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May 26, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:14:33
Hoppe Hour
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Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Left, Right, and White.
I'm Chris Roberts, and I'm here, of course, with Gregory Hood.
A few housekeeping items before we dive into Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and especially his book Democracy, The God That Failed.
Peter Brimelow, you are formally now invited onto our podcast to discuss, possibly debate, the extent to which American conservatism can be credited with bringing about the downfall of the USSR and global communism more generally.
I know you believe that we millennials do not give Ronald Reagan and company enough credit for all of this.
We'd love to have you on the show and talk about it more.
And I believe my colleague, Mr. Hood, had something to say about a small European nation as well.
Yes, yes.
Well, whether it's a nation or not, that's...
I do read the comments, guys, and somebody said, you know, I insulted Belgium.
I want to clarify that.
I wasn't saying Belgium or Belgians are bad, but I've always been a supporter of the Flemish independence movement, and I think that the Dutch-speaking people should be able to secede and either form an independent Flemish Republic or join in Greater Netherlands.
For economic as well as cultural reasons.
And that's a good introduction into what we're talking about today, because a lot of what Hoppe talks about is secession and how you break away from larger regimes.
That's right.
Well, Hoppe, like Wilmot Robertson, who we discussed in the last episode, found a lot of inspiration in the breakup of the Soviet Union, regardless of whether or not Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with that or not.
You know, the sudden freedom of the Baltic states and all of these Central Asian states For him, he specifically cites it in his book, Democracy, the God That Failed, of like, oh, it's possible to break away.
It's possible to just secede from an economically and socially repugnant regime.
Yeah, and the other thing is that it is somewhat like the other books that we've talked about.
There is a certain, this is of its time.
He talks a little bit about the United Nations and a little bit about the prospect of world government But he's still basically talking about the idea of independent countries on the process of centralization the process of nations coming together specifically when he talks about Germany and The different German states coming together and forming Imperial Germany.
He talks about how that might have been a bad thing one of the things that Maybe we have to think about now is we have these sort of overarching regimes where you have the United States, but then you also have the UN, but then you also have these trade regimes and everything else.
And so some of the things that we're going to be talking about, even if you were able to secede, even if you were able to have an independent republic, a state or something, doesn't really matter if you're a part of the EU still or something like that.
Yeah, we were just talking to you about this, the idea of having a completely independent Scotland that's a member of the EU.
Yeah, like what's the point?
Yeah, I mean it's sort of a negative nationalism, where basically you define yourself as a victim and you say, we're open to the world except those guys.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean he's got a more of a version of a positive nationalism and he sees well first of all we should say he sees nationalism as a means not an end and one of the things I want to credit Hoppe with is he's got this historiography of libertarianism of the right He has a whole theory of history in fact.
He even has a little mini book out there which talks about man's history and civilization from ascent to decline.
And he gets into things about the invention of agriculture and where the idea of property first came from and everything else.
But where most people I think have heard it from is Democracy, The God That Failed.
And he takes on the case of defending monarchy not as a monarchist but saying that it's the lesser of two evils compared to democracy and to very briefly summarize his case he essentially says monarchy can be defined as private government and under a private government the sovereign is going to have a greater incentive to build up capital goods
To have productive citizens, to not destroy his land, to invest in infrastructure that will lead to greater productivity in the future, to uphold a certain standard of civilization, because ultimately he's going to pass it down to his heirs and he has a stake in the kingdom going on.
Whereas under democracy, nobody's really in charge.
You have what he calls just caretakers.
And they don't even really own anything.
They have control over the resources of the state, but they don't really own it.
And so they don't really have a stake in it.
And even if they wanted to work toward the long term, they actually can't.
They have to use this stuff as quickly as possible in order to reap the political benefits or economic benefits.
And this ultimately leads to what he sees as a product, a system of De-civilization, which I thought was a pretty cool term for what's happening.
And one of the things that makes him very different from a lot of libertarians, especially the ones you see today, is he's very strong on moral issues.
I mean, it's just very plain and calm and it's actually kind of funny.
He just starts calling people bums and deadbeats and degenerates and parasites.
