front of people who might want to shoot me, that's my choice to make.
I should not strip away someone else's right to keep and bear arms and defend themselves, because I'm scared of a random needle in a haystack.
Not my choice, because of the government.
What happens is, and it's a confluence of things, so security company has to be insured and bonded.
They cannot allow guns into events they secure.
Some might do this, depending on how you hire them.
Bank will not lend to buy property unless you have insurance.
Insurance company will not insure you unless you bar guns from your property.
You have a confluence of factors, many of which are stemming from government requirements on things like insurance, stopping you from being able to exercise your rights and your freedoms.
But government is meaning, it's confidence in a system.
If you say, like, if you woke up tomorrow and there was no government anywhere, a group of people would get together, take guns, and start robbing people, and they would call themselves The Freedom Faction, Control Faction, and then people become loyal to them.
And there'd be a second-in-command and a third-in-command and they'd grow large and they'd have 10,000 members.
I know you get into a million and one arguments over the East India Trading Company because people say, oh, but it's sanctioned by the Crown or whatever.
Either way, it's a corporation that was colonizing.
It was a massive multinational corporation that was unto itself.
That, sure, it had protections from the British Crown because the Crown benefited from it.
They're going to be operating in different countries and different cities.
And it's not a question of Do you need limited liability?
It's that you have ZERO protections under a mafia control system.
unidentified
Right, we're already living in anarcho-capitalism.
We're already there.
Act.
Look, I mean, one of the things that Karine said, I was thinking, as soon as you brought up the, I forget what it was that you mentioned, but it spawned the idea, do you think that if we can't roll back the government enough to feel confident that the state isn't going to make everything, you know, somehow, get his fingers into something, into everything somehow, do you think that there would be an effect by
Rolling back the laws that allow for such a litigious society Do you think that those kind of things will help because right now what you're doing is you give people the option to involve the state and they Absolutely jump at it so they can hurt people and that's people do it all the time I'm gonna sue you not because they really have been injured but because they want to hurt someone if we could manage to roll back that
Impulse, whether it be making people have to pay to lose a suit or whatever, do you think that that would have an effect?
Because I personally think that a significant part of our problem is that people are so inclined to go to the state for help.
Not just the state!
You're not going to like what I'm going to have to say because I'm a bit of a collapsitarian myself.
The fact is we have this chessboard and you can't move one pawn without affecting another one and you're trying to untangle the Gordian Knot.
That is just going to entrap you further when I kind of think the whole chessboard just needs to be wiped clean and we need to start again.
I actually don't believe And limiting people's litigation possibilities, because that's the only justice some people have.
But I do agree with you, and some states have, I'm a paralegal if you didn't know, that if you start a suit and you lose, you pay the cost.
Just to disincentivize.
I'm for revolutionary ends via marginal means, is sort of the way that I think about it.
So, you know, you want to begin with that end in mind, you want to have a very, I would like things to be different in many ways, but you have to find ways of achieving that with marginality that is you yeah i completely agree i was having this conversation with dave smith because we were talking about donald trump and dave is very critical about a lot of donald trump's foreign policy and my response is i will accept all of your criticisms of donald trump's foreign policy and then i'll counter he tried to bring peace to the korean peninsula he crossed into the dmz
he was trying to make peace agreements in the middle east whether you like them or not he set a deadline for withdrawing the troops out of afghanistan he tried getting our troops out of syria it's the first president in my lifetime i'm 38 so i don't know about you guys in my lifetime to actually actively reverse the policies of american expansionism and hegemonic power i I vote for that.
Because it is the first time.
unidentified
Meanwhile, while saying he thinks Israel needs to, you know, come back and be a major... Apply the marginality argument to the three choices.
Which one do you want to help at the margin?
Don't even need to debunk Biden.
I assume that doesn't need to be done.
I think we've already agreed upon that right there.
Do I want to back like the gay race communist faction of the Libertarian Party?
Do I want to help them or do I want to marginally help a guy offering?
You promised me that you were going to endorse Biden this show.
Oh, that's right.
I mean, so listen.
I've had some incontinence in my family, not personally.
And so I just think that-- - Not personally. - I just think that-- - Me thinks he does contest. - It's getting clipped no matter what.
Did you hear about my weekend last weekend or something?
Look, okay, statistics say that every man... I just think it's wrong to dismiss someone out of hand because they've pooped their pants.
I think it's bigoted, okay?
Out of hand, that's it.
Just because they pooped their pants once and wander off a stage, that's enough to discredit someone?
If everyone in this world were of the same moral fortitude as Seamus Coghlan of Freedom Tune, shout out Seamus, you'd need no police, you'd need no government, no standing armies.
Would be a paradise.
unidentified
Why did the Constitution fail?
I think this is a very important question.
Why did all this stuff fail?
So many libertarians and other people are holding on this worship of the written word, and if they get the written words right, then everything will work.
The more cultures fragment, the more morals diverge, then the more heavy authoritarian infrastructure is required to stabilize factions that despise each other.
unidentified
So therefore success requires, what is your selection mechanism for people?
This is what you have to think from first.
What are we, an eugenics here?
I'm a eugenicist.
I had children with someone because I believe that she is better than average.
I don't mate at random.
I don't mate at random, so therefore I'm a eugenicist.
You would have to mate at random to not be a eugenicist.
Right now, a big trend is Hollywood movies, shows advocating people terminate their children or sterilize their children.
And there's two principal factions.
It seems like there's a libertarian right and MAGA overlap in certain areas where not every, I would say this, most libertarians I know are very wired in.
That's unfortunate, they're too plugged in.
I would say a good portion of the MAGA people are not massively plugged in.
They have a general understanding that these policies over here didn't work and we like this guy.
But then there are a lot of Trump supporters, especially the influential ones, who are very well read and know what's going on.
So when you take these two factions, and then you have this large tree of quote-unquote far-right, which is everyone who's not a Democrat, and they're all basically saying, having kids is great, and we should protect our children.
Then the other faction is saying, you can get an abortion at nine months.
That's the policy you're talking about.
unidentified
Sorts itself out.
And the state is actually, the state's behind it.
The state wants you, it wants to abolish the family, because it looks at the family as the final bastion.
I'm a public choice kind of libertarian.
To who?
I think we need to think more atomistically in why that kind of thing is happening.
I'm not saying it's not, but who's doing it and why?
The reason I'm such a big advocate for chickens is that my handlers are trying to encourage me to get more surveillance drones in the homes of every MAGA American.
unidentified
It's a plan.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
Have you ever thought of breeding your chickens to try to get them more dinosaur-like over time?
Like just selective, you know, try to pick the most- I thought about it, but I threw lizards at it.
But I think that the chicken cycle is, it might be like eight months?
A generation?
I could be wrong.
It's been a long time.
We do have chickens and they make more of themselves.
But you do this, not to be more dinosaur-like, but you put a rooster in there who's a good rooster with the chicks and then the chicks have babies that are like the rooster and the chicks and then there you go.
unidentified
And how did we get here?
Let's get more granular about what Jeremy was asking.
He was asking, who is this state?
And I would say it is... The state is a psychopath magnet, I would say.
It attracts people who want to have power over others and control them.
And likewise, it seeks to grow.
Those people seek to grow that state power.
So they'll enact laws that actually decrease the autonomy and the And the freedom of individuals.
I think that I'm on Jeremy's tip a little bit here, because he's talking about how the state is, or at least in my opinion, the state is really your neighbors.
There's so many people that will use the state against you, whether it be calling the HOA, well HOA is not state, but whether it be calling the town because they don't like that you're painting your garage green or whatever.
The problem is less this big, far away government, and it's more the people that live in America, the people that want the state, that want to use the state against you.
And it's really reminiscent of, not to get too movie or whatever, but it's really reminiscent of the way they describe people in the Matrix, right?
If they're in the Matrix, they're plugged in, and you can't convince them.
And that's really the way that most Americans are.
Automatically.
Well, the government's good.
Well, if we want something, what do we do?
We tell the government to do it.
And can the government do it?
Of course the government can do it.
What?
Why do you think that?