He's not shy at all about who he wants in or does not want in these societies.
True.
You know, I remember when I first read the book, finding this, you know, comparing monarchs to people who own a house, so they're invested in, you know, maintaining it, versus presidents and prime ministers being people who are renting an apartment for, guaranteedly, a very brief amount of time.
I'm really not terribly convinced by this, I've gotta say.
Especially since, in all democracies, Presidents and prime ministers are part of political parties that have a vested interest in returning to power just with a different head honcho, right?
It's like you can't completely destroy a nation if you want your party to ever win again.
I also, I'm just not convinced that monarchs always ran their countries very benevolently. I know one of
the specific things that Hoppe talks about is that taxes historically were much, much lower in
monarchies than they ever got to be in democracies, which I suppose is true and fair enough, but
there's a certain level of cheating with this analogy in that monarchy was a thing and
monarchy was really widespread hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
So comparing a political situation from hundreds of years ago to one today, when so many things about society are different and technology is really different, I think it's a serious stretch.
If we had monarchies today, like if Sweden suddenly decided... Well, Sweden is a monarchy, but a real monarchy.
Yeah, yeah, not a parliamentary monarchy.
It just had one absolute monarch ruler, no voting.
A non-cucked monarchy.
No enfranchisement of any kind.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that if that cropped up today, that You know, taxes would go down, the monarch would automatically bring taxes way down, or even that a monarch wouldn't use, you know, this massive state apparatus, you know, to spy on its, you know, spy on its citizens and imprison dissenters and clamp down on free speech and stuff as many, you know, dictatorships and not a few democracies have done as well.
It's just that Monarchs, as we think of them, didn't have the ability to do that when monarchy was the most common form of government 400 years ago.
It was much more difficult to collect taxes.
There was less wealth generally just to tax, etc.
Well let me push back on that one with an argument that he made and this is where we get into the actual left-right divide between me and you.
One argument that he made and then one argument that I would make.
One argument that he makes and in a way it's kind of a self-destroying argument but it's an argument is he says that the existence of the sovereign and the existence of power where everyone can see it You know, if you've got a king, you know who's in charge, and if something goes wrong, you know who to blame.
Benito Mussolini, actually, when he was a socialist, there was an attempt on the king of Italy's life, and he was like a really radical socialist at the time, and he said that an attempt like that was simply part of the job description of being a king.
Because if you're in charge, like, these things happen.
This is what happened to the Tsar, this is what happened to Louis XVI, and everything else.
And Hoppe says this creates a kind of class consciousness because, and these are his terms, because people can see that there's a small group of people who are allowed to lead a parasitic existence and therefore people will be riled up against any violations of the rights and they'll make sure taxes are kept low and everything else.
Whereas if you have a democracy, and in theory anybody can be in charge, You don't want to destroy the mechanism that you want to take charge of one day.
So democracy is inherently more totalitarian and the bureaucracy is inherently more invasive.
Now the problem with this as I see it is, okay, he's made a good point that power and who is sovereign is covered up in a democracy.
That is a really good point.
That is something that we have to talk a lot about in America today and in the world today.
But doesn't that just prove that monarchy is destroyed and, like, doomed to failure?
Doesn't that prove that, like, the way it worked out was almost inevitable how it worked out?
Right, if you think about the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution or these things, it's like, well, so if everybody gets really pissed off about the fact that there's this parasitic class and they overthrow it, well, according to Hoppe, all of the things that overthrew all these monarchies were way worse.
But if monarchy, I mean this is what you're saying, it's a self-destructing argument, but if monarchy makes it really clear who the parasites are, then it's inevitable that they get overthrown.
So why would you have a system that, I mean if you're trying to defend this system, he's not a monarchist, he's anarcho-capitalist and we'll get into that thing a little later, but if you were trying to take this as a monarchist, Why would you say, okay, well this is the lesser of two evils, and it's the lesser of two evils because under this system, everybody underneath the king is mad all the time and hates the guy in charge.
That's not very sustainable.
I mean, historically, These things existed because there was an organic natural order and people saw this as the way things should be.