There's no reason to think that the government can automatically do everything, but that's the way people behave.
To tie it to some of the stuff about the cheering on of abortion or the trans stuff or all these weird cultural issues, I'm a big fan of this economist, Robin Hanson, and he talks about this idea of cultural drift, that basically we're in these mimetic environments that are so different from where we were ancestrally that this is a kind of unprecedented era of memes competing with that basically we're in these mimetic environments that are so different from And memes are supposed to be adaptive.
They're supposed to help us evolutionarily, right?
Religion is generally an adaptive set of memes.
It It helps us.
And so, you know, but now memes are competing via social media and in all of these new ways, and this is a sort of unprecedented mimetic environment, and that this is part of, and obviously this gets intertangled with government because the people in government adopt the memes, people in government enact the memes, they propagate them, so they are entangled, but the, but I think a lot of it is separate, you know, like I think if you look at, say, here's an actual claim to test this kind of thing, like if I look at The transgender issue.
Government, obviously, is part of this, but I don't see it as the source of it.
I see it as something that's related to it, but it's in the culture.
It's not flowing from government to me.
But they adopt it.
They're 40% of the economy.
That's the same principle, you know, that politics is downstream from culture.
But they do adopt it, and they have the power to actually enforce things.
That's the difference.
I don't think it's an enforcement thing.
I think it's an influence thing, and the influence is much, much more important.
Well, when you're paying people to have abortions, or you're paying for abortions, you're paying for transgender surgery, this is, of course... Here's an example.
Take this fight over these books in school libraries, right?
In my view, Very few kids are actually getting these ideas from books in school libraries.
Like, come on, that is not where kids are getting their ideas from.
You were all a kid once.
That's not where you were getting your ideas from.
At the same time, the purpose of the fight over the books in the school libraries is to change the culture, is to signal that these ideas are bad and are wrong.
And so there's still value in fighting over the book being in the school, but it's to have the cultural point be fought over, not actually the book being in the school.
The fight is not so much about the books, it's about the curriculum.
And so, many people that we've had on, Tim Castile for instance, are not saying, this book should not be here, they're saying, as an aside to the argument that teachers should not teach kids about this, these books are examples of when they do, and this should not be allowed.
If you're talking about this, like, Post-government free market society where it's mostly smaller businesses and local entities and they can compete.
And one guy says, hey, I just realized all these companies are forcing their employees.
Nobody wants to work there so I can get them at a discount rate.
unidentified
Fine, right now.
If I had an elderly person in elderly care in the summer of 2020, when COVID was potentially going through nursing homes or already was, I would have absolutely paid extra money to have treatment from nurses who had undergone undergone variolation.
That is, who had been purposely infected and were now immune from the disease.
So, for instance, do you think if there is a medical treatment that would save the life of a child, and the parents refuse to give it to their child, the government should seize the kids from the parent?
Let me try and rephrase it.
It seems a little complicated.
A kid has some medical diagnosis.
It is largely believed that it will be resulting in death.
The parents say the prescribed treatment we do not want.
Should the government intervene and take the children away from the parent?
unidentified
I place a big moral distinction between whether I'm enforcing my morals sort of in my community versus at the state and national level.
So what level am I asking, am I answering these questions?
There's a child, seven years old, with a malignant tumor that can be easily removed.
Easily removed.
And with 100% success rate, the doctor says, look, if it's left to grow, the kid will die in six months, we can remove it right now, and the kid with 100% chance and 95%, we believe there'll be no complications, and the parents say, no, you're a crackpot, and we're gonna worship a Moloch, and pray that the tumor goes away.
You'd be okay with the police coming in, taking that kid from the parents, and saying, we're gonna remove this tumor.
That's fine, that's fine, but so if you saw the cops come up and say, if you were standing by and the cop said, this kid's got a malignant tumor, you can see it right there, it's on his chest, we're just gonna have it removed, the kid's gonna be okay, these parents, this kid's gonna die.
You'd say, well, okay, I guess, right?
You tolerate, you accept local police taking a child to give them a very easy medical procedure to save their life.
unidentified
We can, I can come up with... Child abuse is generally going to be policed in all cases.
In the extreme cases of what we would want to call medical malpractice or parents doing things that are very clearly hurting their children, we can come up with all kinds of hypotheticals here.
The point is, I am trying to explain to you morals versus principles.
The principle is we either do or do not allow the state to take children from parents who disagree with medical treatments.
But there is no one or the other.
In some circumstances, we draw a moral line.
You're not cutting off that kid's testicles no matter what a doctor says.
In another instance, we say, yes, we're getting the tumor roof based on our view.
unidentified
It's a moral rather than a principle stance.
What I'm saying is I think that that's false.
I think that you literally can't craft a principle that people will consistently interpret when they're 98% in the two different Camps.
Like, in other words, you can, no matter how strict you try to write down your principle of, you can't do child abuse, and child- like, you could write a law that said- I get it, but- No, let me give you my moment over there.
You could write a law that said, it is absolutely, categorically child abuse to cut off a child's penis.
And if 99% of people believed that it was moral to transgender their children, they'd just go, well, it's not a penis.
Or they'd go, that's not a child.
Or they'd interpret the principle in some other way.
- The distinction about whether things are, whether you're agreeing to these kinds of things is whether they're-- - People are gonna interpret a principle based on morals. - I was trying to make that point as well.
I'm saying private entities... That's a principle you can have.
And the government together, neither, or individually, should be allowed to mandate private individuals undergo medical treatments.
In exchange for employment.
And the exception to that is, unless said medical treatment is a specific requirement for the job, for which vaccine mandates are not.
unidentified
I mean, this is an example of like a motive conjugation where we're both just like baking our conclusions into the language.
So, you know, the trans example is to one group, it's chemical castration, and to the other group, it's gender affirming care.
Like, we're baking our conclusions into the way that we talk about it as being sort of, you know, voluntary versus And that's exactly what Chase Oliver did in the entire campaign.
That's exactly what he did.
Stating what seems to be on a prima facie libertarian principles, but baked into it was a kind of coded language that implied a certain moral stance.
For example, that he suggested that we want the state Not to have anything to do with how you raise your children.
Code 4, we want you to be allowed to have your child, you know, have chemical castration.
I will clarify too, his position is no surgery, but yes.
unidentified
Chemical castration.
But that makes no, as Liz Wolf from Reason correctly did, There's no distinction.
There isn't a distinction.
If you're going to permanently medically alter somebody, but you're just doing it through chemicals rather than through surgery, I do not think there's a distinction.
But here's where this gets to, that sort of unifies all this, because it's something that the Libertarian Party is doing and it's the same as all this discussion is, it's great to talk about principles, oh we all like freedom, we're all against child abuse, we're talking these abstract language, but where the rubber meets the road is, what do you mean by those things?
In software, I would call it the unit test.
What's child abuse?
That's why he's saying there's a moral issue.
I think there's room for advancement.
We can talk about our principles, but if we don't pair that with, well, what does that mean?
Then all the principles are doing is letting us pretend we agree, but it's fake.
And this is what all this Libertarian Party fighting is highlighting, is like, we wrote this statement of principles, like, oh, we all agree, but then we completely disagree about what they mean.
And that's the conflict that we see, and that's why When we go back to the argument about businesses and vaccine mandates, I actually think, my view is this, if there's one thing government should do, it's to protect the liberties of individuals at the bare minimum, preserving life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
If a network of private entities, for some reason or other, all start requiring a medical treatment, I believe it is the purpose of the state to say, this has to stop, because you are infringing on the liberties of the individual.
unidentified
I think it's very difficult for a democracy to produce those outcomes, similar to the fact that, you know, for example, anti-discrimination law was mostly worthless because 50% of people already didn't want discrimination.
So, you know, generally, by the time the government is capable of producing laws to protect minorities, it was unnecessary because there was already...
Let's, if we look at what happened with vaccine, like vaccine mandates did not work, right?
They were, the government did push them.
I agree with this completely, very wrong.
Yes.
The free market is what rejected that.
The free market is what rejected vaccine mandates.
There were enough people who said, I'm not going to tolerate this.