There was a sense of hierarchy that was ordained by God or the gods or nature or whatever.
And so you didn't disrupt these things because to do so was to make things worse.
He's doing it from a more cynical way where he's saying, oh well wouldn't it be great if we could go back to this because the peasants would be mad all the time and they wouldn't have to pay taxes.
It doesn't work that way.
And there's also some, I mean this is the argument that I would make against what he was saying, is that he makes, at the beginning he says, as a theorist, I'm going to make certain things that aren't open to empirical challenge.
He's just going to lay down certain ideas that have to be taken for the theory to flow.
He's a very axiom-oriented guy.
Right.
And you might be having flashbacks to Rand and A is A and all this kind of stuff.
A is A and therefore all taxes are theft.
But a lot of what he says, he makes claims that just aren't really true.
So just to take some small examples, in one case he says, well, under private government, even a horrific form of it like slavery, That's preferable to communism because under private slavery the birth, the number of slaves actually went up and people didn't generally kill their slaves, but in communist societies they did kill people and the population went down.
I know what he's talking about here because in the United States the slave population
grew, which is why they were able to ban importation of slaves and the slave population
in the South still went up. But that is not the norm at all.
I mean if you look at like San Domingue or other places of slavery that were relatively common, it
made way more economic sense to just work a slave to death and import somebody else in. So this
idea that self-interest is going to just automatically make you more moral just doesn't hold up.
Another thing is he says, oh well the roads that the Roman Empire was famed for were actually
seen as kind of a curse by the people because it let officials and armies go around and
everything else.
And the reason Europe became prosperous is because we had divided authority and all this other stuff.
And it's like, well, no.
When the Western Empire fell, you can see pretty clearly a catastrophic loss of prosperity and stability and everything else.
I mean, in Britain, you had the You basically went from a developed civilization to a very ugly and horrible form of anarchy that lasted for centuries.
And the idea that, oh, well, political authority was divided, so it's great.
And it's like, no, it means that random warlords come and slaughter everyone.
It was the removal of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.
Exactly.
You went back to nasty British and short.
And if he says, like, well, I'm just not going to open this stuff up to empirical challenge, like, well, that's fine.
But then we're not really talking about anything, are we?
Well, I'll say two things.
One, on the visibility of there being a parasitic class and how it's more obfuscated by democracy than monarchy.
Say again, it's just not that simple a binary.
There have been plenty of democracies that have elected really parasitic governments.
That everybody, you know, the citizenry at large is like, wow, this is really parasitic, and then they've done something about it.
Salvador Allende in Chile would be the biggest example of, like, they were democratically elected, and it was real apparent to everybody that it was a really parasitic overclass.
You know, South Africa today, with the ANC, I mean, even, like, liberal and left-wing blacks talk pretty openly about how just shamelessly corrupt the ANC is, and how openly nepotistic it is, and all that stuff, and that's technically a democracy.
Yeah, but keep in mind, a lot of them go at it from the left and say, well the big problem is they're not going after white monopoly capital and all this kind of stuff.
I think the idea that democracy conceals power and conceals who is sovereign is actually one of Hoppe's best points.
You want to know who is sovereign if only because, like if things are going bad in Russia right now, everybody knows who to blame.
Sure.
And I mean, if he's out there listening to this, it's unlikely, but I'm sure he'd be absolutely horrified to know that I read him at one time, but this kind of hipster author, Chuck Klausterman, he had this theory long ago.
He was talking about the impossibility of overthrowing the government.
And he created a hypothetical like, alright, what is the craziest situation and said, what if you had absolute proof that the government was behind 9-11 and they were going to hold a press conference and explain why they did this?
Would there be a revolution?
And he basically said, no.
People still wouldn't know who to go after.
Yeah, and I think that's or like what would you do? What do you do go attack?
And so the local cop right? I mean like right. I mean burn down a courthouse, right?
What what good is gonna come of that? And so I Think the fact that democracy does kind of wrap it's a
system of lies and manipulation that prevents change And I think he's very but there are solid have been counter
revolutions against corrupt democracy. Yeah Yeah, but not through democratic means, generally.