I'm not going to go into stores that do it.
I'm going to fight it.
I will go in unmasked.
I will be a jerk.
I don't think that's true.
Vaccine mandates, mostly, there was a brief period where they were happening for events.
National divorce means civil war means World War III.
unidentified
Yeah.
It doesn't have to.
Do I think it's likely?
Absolutely.
I'm not stupid.
It's not about what Americans are going to do.
It's about what the rest of the world is going to do.
The U.S.
starts to have a significant civil unrest.
And then the rest of the world's gonna say they have a boatload of nuclear weapons and we cannot allow that country to dissolve and have those nuclear weapons.
So that means that the UN would send forces in and I'm not saying this is... But we're not doing that to the Soviet Union who's fallen apart.
The Soviet Union is not the United States of America and to imply that they're the same is actually ridiculous.
I didn't say they were the same.
I did say they have a lot of nuclear weapons.
The point that I'm making Iran.
the rest of the world is not going to allow the United States to fall into multiple countries without significant actions by China and by Russia.
The issue I see is, a lot of people come and they advocate for peaceful national divorce.
I think the first thing you see in peaceful national divorce is the Republic of Nevada invading California, eastern farmland, because Nevada doesn't have the resources to support its citizenry, water or food.
And so, in this region specifically, how do you prevent people saying, right now, we have a national agreement on, we get access to these things, and a federal system which can enforce courts when it comes to the state level.
If one state says we have an expanding population, so we need to dam right here so that we can build a reservoir, then downstream they're saying, hey, you're cutting off my people.
You can't do this.
unidentified
Well, this is all an argument for marginal national divorce and not a revolutionary national divorce.
This is why we want to be nudging it so that we can make sure we're working out how states can work out disagreements.
Of course, this idea that, of course, larger systems need to exist.
Of course, regions are going to have disagreements with one another, and we want to have the best possible agreeable mechanisms for solving those kinds of problems.
But the idea that they can't exist or that the only way of solving these problems is exactly the United States of America.
I don't think that's true.
I'm just saying a national divorce will go towards better ideas and better systems.
So what happens in the fall of the Soviet Union, and this would likely happen.
So you get a, I don't know, Cargill or something, Purdue, a meat processing plant.
They've got X, I don't want to use a specific example because I don't know where the factories exactly are.
But let's say there's a meat processing company, and they've got five major factories in each region.
Hmm.
When the national divorce happens, the superseding control structure of that corporation does not maintain that bond.
So, a factory in Arizona, and a factory in New York, that control structure is shattered when a national divorce happens.
What happened in the Soviet Union is, Ukraine, the Soviet Union collapses.
So the factories in Ukraine, they're producing various goods, food or otherwise.
They all of a sudden have no boss.
And so they're saying, well, when are supplies coming in?
We don't know where supplies are coming from.
Dude shows up with a gun, and two of his buddies, and he says, who's in charge of this factory?
And they say, this guy, he's the factory foreman.
He walks over and he was like, what's going on?
They were like, are your supplies coming in?
And they were like, no.
He's like, who do you report to?
He's like, they don't answer the phones anymore.
They're like, okay, from now on, we're in charge.
I'm your boss.
It's my factory.
And we're going to make sure you guys all get your food.
I'll get your money.
And then you report to us.
And they went, you got it boss.
And that was the rise of the oligarchs.
unidentified
That's an example of a disordered, highly fractional, adversarial divorce.
It does not have to be that way.
And if anything, the fact that national U.S.
corporations wouldn't want it to be that way is an encouraging factor towards there being frameworks for maintaining property rights and maintaining structure.
We already have frameworks for international corporations.
Corporations already exist across national boundaries.
And so, do you think that, you know, your average mid- to high-size company in the United States with coast-to-coast operations is going to hire private military contractors or security to enforce and control their property rights?
unidentified
If there's five different, if there are five regions, if there are five, and I'm not arguing for the specific solution, this is just hypothetical, but if there are five separate sub-United States, I'm not seeing why this would automatically, again, United States and Canada get along fine-ish.
Which one would have control over the military?
Which one would have control over the nuclear weapons?
They can all have their own nuclear weapons.
They're not going to have them right away.
They're already nuclear weapons in all five states, all over the U.S.
nuclear weapons in all five states all over the US.
- Yeah, but they don't have control over. - Here's something that's just not being said, okay?
It is an inevitable You know where they say too big to fail?
I think we're too big not to fail.
And I think if we are not talking about the solutions, we're just like the ostriches burying our head in the sand.
If you don't look around and see that some kind of separation is going to happen, I'm sorry you're a fool.
There is just no way that this current system we have right now is sustainable.
Well, either we separate or America becomes Brazil.
Those are the only two scenarios.
So America can become a sort of, you know, dysfunctional state.
Become dysfunctional?
For better or worse, the United States remains one of the best functioning States in the world.
People choose to do business in the United States.
People seek out the United States.
The United States has the best economy in the world.
It does all those things despite a sclerotic national government that takes up 40% of all the resources in the entire country.
We are falling apart.
I'm sorry.
We need to wake up and fight.
Both of those things can be true.
Yes, they can be, but a lot of people are just like...
You have to dismantle the central government before you have this kind of divorce.
Because one region is going to control it, and then you're going to have a war with one of the regions, just like you have with Ukraine.
My fear, I think, and I'm not saying you're saying this, but a lot of people instantly default to they think there will be a confederacy and a union, which is just nonsense.
That's a specific moment in history.
It's not indicative.
It doesn't exemplify all the other civil wars and how civil wars happen.
What I fear actually happening is It's happening right now.
Donald Trump is criminally charged.
He's civilly sued by the state, and these charges are by anyone who's paid attention.
They're bunk.
I will always shout at CNN in this regard.
Don't take my word for it.
Fareed Zakaria of CNN said this case in New York would not be brought against someone whose name was not Donald Trump.
Even MSNBC was saying, like, what is this criminal case?
It's not real.
The conversation we had last night on IRL was My argument with the Georgia case against Donald Trump, and this is amazing.
The Georgia case is clearly bunk, clearly nonsensical.
They're criminally charging Trump's lawyers.
When this happened, I said, Donald Trump should remain in Florida, and he should say, I don't know what these charges are.
They can send the paperwork to the state of Florida, who can then review to make sure it's legitimate, and if it is, we will answer them.
New York files charges, criminal charges.
They're clearly fake.
A misdemeanor charge upgraded on a mystery underlying crime that no one, to this day, knows.
Pulling it beyond the statute of limitations and turning it into 34 felonies, and then they charge Trump, and Trump gleefully gets on his plane and flies to New York to answer the charges from fake, non-entity authority.
unidentified
Something local, they would nullify it, basically.
And so, the conversation we had yesterday was that states must enforce malicious prosecution protection laws to prevent other states from manipulating and attacking their residents for political reasons or otherwise.
In this instance, what would happen is, I think Mike Benz was talking about this, or was it the night before?
I can't remember.
Anyway, what would happen is, New York files criminal charges.
We all recognize them as clearly bunk.
Trump then says, I will be filing a claim under Florida malicious prosecution protection laws.
It would go to the state court and to the governor's office.
They would review it.
And if the courts determined that it was malicious, then they would tell Trump, do not answer to these, and they will have to sue the federal government to bring marshals in if they disagree.
The fact that Donald Trump is a Florida resident, and I get it because he was a resident in New York before, is criminally charged for something that is clearly fake.
Shows that this is already begun.
The fact that we can no longer rely on states to protect its own residents and that states must now create some kind of enforcement protection against the malicious prosecution from other states shows it has already begun.
If we are to move forward as a country, the solution being proposed is that the states start to fragment each other and even set up border barriers to prevent law enforcement from other areas without the authority coming and kidnapping citizens from other states.
What they've done to Donald Trump is throwing a match onto the Tinder pile that is national divorce.
The only solution now, considering half the country believes Trump's innocent, half says he's not, But again, I'll throw it to CNN.
The only solution now is that Florida reject the authority of New York and defy by force any attempt to remove Donald Trump from their state.