I mean, in Chile it wasn't democratic.
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
No, I didn't mean to suggest that replacing a parasitic but democratically elected government can be done democratically.
But I'm just saying that Examples like Allende in Chile and even the corrupt Democratic government in Spain that Franco overthrew are proof that, at least at times, people do have it very clear that they are being ruled by a parasitic class.
Even to a certain extent, the election of Donald Trump was, for a lot of the people who voted for him, for a lot of the people who supported him, it was because he was an outsider and he was not like these parasitic elites.
Not another Clinton, not another Bush.
Right, drain the swamp, all that.
Yeah.
Sure, democracy can make it more complicated, but again, here I think Hapa is kind of cheating by comparing something from long ago to something now.
Societies have just become much, much more complex.
There's just more going on than there was.
In the 1500s, when you had like a really simple agricultural society with not very many people and one king.
Again, if we brought back kings and queens and princes and all of these things, societies would still be infinitely more complex than they were 500 years ago.
You'd still have the internet, you'd still have the press, you'd still have, you know, 20 times as many human beings in a given political, you know, in a given polity than before.
Some of this simply has to do with what sociologists sometimes call colossalization.
There's a lot of everything now in a way that wasn't true a few hundred years ago.
If we talk about what we've talked about in past episodes with Burnham and Francis, just managerialism and the mass state.
The problems of scale arise.
I would say, though, that we have examples.
First of all, With Trump, people thought they were expelling a parasitic elite, but they weren't.
Which goes back to the point of, I don't think you can do it democratically.
But my point is that they saw it.
They did see it.
But you need some sort of, in most cases, extra parliamentary means.
Whether that's secession, whether that's states' rights, whether that's Whatever it is sure, but that's also true for overthrowing
a monarch true, but if you look at Somebody like Salazar or somebody like Franco. I mean this
wasn't that long ago or or Pinochet even right?
I mean Pinochet was voted out. Yes, and he was voted out and they've
Yeah, very narrowly It was very narrowly and now that they won they can make
all the movies and documentaries about it with people basically using
American PR techniques to basically shape public opinion and this gets into the bigger problem
I think with libertarianism generally and the foundation of hoppers whole thing and all libertarians whole thing is
they say well Value is created by a person's subjective wants and desires.
That's what drives the market.
But what we should really be asking is, okay, but what determines a person's subjective wants and desires?
Because the assumption is that the person is coming up with this stuff themselves.
And I would argue that's not really true.
Yeah.
If the last few years have shown us anything, especially with the Great Awakening, it's that the masses can be moved pretty easily just by pushing a button.
Now maybe that's like something that's new, as you suggest, because you have the internet, because you have social media, you have algorithms that can drive certain stories and everything like that.
But if you're basing your whole system on rational choices and people's perception of what's good for me or not, I don't think that rationality is there, and I think therefore the whole model is flawed.
And also, I think democracy does drive itself to destruction.
And again, Hoppe is very clear about this, and I think this is, again, one of his better points.
Democracy is not a new thing.
I mean, you can read the Greeks talking about why this is a stupid idea and why democracies failed.
Centuries ago.
And the Founding Fathers didn't think it was a good idea.
And most Americans didn't think it was a good idea.
And if we take Hoppe's own standard of democracy meaning no kings or no powerful kings and more or less universal suffrage, the post-World War I era, within a century it basically destroyed Western civilization.
And if it goes down for another century, there's just going to be nothing left.
So, I mean, just as a fact of history, we have to deal with that.
Was the West more powerful and prosperous, you know, before the Great War or now?
It's a fair point, definitely, but we're talking about post-World War I, we're talking about a kind of Wilsonian democracy, we're talking about the sort of massification and the increased popularity of democracy.
It is worth noting that in places like the U.S.
and the U.K.
in Switzerland, you had some level of democracy for as much as 100 years or more before World
War I. And those democracies were not in the process of destroying themselves in the early
19th century.
It's one of those things where I'm inclined to agree with John Maynard Keynes, the famous
economist, the statist economist, who somebody was criticizing him about, well, in the long
run, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
In the long run, we're all dead.