The problem then is, if Trump wants to go and campaign in the United States, any state that's aligned with New York will immediately arrest and extradite him back to a state he does not reside in.
This is the tinderbox beginning to light up.
unidentified
And it definitely is.
I mean, I might not agree with all the specifics that you said, but it certainly, I mean, we need to open our eyes that we're turning into a banana republic.
And that is the dramatic reversal of where we are right now, where if you live in Colorado and you're accused of a crime in Illinois, Colorado will do nothing to protect you.
The feds will, they'll say a wart was issued in this state, Colorado will either have its state police arrest you, and then you will be extradited, you'll be sent into a transport, or Illinois will pay for it, or federal marshals will come in to take you and bring you to Illinois.
But now that we're seeing abject malicious prosecution that is recognizable by more than half the country and even major cable networks, this creates a very, very dramatic and insane circumstance.
If Trump didn't answer to that indictment, they would seize all of his properties, no question, nullify ownership of them and say he's a fugitive from the law in New York.
I will say, maybe it's a bit of a fantasy, but if there's a hope, it's that you have a vengeful Trump elected, enabling someone like Vivek Ramaswamy as his sword, and just slices through.
I'm not saying it's going to happen.
It's probably a little bit aspirational, but that is a better chance than anything else on the table for the Libertarians.
This is one of the reasons why I think we're talking about You know, you mentioned the Libertarian Party might save your children or whatever.
I think if Trump doesn't win, there's not going to be a party for your children, Libertarian or otherwise.
unidentified
I don't necessarily agree there, except perhaps to the extent, and again, I'm going to be the unpopular person at the table in saying that, in the system that we're having now, I think it's absolutely vital that we exist.
But I also have no problem with clearing the chessboard.
And if you're talking about clearing the chessboard, well then great, then we don't need the LP because we're starting afresh.
I think the Libertarian Party is wildly important and we need competition in politics.
The issue right now is you have one of the highest ranking members of the DOJ stepping down to take a position in New York's local prosecutorial office to work for a man who outright campaigned on prosecuting Trump, who brought up bunk charges to do so.
The level of Corruption here from the Democratic Party all the way down, and we're seeing it across the board.
Steve Bannon's going to prison.
Peter Navarro's already in prison.
unidentified
And Eugene Debs ran from prison and got 20% of the vote.
Yeah, but okay, I'm gonna bring up something entirely different, and you could just shut me up if you want to.
My husband's used to doing it all the time, so, you know, feel free.
The fact is, you know, we are talking about the big hypocrisy in prosecuting Trump, and I actually absolutely agree with you there, even though I'm not a Trump fan whatsoever.
But there's another hypocrisy we're not talking about.
So a lot of Trump supporters will be talking about election interference and how the elections are rigged and all.
And you want to know what?
I agree with him, but he's ignoring the fact that his party and himself And the Democrats are absolutely complicit in rigging elections every single time against third parties because they are just seeking to entrench their own power.
They do everything they can.
To collude with each other to keep us from having alternative voices.
So while I do, while I do agree with him with all of his complaints of election interference on one hand, on the other hand, I'm like, Boo-hoo, I don't know how that feels at all.
So until he starts becoming a bit more consistent about the fact that he is absolutely complicit in his party and in himself, he's made no promises about having a more fair representative system, again, it's crocodile tears.
I half agree and I half think that's a communist argument.
unidentified
I've never been called a commie before, so this is odd.
The idea that because the two dominant political parties aren't actively helping... I'm not saying actively helping, I'm saying not actively hurting, and there's a difference.
Yeah, the Founding Fathers did not believe in democracy either.
unidentified
No, they warned against it all the time.
The fact that we've lost that notion that the people in the United States have bought into our democracy stuff, that stuff is straight-up communism.
That's the exact same argument that Mao was making.
And you would know better than anyone else, Michael, if you want to speak to that.
But democracy is not—democracy is a tool.
Democracy is like a hammer or like a gun or like a truck, right?
What you do with it matters.
Just having it is not a guarantee of liberty, positive results.
It's antithetical to liberty.
I agree completely with you guys, but people don't understand.
My point is that... He's speaking to the normies, not the conservatives.
My point is like, back to the point I made earlier today.
Most of the time, what you're actually going against, you think you're going against the government, but you're going against people that disagree.
Yeah, that's a hard one, I think.
And I struggle with this one myself.
Who am I supposed to be mad at here?
And I think you gotta get mad at the politicians first and foremost.
But okay, the politicians are political entrepreneurs who are trying to compete in a market.
And they're incentivized to give the market what it wants, to earn votes.
Not excusing the politician, but as libertarians we recognize that everything flows from incentives and the system itself incentivizes all of this terrible behavior.
Well, what democracy is, fundamentally, is Chekhov's gun.
The gun is on the table.
Somebody is going to pick it up.
And in our self-interest, I want to be the one to pick it up.
Because someone is gonna, if I don't.
I get it.
I get it.
We do need a fundamental change.
Whether or not we believe in... well, we don't believe in democracy, but the fact is it exists.
What would I prefer?
I would prefer a more proportional representation system.
I want to point that out again, just one more time, just for the normies.
It's not that we don't believe in democracy.
Oh, I don't.
We acknowledge what democracy is.
I don't believe or not believe in hammers, right?
They work for a certain thing.
And sometimes they don't work for a certain thing.
Try and use a hammer to eat your eggs.
You're gonna have issues, right?
So maybe people need to think about I don't know, I could picture it.
You could, but it's going to be hard.
It's not going to be easy.
But the point is, you could possibly have people understand that.
Now, I'm not saying everyone or whatever, or if you, again, I don't know the means to get to there, but in theory, you could get people to understand that the tool is not the goal.
And sometimes democracy isn't what you want.
You listen to people talk now and they'll scream about, oh, we need to get rid of the Electoral College.
And it's like, Why?
They don't know!
Because the only thing they say is, like, oh, well, because not everybody's vote counts.
But the tool is made for a particular purpose.
You know, like a hammer is made to hammer nails.
The democracy is designed to allow you to rob people.
Yes, to oppress the minority.
No, that's not what it was designed for.
The idea of democracy was not designed so you could extort people.
That is a result.
It was designed, I don't know, the Greeks were the first people to actually have a democracy, right?
Well, rather than go back to the origins of democracy, I mean, go back to the origins of the United States, which I think were very well-intentioned, right?
The founders Failed, but they were attempting, ultimately, because let's look at what's happened, but they were attempting something that was very aspirational, that was directionally about as good as you could be.
For that time, yes!
And it didn't work.
Okay, so I'm a scientist.
I'm an empiricist, first and foremost.
Okay, we want to do something new.
What are we going to do differently?
What's going to work?
I don't want to just be a critic.
I think this is something that libertarians get wrong.
It's very easy to be a critic because things suck.
Okay, what's your vision?
Be specific.
How are things going to work?
I'm interested in building this sort of positive alternative.
No, I'm talking about like a big box I will work in that everyone can watch me work and then I immediately order the withdrawal of all foreign troops back to the United States and the dissolution of these military bases and criminal charges for all of the corrupt officials just locked in this box everyone can see and I will live there for the rest of my life if it gets those things done without the CIA being able to kill me.
unidentified
According to the Libertarian Party bylaws, it is still possible for them to put you on the ticket.
These are the things I'm sick of the most, is the abject corruption and criminal activities where they get away with it all day every day, and the mass spending on American empire for some liberal economic order BS.
unidentified
Yeah, see, one of the things that I would say after having been through this nomination process is that, you know... I'm sorry.
That's all I have to say is I'm sorry.
There's a part of the Libertarian Party that are kind of like major party wannabe types.
They just want to be able to do what these other parties do.
You know that's not me.
No, I know it's not you.
I'm not looking at you for that reason.
No, I'm just making it clear that I understand that the function of the Libertarian Party is way different than the function of the Republicans and the Democrats, and I am not looking to be just the new Republican.
But you guys, this is... I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
So I'll say two things about this.
Democrat and Republican Party politics 101.
It's exactly what they do all day every day.
Work with me and we'll get the job done.