And he was like, well, in the long run, we're all dead.
Well, he goes after that in the book.
The extent to which, you know, democracies over the long haul will destroy themselves, and as we were just talking about, like, well, over the long haul monarchies destroyed themselves, communism sort of destroyed itself.
It's like, well, in the long run, things fall apart.
I don't know.
If you're looking for one system that can just provide infinite stability, You know, you've got to look at a species that isn't humans to really define that.
We talked about this with Fukuyama as well, where I said my final critique of it is biological, where the end of history is not going to really matter if the entire planet is Africa and all of these democracies are just ruled by the African National Congress.
Immaterial, if people have voting rights or things, it's still going to be a terrible society.
This is, you know, the problem of who, not what.
And this is why so much of political philosophy is, frankly, I think, irrelevant, and why our movement is necessary, and why I think identitarianism needs to become a general theory.
Because, ultimately, you have to start with who we are as creatures, as genetic creatures, not as these deracinated, atomized, you know, things floating around, making irrational choices.
Much less like hapas.
We're all just these, you He concedes that sometimes people will choose to live in a community with certain values, with certain people at the cost of prosperity, but it's implicit that these people are being somewhat irrational and that gradually they'll kind of get pushed out of the way.
I'm not impressed by this concession because it's not that some people will choose that, it's that basically everybody will choose that.
There are people who will make every life choice they have in front of them, like an economic one, is just tiny, if it's existent at all.
You know, these sort of like rational monsters who are constantly trying to figure out how to save a dollar here, how to save a dollar there.
I mean, these people are very few and far between.
Human beings are motivated by love and loyalty and senses of belonging.
Right, and even the people who make like great fortunes.
Oddly enough, if you look into their biographies and everything else, they're not really driven by money.
They're driven by, like, a passion, a cause.
They think they're changing the world.
If you think of even the people now who we may like or dislike among the oligarchs, I mean, they really do have it in their head, like, this is what I was put here to do.
This is why I'm going to work 20-hour days when I'm 27 or whatever it is.
It's not clipping coupons.
This was true of the Enron guys.
Bizarrely enough, for a lot of them, it wasn't entirely about the money.
It was about the danger.
It was about the thrill of the gambling.
All of those guys went on these like crazy dirt bike excursions and stuff, like in jungles in Latin America.
They were into like extreme sports.
That was the hobby of all of the top Enron guys.
Yeah, because they knew it was nonsense.
They knew they weren't selling anything.
They were just gimme danger kind of guys, whether that was gambling on You know, oil futures or whatever it was, or just, you know, being like a 45-year-old on a BMX bike, you know, in, like, the hills outside of Tijuana or something.
It was about the thrill, it was about the risk, it was about the danger.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the biggest problems that these libertarians face, is that they're... The way Ludwig von Mises, you know, when he talks about human action, I just think a lot of the presumptions he makes about human action are just wrong.
Yeah.
And it's just not the way people behave, and it's not what drives them.
I do want to circle around to this idea of democracy destroying itself though because I think I was really struck by how pressing a lot of this is.
I just want to read a quick excerpt on page 145 and he's talking about immigration policy.
And again, he's making the monarch versus democracy argument.
And he says, well, a monarch, if you were trying to deal with immigration policy, and he gives examples of monarchs like attracting Germans to settle in certain areas so they can run certain things or have farms or whatever, you would attract people who are going to make you lots of money and maybe safeguard your frontiers and basically increase the capital in your kingdom.
In contrast, and I quote, For a democratic ruler, as far as immigration policies are concerned, the incentives and disincentives are likewise distorted and the results are equally perverse for democracies.
For a democratic ruler, it also matters little whether bums or geniuses below or above average civilized and productive people immigrate into the country.
Nor seem much concerned about the distinction between temporary workers, owners of work permits, and permanent property-owning immigrants, naturalized citizens.
In fact, bums and unproductive people may well be preferred as residents and citizens because they create more so-called social problems, and democratic rulers thrive on the existence of such problems.
Moreover, bums and inferior people will likely support his egalitarian policies, whereas geniuses and superior people will not.
And then he quotes the 1965 Immigration Act as like the ultimate example of this.
Okay, so that's based.
of inferior immigrants onto domestic property owners who, if the decision were left to them,
would have sharply discriminated and chosen very different neighbors for themselves."
And then he quotes the 1965 Immigration Act as like the ultimate example of this.
Okay, so that's based. However, all of America's, almost all of America's immigration policies up
until 1965 were, if not just straight up good, were decent, were okay.
This sort of, like, saying like democracy makes the 1965 Immigration Act inevitable doesn't really make sense because there's almost 200 years of much more rational and good immigration policy under democracy until 1965.
This is true.
Switzerland's a really long-standing democracy.
That's what I was going to say.
They don't have stupid immigration policies.
Chile has been largely democratic over the last 200 years.
They really only threw open the doors to Haitians and Colombians and everybody else like six years ago, seven years ago, something like that.
It's just not that simple.
He quotes, not quotes, but he cites Switzerland approvingly.
Quite a few times.
And you do have to ask yourself, like, okay, if your whole theory is, well, Switzerland's not a monarchy.
It basically never was.
Japan, as well.
Since 1945, they've been a democracy and they have the greatest immigration policy in the history of the world.
Although they may be getting a little shaky on that, but that could be due to American pressure more than anything else.
But I mean, I think Switzerland, I mean, we had a debate when we were talking about Fukuyama, you know, whether all we want is just like a nice white country, right?
Or whether we want some glorious mission to unite this, that, and the other thing.
Right.
But if you were saying, okay, well, name something in the real world now that isn't like crazy or grandiose or some absurdly messianic thing, you could just say, Switzerland.
Yeah, I want that.
Where basically you have a canton, you've got your people, you run your local affairs.
If there's a national issue, you deal with it, but you're not a member of the EU, you're prosperous.
And yes, I know they've been dealing with immigration problems too, and so you've got the Swiss People's Party and you have some responses, but it's on a totally different scale than what most Western countries have had to deal with.
And I'm fully on board with that.
That is legitimate.
quite a few times and you say, well maybe it's not so much democracy itself that
the problem is the problem but like the form of democracy, the scale of democracy.
Democracy at the extreme local level may be quite good. And I'm fully on board
with that. That is legitimate. Talking about how well democracy works or
doesn't work based upon scale, based upon geography, population, ethnicity, diversity,
multiculturalism, all these things.
There's a lot of interesting stuff there, but as much as Hoppe likes Switzerland and, you know, proves it, you know, incites it approvingly and views it as kind of an exception to some of these things, fundamentally for him, at the end of the day, it's still this tyranny because there is a government, there's a draft, everybody goes into the military, all men go into the military after graduating high school, all these things, and Democracy the God That Failed is ultimately an anarcho-capitalist manifesto.
And we gotta get into that, because when he starts off about his defensive monarchy, that's almost just like a cheap pop in professional wrestling or something.
It's just something to get your attention, and then he's got you hooked.
It does work on that, because it's not every day that you read a book being like, monarchies are better than democracies.
I mean, maybe in our circles.
Let me tell you, when I read this book at age 17, I was like, What is this dude talking about?
Like, man, this is weird.
Right.
But I mean, it worked, right?
It was a shock tactic at the beginning.
It worked.
And then he gets into the weeds with, okay, now we're going to have private insurance companies that are basically going to be... So, okay, yeah.
Okay, so what's your definition of anarcho-capitalism?
I have a hard time even conceptualizing it because every time, he talks about a natural order and he talks in some detail about how this would work in terms of insurance companies and contracts and you can even, in the era of crypto, you can even talk about things like smart contracts that everybody can view and be verified.
Theoretically, I can vaguely picture how this works.
But at the end of the day, if you have a bunch of competing insurance or security companies, one's gonna win.
You gotta back up here.
So as Hoppe envisions it, anarcho-capitalism is anarchy.
There are no governments of any kind, but it's an anarchy that's really oriented around The market around profit.
It's not the kind of left-wing anarchy that's just envisioned sort of one big hippie commune or something.