And then the other issue that really irks me with the vote for Chase Oliver is the Libertarian Party doesn't seem to care about votes.
They care about principles.
And not even necessarily real principles, but their moral principles, particularly depending on the subject of the subject of individual.
The Democrats say, What is the most popular issue with the average American?
They say, well, it's 52% says X on this issue, and 40% says, okay, we adopt the 52% issue if it aligns with certain background ideologies.
So the party platform for the Democrats and Republicans gets released every few years, and they'll say, this time around we're really concerned about immigration.
We're gonna get the most votes from it, it's what the American people want.
The Libertarians get on stage, take their pants off, and say we should be allowed to be naked.
I'm being crass here, but the Libertarians will come up and say things that are deeply unpopular because it's the right thing, and they earn no votes because of it.
unidentified
And they think it's the default position, like the open borders thing.
They do not analyze the thing very closely.
They don't understand property rights, and so they equate free trade with the free movement of people, but these are not the same thing.
He and I disagree.
They're not the same thing.
Well, he and I disagree, so this is funny.
I think that people misunderstand the inside of the Libertarian Party, because basically there's massive divide between left and right inside the Libertarian Party.
You have to understand that when that guy got naked on the stage that they like to share all the time, that guy was a lefty, libertarian, communist type of guy, and he did that specifically to embarrass and drive away the social conservatives and the Mises caucus people who were coming in.
And so you have this complete division where there's people in one camp or the other.
And by the way, inviting Trump, same exact thing from the other side, all the people tearing their hair out are all the people, you know, like the naked guy.
And then they had this contest, effectively, who could exhibit the most TDS symptomology.
To be fair, Alex Stein also took his pants off on stage at the Libertarian Convention, too.
But we enjoyed that when he did it.
unidentified
Rule one, don't be unattractive, you know?
There's a little bit more of inside Libertarian Party baseball here.
I'm not going to get into the back door deal things and things like that because I really just can't as a National Party officer.
But I will say as a National Party officer that I do think, and I'm not saying things would have been differently, I'm not saying that Chase wouldn't be our nominee, and I am going to say, however unpopular it is, again, I'm an officer of the party.
If I have the opportunity to, I will be voting for our nominee.
And I do support our nominee because I support the party.
But I do think the delegates were not given all the information they were entitled to have.
Because in the last round, it was pretty much 60-40 between Chase and Noda.
And a lot of the people who did not vote Noda were told that if they voted Noda, we were going to lose ballot access.
All of these states.
Well, I did some research before I came on the show, and guess how many states rely only on presidential vote totals in order to retain ballot access?
Two.
One.
And that is Kentucky.
There is another one this term that is, which is Georgia, but that's because they didn't retain it with a different statewide office.
Most states have multiple ways that they can retain access, and it's usually a statewide candidate.
If they fail to do it with their statewide candidate, that doesn't mean that they rely solely on President.
If they are, it's because they failed to retain it another way.
There is only one state, Kentucky, that has that as its sole Way to retain access.
And I think most delegates on the floor thought differently.
And the reason I know that is I'm reading Colorado's post where it says that Colorado, you know, refused to put them on the ballot.
And all these people are going way to lose ballot access for Colorado.
Let me tell you, Colorado ballot access has zero to do.
We don't have to run a presidential candidate.
We just have to have a thousand people in Colorado registered as libertarians.
And we have permanent ballot access.
There was ignorance on the convention floor that was purposely perpetrated by some other delegate.
But this has to go to, at least some of the blame here, has to be on the Mises Caucus.
The Mises Caucus acted very hard-line.
They pushed out people from the middle.
They didn't work the floor well.
They didn't put out information.
They didn't do opposition research.
All this stuff came out about Chase Oliver after the fact.
It was their job to do this stuff.
There's got to be lessons learned and a recognition that there's room for improvement here.
To be fair, the Mises Caucus was a little bit of hubris.
They thought Dave Smith was going to do it, and Dave Smith wouldn't.
All of that other stuff would have been a significant... He wasn't a shoo-in either, let me tell you.
They dropped the ball, definitely.
What I'm saying is the reason the Mises Caucus behaved the way they did.
Listen, you know that there's a huge contingent of progressives.
Why isn't Chase Oliver on this show?
Because these people- He chose not to.
They hate- They think we're fascists.
Mises Caucus pushed out New Hampshire for being too right-wing.
They said New Hampshire is too right-wing for the Mises Caucus.
New Hampshire talks honestly about race, New Hampshire talks honestly about issues- Jeremy.
My understanding is that our booking team reached out to Chase Oliver two weeks ago, several times.
Phil attempted to reach out.
Angela McArdle was on board and attempted to reach out.
There was no communication.
At the 11th hour, which I believe was yesterday, they emailed to decline that it would come on.
At the very last minute, Mike Termat...
I guess reached out and said, I really want to come on the show, and he's actually only a couple hours away.
And then around, I think, like 11, word came in that he has a Flag Day thing already set up in Florida with a flight scheduled, so he's just not going to be able to do it.
unidentified
Listen, you can't believe anything he says, so I don't know what he's saying.
Either way, you'd think The funny response from many of these people in Chase Oliver's camp is that I and this show and IRL are just irrelevant to anyone.
And I'm just like, I'm not trying to be a dick and brag, but I have 2 million Twitter followers, okay?
We put out this show, we tweet out to 2 million people, that's a platform for the LP and for Chase Oliver to say what he thinks.
unidentified
This makes me really mad because, you know, one of my arguments during the whole campaign is that I will get this media.
I will go on these shows.
And none of these other people, not only did they not do it, they had no opportunities in advance of this campaign.
So that was one of my major arguments and here they have what they deserve, I guess, the majority that voted for him.
I mean it to be a little sensationalist, because Dave's great, and I respect his decision for not wanting to do it and all that, but I do believe that if Dave was the nominee, he would have won.
unidentified
Well, yeah, that's probably because it would have drawn more Mises caucus people to the convention.
Dave's been on Rogan's show like three times in three months.
That is the biggest media access, and I don't mean to be crass or whatever to Joe, but let's just be real, Dave Smith is a very funny and charismatic guy, he's also very tall, and he's on the biggest podcast in the world over and over again.
I just kind of feel like that would have bolstered the LP more than anyone.
Look, Gary Johnson did tremendous, he was a governor I believe, New Mexico?
Then he runs for the LP, and all of a sudden there's this massive attention, and it's a big deal.
Dave Smith is a national-level comedian, friends with the... And he's tall.
Since the epic of television, height has mattered more and more and more.
So, that aside, because I'm only half-kidding, I just think Dave would have drawn massive national, mainstream attention appearing on Fox Business with Kennedy as often as he did, appearing on shows like mine, on Rogan more so.
I think that plays a huge role.
Plays a huge, huge role.
And Dave didn't want to do it?
I get it.
Like, this is what I was saying earlier about non-profits needing to pay a million bucks to get executive directors or more.
Dave Smith has a career, he has a family, he has obligations, he has friends, and the ask of him is to throw that all away for a ticket he will not win for the betterment of the party.
unidentified
It puts him in a box, Tim.
Like, he's outside of the Libertarian Boxer now that it almost puts him back in a box as just a Libertarian guy, you know?
But that, I mean... As one who took the bait, I can definitely sympathize with that view.
A lot of people pointed out they had no backup plan, and they should have had a backup plan.
unidentified
I'm not going to get into the Mises stuff, but I will say that I do agree with you that I'm not going to get into Dave's personal reasons.
I'm not going to get into his personal life.
I believe in the great man theory of history, and I do think it was a pivotal moment, and that Dave could have done Because of his unique positioning, and his communication abilities, and all of the connections that he had, he really could have been a pivotable, pivotable, you know what I'm saying?
Pivotable.
Yeah, pivotable.
It's a new word.
It's a new word.
I've just declared it.
Moment in American history.
And I think he would have gotten the nomination easily, and I think he would have easily gotten the most vote totals that the Libertarian Party has ever had.
But his family, he had a child that had an illness.
I'm not judging him.
There was a lot of stuff.
I'm not judging Dave.
I'm just saying that I think it was a big lost opportunity, perhaps for very understandable reasons.
But I'm very personally disappointed, but I understand But the fact is, the Libertarian Party is worth preserving.
You gotta give me my few minutes to pump the LP.
Please do not leave the party if you're not happy with the nominee.
And if you're happy with the nominee, work even doubly.
To his credit, Dave Smith was on the floor of the convention the whole time.
He was helping us trying to negotiate with Termat and, you know.
As Shermott basically went back on five promises he made to me during the course of the campaign and three seconds before he got up to the microphone to throw to Chase Oliver, I asked him, are you going to endorse Chase Oliver right now?
It's a lot to ask someone in terms of risk to take and things to give up for a life in politics.
It's very, very difficult.
What I will say, though, is Every Trump supporter is cracking a beer and cheering and having parties because they're like, we just won the Mises Caucus.
unidentified
Yep.
I had a MAGA equals socialist sign, right?
I had all the pictures of me.
I mean, Trump appreciates professional wrestling, so I feel like, if anything, it's all game.
Because again, I am here to just encourage people to have, I'm going to use a Hoppian phrase, hopefully I don't screw it up like I did last time, have a low time preference and not just think five months ahead to this current election.
I mean look, Chase Oliver's the New Hampshire candidate.
What better evidence that you need to give up on any hope The Libertarian Party can't even... Oh, you're doing Dante's Inferno.
Give up hope, all ye who... No, it's that I love the Rothbard egalitarianism as a revolt against nature essay.
I come back to it all the time.
You can't just make nice arguments.
It's this idea that if people say that you could fly by flapping your wings, would you say that?
It's false.
It doesn't matter if it sounds nice.
Libertarian Party winning sounds nice.
We want to have these hopes.
It would be so great if we could have these national things happen.
But it's fake.
It's not true.
It's just not true.
There's been 50 years.
We know sociological, psychological, biological, all these reasons that it's literally not possible.
And it has to be said.
When people want to do impossible things, we have to say it.
We can't say it just because we can't act like you're good intentioned if you want to jump off of a roof and fly by flapping your arms.
I think the Libertarian Party needs to focus more heavily on singular local races.
unidentified
Oh, I agree.
We need to implement on a national level, well, from the national standpoint of the party, project decentralization and create more New Hampshires.
You know, I think one of the faults with the decentralization plan is that it needs Another element needs centralized decentralization, needs concentrated decentralization.
So we need to get libertarians into local offices in a concentrated way, like they're doing in New Hampshire.
And New Hampshire is a great example of concentrating libertarians in a particular locality, taking over the government, taking over these roles, and implementing liberty-minded policies.
This has to happen.
Look, there are millions of people who are pro-liberty, pro-family, pro-reason, capable, competent people who are dominated in every aspect of their lives, and all they have to do is get together.
And there's already proof that it's working.
And this is how nations start.
It starts by a people coming together.
Jeff Deist got in a lot of trouble for this, but blood and soil and honor, these things matter to people.
You have to have a soul to yourself.
This is what America has lost.
This is what Vivek is very good at.
He says that America has to have a positive vision.
We have to be aspirational.
And we've lost it entirely.
For those people who have it, we can still recreate it and it can still exist.
A new colonialism within the country.
You've moved, right?
Or you are moving?
I'm very aspirational toward moving to New Hampshire.
You're working on a new think tank.
And I'm working on a think tank based on the Free State Project.
When settlers came to the United States and started building, they were like, hey, don't go that way.
You can't get your wagons up the mountains.
It's too difficult.
And so it remains less developed with a smaller population, but it's a massive state.
Tremendous opportunity, thanks to modern technologies, infrastructure expansion, Starlink, etc., to get low-cost real estate to build, and that's one of the reasons we're here.
We were able to get 10 times the land and property than we would have normally gotten in any other state.
We looked at New Hampshire.
It's just way too expensive.
unidentified
But you were mentioning before the show you had a 10,000 member militia that you were now training.
So Luke is on this show on IRL and he's saying, like, you gotta move to New Hampshire, you gotta move to New Hampshire.
And then I was like, well, we'll take a look at the properties.
It's expensive.
And then Luke moves to Florida.
And so we're like, oh, okay, Luke.
We decided to go to West Virginia.
So the issue I took with New Hampshire, outside of the price, it's got infrastructure because the backhaul that goes up there with internet is really, really good.
But you're surrounded on every side by entrenched wokeness.
unidentified
I think this very much helps.
So many of the people come from Massachusetts and like Phil.
One of the best state reps, actually, in New Hampshire, Tom Mannion, moved from Massachusetts.
Credits Phil specifically for why he is there.
Nobody can ever say that I've never helped the Libertarian Party or the Liberty Movement.
Yeah, and this guy is a firebrand.
He's exactly the kind of guy you want.
He's a fit guy, ex-military, knows his economics, you know, led the charge for Defend the Guard in New Hampshire.
What's his name?
Tom Mannion.
And so, you know, it helps.
It helps.
I mean, North Korea and South Korea are very different.
They're adjacent to each other.
But the more you can cycle these kinds of things, so I actually think the ease of selection, similarly, by the way, and a lot of people get uncomfortable about this, but I believe this strongly, we've got to drive the crappy people out of New Hampshire.
We're not going to persuade all of them.
And so the diehard progressives, the people who want to trans their kids, the people who want the big government, we've got to get them out.
Anyone that wants to say that that's a bad thing, or that trying to pass laws that are unpalatable to other people, F you.
Because you don't give a crap about passing laws that are unpalatable to me.
I've had to move, I've moved two times to escape different governments, so up yours.
In New York, why is it that the Proud Boys go to prison and Antifa got away?
Because Proud Boys cooperated with cops.
The cops showed up to a fight between Antifa and the Proud Boys.
Antifa said, screw you, and ran full speed.
And then the Proud Boys were like, here, officer, here's my name, information, address, date of birth.
And they went, thank you.
Then the cops came back and said, these men are all going to prison for four years.
And then the Proud Boys are like, what about Antifa?
And they're like, we don't know who they are.
Bye!
So, if the right showed up in BlackBlock, it wouldn't matter.
If you're in BlackBlock, no one knows your ideology.
At these events, there are communists and anarchists who completely despise each other but agree on dismantling the state, and so they walk in unison.
I've been covering these protests for a decade.
I go down, I see a guy in black block.
I'm hanging out at direct action training, and one guy says, we want total authoritarian control, we want to shut down speech, we want to control the internet, we want to control trade, we want to be in charge of everything.
I'm going to black block up, I'm going to wear a black hoodie and a mask, and go and join anarchists.
And the anarchists are like, we don't want government at all.
And I'm like, you're standing side by side by tankies.
And they're like, we know.
And I'm like, fascinating.
So if right-winger traditionalists showed up and said, the only thing we agree on is that we think the government's corrupt, there's no question.
The issue is the right doesn't wear masks, they typically do not get into organized violence like Antifa, so everyone just believes, well I bet if the right did that, I don't agree.
When the far left stormed D.C., smashing windows, starting fires during Trump's inauguration, and they actually got arrested and charged with conspiracy, they won!
And then D.C.
had to pay them a million bucks.
unidentified
The meme that everyone's a fed, I think, is actually kind of harmful.
I mean, I don't encourage people taking actions that would get them in trouble or hurt themselves or this kind of thing.
I'm not trying to cheer that kind of thing on, necessarily.
The idea that this reactive kind of thing, it's a self-defeating meme complex where anyone, the right attacks the right and says, oh you're a fed, you're a fed, you're a fed.
These murals that are popping up all over the country, the pride murals that are being destroyed, The first thing I'll always say is, I don't agree with destroying—Huntington, West Virginia made a pride mural in their city.
So long as it's a local ordinance thing that's agreed upon and they voted for it, then it's fine.
I mean, if they stole money for it, then there's got to be some kind of accountability.
We're talking about Huntington, West Virginia, a very small community, who elects a city council whether you like it or not, and these are the rules everyone agrees to, and then you're going, yeah, well, too bad.