It's not anarcho-primitivism in which we all just go back to the Stone Age and become hunter-gatherers again, etc, etc.
It's just everything is just private companies.
So these insurance companies that Greg is talking about Hapa, some of you will probably find this very hard to believe.
It gets into a lot of detail.
But Hapa says that in this great anarcho-capitalist world, since we won't have governments, there won't be courts, and there won't be police, and there won't be National Guard, you know, there won't be, you know, no 9-1-1 services.
So what will fill that void is insurance companies that have like private security forces and private ambulance services.
Yeah, that's why I keep That's why I can't even picture it.
And that they will all, you know, because anarcho-capitalism is very anti-monopoly because
it views government as this illegal monopoly of security services.
Government as an outlaw organization.
Right.
So instead of having one police force, there will be many different insurance companies
with private police forces that compete in an open-air market the same way Pepsi and
Coke compete for your dollar for the best tasting, slightly caffeinated cola beverage.
All of the, you know, Geico and State Farm will compete price-wise and service-wise for which one of the two you want to contract for who you will call if somebody breaks into your home.
If you're thinking about like ED-209 and RoboCop, you've got the right idea.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And interestingly enough, you know, as fantastical as this sounds, I think Vice recently had an article whining that, you know, because in a lot of these neighborhoods, the police either can't or won't do their jobs anymore.
So you actually do.
I think there's this app called Citizen or something, and they actually are rolling out sort of a private security force because the police can't ensure security anymore.
Now, here's the thing.
That's not a glorious victory for the free market.
That's because we have social breakdown, and this is the point.
This is why when you ask, like, how do you even define it, I can't, because it sounds to me like, well, we're gonna have a government, we just call it an insurance company instead, because one's gonna win, and everyone's just gonna say, this one, and then that's the state.
I don't care what you call it, it's the state.
Well, this also gets in to the idea of market failure or not.
Market failure being when the free market fails to do something good that it's supposed to.
This can happen both with voids and with bad things, like Enron and that whole scandal was a market failure
because the free market didn't catch these guys, didn't figure out that what they were doing was voodoo,
was just made up.
And then some other, like the flip side of that is when liberals talk about food deserts in the ghetto,
like whole neighborhoods where there are no supermarkets or grocery stores or anything, that is a market failure.
The free market failed to bring something that's obviously pretty necessary to live a good life and you just rely on corner stores.
I've lived in ghettos before and that is a reality and it really does suck.
I did too, but I also can explain why that happened, which is because they keep getting robbed.
I think it was Walgreens just shut down a whole host of locations on the West Coast because they passed a law saying if you shoplift items under a certain amount, we're not going to process it.
So guess what everybody did?
They shoplifted stuff.
The stores close and then we get, why are there food deserts?
Because you keep robbing everything.
Yeah, it's just an example.
Your explanation for the existence of food deserts is correct, but it's still in some sense a market failure.
I would say they're responding to incentives accurately there.
But it's a market failure in the sense that the market does not, due to all of these external reasons, granted, fails to provide a basic service that people need, like grocery stores.
I would say that in certain cases, it's also economies of scale and free market capitalism just don't mix.
If you're talking about something like, say, a nuclear power plant, or you're talking about some massive thing of infrastructure, in the short-term interest of any company, It's never going to be in their interest to do something.
There are some things which only government can do.
There are some things only government projects and only government or several governments can do together to make happen.
And the idea that... Well, so that's the thing.
So Hoppe would say that that's not true because Hoppe basically does not believe that there is such a thing as market failure.
He views the market as such a pure and good ideal that Yeah, although I will say this, he does have a better sense of real-world politics and the implications of some of these policies, particularly with regards to immigration and things like that.
cannot be a failure and I think that is deeply silly.
Yeah, although I will say this, he does have a better sense of real world politics and
the implications of some of these policies, particularly with regards to immigration
and things like that.
And he actually goes after Walter Bloch, who's a relatively well-known libertarian, also
of the Austrian school.
I guess we'd call him more of a left libertarian than Hoppe.
Not really.