I'm the loser, but I get it.
unidentified
But you're saying everyone's, which means, and I'm saying not everyone.
We're talking about this community.
This is where I've said that democracy is a tool to rob you.
The argument that, I can't stand this argument, this is, I don't see the distinction between the millennial communists who are like, I deserve this, and the argument that because I live here, want to live here, but I don't consent to how the majority of people choose to live, I should have special treatment.
If you choose to live in a place where rapes happen a thousand times a day versus live in a place where rape doesn't happen, and you could leave, this isn't excusing the rape, but you have to have... You're talking about smart arguments, and I get it.
It's in your sphere of control to leave the But that doesn't make what is happening to you right.
We're arguing two entirely different things.
But it gets complicated here because you're always going to have local enforcement.
I lock my front door because I'm an intelligent person.
But if I chose not to lock my front door and somebody robbed me, it's still wrong that they robbed me.
At the local level, there's always going to be norms.
There's always going to be some sense of democracy.
At the localist level, there will be some sense of democracy.
Even as someone who's anti-democratic, I completely accept that there's going to be some sense of democracy at the local level.
If me and my friends agree to pitch in to buy pizza every Friday night for 10 years, and then one day you show up and start complaining that you have to pay rent and you're being stolen from because we order pizza on Friday nights, we say, get out of my house and go somewhere where they don't do this.
You can go live in the woods, buck naked with a pointy stick.
You do not have a right to take other people's stuff just because you think you're an individual.
unidentified
I am not advocating for taking anyone's stuff.
I have a legitimate objection, which is if we try to build something private, if we try to build something in the middle of the woods, the government will Exactly.
I understand the conundrum of civilization has developed to a point where we have satellites and boundaries everywhere.
My point is, I do not accept, and this is the libertarian... I mostly agree with you.
I know.
You have the open borders faction of, you know, Chase Oliver and the Ellis Island model.
The idea that me and my friends and family can establish We have a social agreement between each other.
We can set up our boundaries for what we accept and what we don't accept.
We don't want clowns coming in here making lewd balloon animals, and then someone shows up and says, I'm gonna live here and pay rent, and now because I have not consented to what you do with the rent money, I've agreed to pay you.
It's so too bad!
Go move somewhere else!
unidentified
It's not the same thing as rent, and you keep saying we as if it's everybody.
There's always going to be some kind of collective No, there's going to be social norms, and then you enforce them through non-violent social means.
There's going to be projects that require people to pay some money towards.
Right, so if you don't volunteer to that, get out of that area.
A child's going to be born into that, and there's going to be born into that set of rules.
And by matter of circumstance, they now live here.
Let's say it's the child of one of the people who lives in my very large house.
They come of age and they say, I understand that I live here and I have to pay rent, but I don't like that you're using my rent money to, I don't know, install solar panels.
I say, you are now 18.
I agree.
There's the door.
unidentified
And I don't have a problem with that because that is your private property.
We can find municipalities where we could trace back the instantiation of the municipality to be essentially a fully contractual private property agreement.
So are those municipalities?
I would have to see that because So it's all about... There's a point at which this private-public thing goes, it gets very... I think the big problem with Tim's position is that we're in an oligopoly where you're not allowed to compete and this is what makes the... Now I understand that.
Where it sort of falls apart is that Well, I can't go do my own thing and I can't... You can.
If it becomes totalitarian, there's not a lot of time to do that.
And Jeremy, this gets to what we talked about last night.
If you want to talk about this hypothetical municipality where you can trace back the ownership and there actually is consent and all of that, I don't agree with you that there's some of them that can.
If in fact there is that collective ownership, because we got into this with HOAs and I don't believe covenants run with the land just like Rothbard did not, then there is also collective liability which does not exist.
With ownership comes liability.
You have a framework under which literally nothing can be constructed, built, or done, and it's completely untenable.
People are going to need to live near one another.
People are going to need sets of rules.
Those rules are going to exist outside of themselves, and there's going to be a framework that perpetuates them over the area.
This is just literally unavoidable, and I'm thinking that this is unavoidable is completely utopian thinking.
Bitcoin Thailand Seastead would pearl up the story.
And he built a seastead in international waters, was living there with his girlfriend or his wife, and the United States government called up Thailand.
They sent in the armed forces.
It was complete defiance of all international law.
Welcome to war.
So this is why feasible strategies have to be taking over existing systems, existing power structures, building parallel structures.
My point is, and I want to make this point, you're all communists, I have made the argument numerous times that anyone can go live in the wilderness and they always say, but we live under... there are uninhabited islands where I guarantee, I will in fact, I will give you $20,000 to set up your little continent island, no one will bother you for the rest of your life.
unidentified
We live under anarcho-capitalism already.
We already live in anarchy.
Go achieve your society.
That's what I'm doing.
I'm not here to say, I'm not here calling everything out here as legitimate.
I can't stand the argument that because I was born here, I can now, as the minority position, upend the rules of your social order, when in fact, there are numerous places you can go live without issue.
There is a small jurisdiction of a thousand people that have decided this is our jurisdiction.
I own parcel A, you own parcel B. Fine.
Someone is born there and then says, I represent 10% of the people here and we do not consent to how our money is being spent.
They say, we have a social order and a contract that if you don't like, you can voluntarily choose to leave and not give us money anymore.
But you have no right to live here under our rules, in our jurisdiction, unless you are paying what we all agree to pay.
That's called rent.
unidentified
I do not have a problem with rent.
I don't have a problem with this hypothetical that you just constructed.
I chose to live in a place out of how many different cities are there in the United States?
Hundreds of thousands?
A million?
I chose one out of all.
There has to be some aspect in which I am consenting to something there.
I'm not a victim.
I chose that one out of the set of all the choices.
To the extent that I'm a victim, it's the extent to which other people can't compete to the extent which, you know, if you don't like it, leave is a completely valid moral sentiment so long as the people saying it don't hunt you down anywhere you go.
This is the issue I have with communists and the woke left that the open borders libertarians completely agree with them on.
This idea that a group of people can't come together and set a jurisdiction, the idea that you have to create a private proclamation of ownership upon a single entity is meaningless.
If a group of people have a community, they have set rules and guidelines, and someone else comes to that place, your consent is meaningless.
Completely meaningless.
The property is of those people who live there, and it's a communist idea that the property is just arbitrary and owned by everyone, and if I live there, you must get my permission.
No.
You're not of our community.
You have no right to our land.
We'll let you live here.
unidentified
- They're saying the R. - Yes, leftists like Chase. - And the R does not remain static. - They sincerely do believe that foreigners have the same moral worth as their neighbors.
That's part of what's different about their psychology.
- They believe that if there is a group of people who isolate 10 acres and put houses on it, Chase Oliver believes that foreign individuals can come onto that property and live how they want to live without it.
unidentified
Why?
But why?
This is where it gets to the heart of... No, I don't think he believes that.
I don't think he believes that.
Here's what I can promise you he believes, because this gets to the heart of the difference between left and right, okay?
Which is about how you draw your moral circles.
So, the more right you get, the more you focus on your family and the things close to you.
The more left you get, the more universalist you get in your morality, to the point that you believe that dirt and rocks are as important as people or animals are as important as people.
But along that continuum, you reach a point where you believe that the stranger in China is of equal moral worth to your neighbor or is at least much closer in worth than the average person on the right believes.
And this is a real moral difference that affects our politics that's outside of libertarianism.
I'm going to make the controversial statement and you can call me a communist leftist and I do think the person in China has equal moral worth to the person in this country.
I would kill 10,000 people in China to save the people in my town.
I don't care about them at all.
It's not a political thing, perhaps.
Perhaps it's a religious thing.
Because I am a devout Christian who believes that every single person is made in the image of God.
But they don't have a right to just move here, live on public property.
These are, in my opinion, actually objectively false Here's the issue we have.
Forget about the God part.
I think it's objectively true that some random person in China has equal moral worth to my neighbor.
When I'm looking at property, I check if there's an HOA.
If there is, I don't buy it.
The idea that I would go in and assert my rights over a private community or group of individuals is communist.
It is the idea that this idea that either a single individual owns it or it's everyone's to have however they want is communism.
The idea that where we exist right now and moving towards communism in the United States is that There is a small group of people who created an enclave, or what do you want to call it?
They created a small jurisdiction, they incorporated it, and they say, here are our rules and our tenets to live here.
Totally fine with it.
That is collective property of that group of people, that small group of people.
The idea that the federal government can then come in and say, we're going to take people from outside this country, they're going to come in, and you have to abide by what they want now.
Communism.
People have a right to band together.
The problem we face right now in this country is the expansion of population, the advancement of technology, and now we're getting to the point where it's becoming harder and harder to find unclaimed territory where someone could just live.
But islands exist, and not to mention, In the United States, perhaps it's very difficult.
But what really bothers me, and I will stress again, it is communism, this idea that you are entitled to the rights, privileges, and protections of the United States.
If you don't like the military-industrial complex, you do have a choice to go to Mexico, where I guarantee you can live in the wilderness and be completely unbothered.
unidentified
And I also have a choice to live here and work to dismantle it.
I think between us and the Bitcoiners, we can buy five square miles and do this.
unidentified
Sure, but it needs to be, like, the US has to say that this is the Anarchy Zone.
Like, you can murder people.
It's Anarchy Zone.
The United States will not attempt to enforce anything.
This is the anarchy zone.
Your choices as a United States citizen are, you either get the U.S.
for all the good and bad, or you can at least choose the anarchy zone.
The U.S.
should also drop the, you have to pay thousands of dollars to renounce your citizenship, the U.S.
should drop that as well.
It's not consensual.
Yeah, but otherwise... Yeah, but you were born here and you agree to that, so forget the non-consensual.
They have to let you leave.
No, they should, and this is a principle I'm comfortable universalizing, is that if you let people leave for free, then you can otherwise say if you want to stay here, you have all these other obligations.
Yeah, but that's part of the social contract that you have to pay the leavers to the army.
If you were a destitute, homeless person on welfare, ain't nobody going to stop you from going to live in the woods.
unidentified
Sure, yes.
If you want to drop out, and I think dropping out makes a lot of sense compared to being politically active, but to me, I'm someone who believes that great things are achievable.
I want to see humans build, do more advanced, interesting things.
I believe that I live an incredible life thanks to the entrepreneurs, capitalists, and intelligent people who came before me.
And I want that to continue.
It is entrepreneurs who make the world great, and inventors, and these kinds of people, and I want them to be unfettered to continue to make the world better, and then move on.
We're a little bit over, so I'll make one more point, then I'll give you guys each your last words.
Living in New York, it's really interesting.
The Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Queensborough Bridge, man, the Verrazano.
There's so many bridges, and I paid nothing for any of them.
In fact, as someone who first moved there, I'd still paid zero to New York State, city, or otherwise, the Port Authority, so these bridges and tunnels could exist.
And I get to walk across them.
These things were built by people who invested tons of energy.
The agreement exists as such.
You get access to massive infrastructure that was built and paid for by other people's work and labor, and here's what we expect of you.
If you disagree, you can leave.
You don't have to live in New York City.
New York City has a very high income tax, the highest income tax in the country because they have a state income tax, city income tax, on top of the federal income tax.
California actually has the highest tax rate, but New York City has an income tax.
Don't want to live there?
You are free to go.
No one is forcing you to be here to pay these bills.
But if you want access to the things that we've built, We expect you to abide by the rules that we've set.
If you don't like that, you can leave.
It is fascinating how many liberal lefties I meet and libertarians who have this idea that I'm allowed to live upon your infrastructure, the shoulders of your giants that you labored for and paid for, and I don't have to pay those taxes.
unidentified
Well, that's why I argued that this open borders immigration policy is just outrageous.
You're asking people who have paid for so-called public property to allow other people just to come and use that public property to put immense stress on those public resources.
And I would agree, I'd prefer if the system was not this way, and we had a better representational system.
But the issue is not what should be, the issue is what is.
And what is so far is that very few people respect the shoulders of giants that we are all standing on.
To stand atop the Manhattan Bridge, a massive marvel of engineering and managerial power, inspirational to me, and I'm like, and I didn't do anything for it.
It was humans who came before me who dedicated their time and energy and labor, and many died in a lot of these great works.
The idea that you could come to that city and say, I shouldn't have to pay taxes now, it's like, just go somewhere else.
Now that presents a challenge in the massive expansionist state the United States is, in that no matter what you do, no matter where you go, no matter what you make, they demand a piece of it.
Even if you don't make money, and you live in the middle of the woods, and all you do is whittle little sculptures out of wood you find in the ground, it is actually law that you have to give 20% of those little figurines to the government, because it's not about money.
This is true.
When people don't make monetary value, the state still demands 20% of their value.
Or not 20, whatever the income tax rate is.
So that being said, if you want to take the final word on that argument, and then we'll go around and give final thoughts.
unidentified
Okay, perfect.
I think you just created a false dichotomy.
You said it's not about what should be, it's about what is.
I actually think it's a little bit about both.
Because I don't disagree with you that the fact is there are things that exist that have been paid for in the past through extortion by people back then.
I can't think we can call it we.
I get it.
Yeah, you get to stand on the Manhattan Bridge that you paid no money for.
Well, maybe, and I'm only throwing out a hypothetical here because I'm just rejecting your dichotomy, is that perhaps the people who want to use it now do need to pay an upkeep or a rent of some sort to be able to continue to use it and have its upkeep.
But I don't think they're responsible for the extortion that happened in the past that built it before.
Perhaps that's a potential solution.
That's not the only one.
I'm not discounting the fact that, yes, that got paid for by extortion of people in the past.
But I don't think we can completely separate what should be from what is.
And I don't think calling everyone a communist is a good way to handle the argument.
Well, I'll agree completely is that appreciation for greatness.
And I think that's gone completely.
I feel the same way when I stand on bridges or see tall buildings or just the things that human beings have created.
And we now have a culture where the people who are capable of great things, everyone wants to chop them down.
And whether that's through the government or privately.
And whether that's cultural or in people's souls, I don't know exactly where it comes from, but there is an opportunity to fix it.
And so for the people who appreciate greatness, who want to build things, who are tired of this being the way things are, we've got to build something better.
And I believe the best way is for people with that in their spirits to be bunkering down and to be building the new thing.
I mean, we would need a lot of people to do it under the pretext that when you put the money in, the island will be an anarchist state and you expect nothing of it.
unidentified
The problem is, and this is the problem with Ken Ware, so your economy ends up being very inefficient, so it's very expensive to ship all these things out there, so how are you going to make money and be productive here?
Generally the answer is, well, I'm going to do things that the United States government frowns upon.
And I don't mean vice crimes necessarily, we can come up with all kinds of things that are better.
- 100 milligrams only. - The question is, you do this, what's your economy?
What are the businesses you're gonna attract?
And are you going to be able to allow those businesses to operate there without the United States government crushing you?
If you can do that, it's a very valuable idea. - I'd be willing to bet that if we went to a moderately developed country that was like a lower GDP nation, I think Brazil's GDP is like 8,000.
It's just the question is what will happen when economies or businesses operate in those areas that draw ire of the United States government.
And we see this happening now.
There's one of these private cities, for example, is offering this medical treatment that the FDA has denied where you put this bacteria in your mouth and supposedly you don't need cavities.
You will never get a cavity again.
I'm not claiming it's true.
Hashtag not sponsored.
Too late.
I'm writing it down.
They're building an economy off of treatments like this where you can't get them.
And so the question is, well, will the United States government tolerate it?
But no, I mean, look, the fact of the matter is, you know, we initially were talking about the future of the Libertarian Party and what, you know, Chase meant.
I think that there is a segment of the Libertarian Party that's gonna like him, but as far as I'm concerned, Chase is essentially a Democrat, right?
He's got very, very similar... He's like a Democrat, but he likes guns or whatever, and maybe he's a little less... He loves guns, by the way.
Good for him.
Maybe he's a little less overbearing than your regular Democrat, but the Libertarian Party does need to have some kind of independent identity, and Chase is not it.