Walter Block agrees with basically everything Hoppe has to say except immigration.
Except immigration.
Block isn't a lefty, I mean he's still Rothbardian.
Right, Rothbardian then.
But Hoppe says...
That it is a consistent and in fact necessary libertarian position to limit immigration, at least under current circumstances because of the welfare state and everything else.
Now that already means that the Reason Magazine crowd and the Cato Institute crowd and all those guys are going to cast them into the outer darkness.
Physically remove him, you might say.
And one example that Hoppe gives in the book is he's talking about, he's quoting Walter Block here,
and he says, a truly remarkable position is staked out by Walter Block, a libertarian case for free
immigration in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Block does not deny the above predicted consequences
of an open border policy, i.e. the breakdown of Western civilization. To the contrary, he writes,
suppose unlimited immigration is made the order of the day while minimum wages, unions, welfare,
and a law code soft on criminals are still in place in the host country.
Then, it might well be maintained, the host country would be subjected to increased crime, welfarism, and unemployment.
An open-door policy would imply not economic freedom, but forced integration with all the dregs of the world with enough money to reach our shores.
Back to Hoppe.
Nonetheless, Bloch then goes on to advocate an open-door policy regardless of those predictable
consequences and he claims such a stand is required by the principles of libertarian
political philosophy. Now Elise Hoppe calls that out and that speaks to a bigger thing on the
American right where we see a problem and we say hey here's an obvious solution to that problem and
then some idiot pops up and says no our principles say we can't do that. Yeah. To which the
response should be one then the principles are stupid. Two, the principle, it's not about
A principle or an ideological program or a theory, and if the theory doesn't work out, we warp the facts to fit the theory.
I mean, politics should be based on, this is us, this is our people, we're defending our interest, and what's good is what works.
Okay, so I'm so glad you went on that little monologue because... I tend to do that.
Yeah, but not all of them are good.
I'm complimenting you for the fact that it was a good one.
Something I was thinking about when I was looking over Hoppe's stuff in preparation for this was a great line from Wilmot Robertson in The Dispossessed Majority that I failed to quote in our episode about him.
Wilmot Robertson, at the beginning of Chapter 25 in The Dispossessed Majority, writes at length about economics, and I've always just loved this passage.
It's a little long, so bear with me.
If there was ever a discipline that should be founded on reason, and on reason alone, it is economics.
Yet, like politics, economics has now been so theorized and theologized, so supercharged with tendaciousness and unreason, as to be almost completely shrouded from the prying eye of objectivity.
Officiating as the priesthood of the various fiscal cults that dominate modern economic thought, some of which stray well beyond the boundaries of economics and meddle in practically every aspect of human behavior, is a mishmash of liberal historicists, doctrinaire materialists, bureaucratic statisticians, and tax-happy plutocrats.
Any given economic system must prove to be false or inadequate over a period of time for the obvious reason that no one economic system can effectively adjust to the wildly fluctuating economic conditions which harry and bedevil every nation during its lifespan.
What is good economics for a country with unlimited natural resources and an industrious, expanding population can be bad economics for a nation without resources and with a declining birth rate.
Also, foreign or civil wars have a habit of overturning the best laid economic plans, and in an ever more interdependent world, even a small shift in the economy of one nation may produce a chain reaction in the economics of others.
You know, I would say that There are plenty of libertarians out there who have interesting things to say, and Hoppe is certainly one of them, and a lot of his critiques of the welfare state or modernity or democracy are at the very least interesting, but all of these guys put these economic principles above absolutely everything else, and I think that that's very
Weird, for one, to feel more aligned to an economic concept or an economic theory than you feel aligned or loyal to a people or a nation.
Something that's real, something concrete.
Right, and two, again, Robertson is right.
Economic systems that work in some places some of the time don't work in other places other times, just because it's complicated.
Right.
He lays out certain axiomatic things here, where he says, well, secession is good, and he says secession is always anti-democratic because it's inherently anti-majoritarian.
I'll concede that point.
Most of the time, anyway.
Although, frankly, we can point to cases where there were mutual secessions, the Czechs and the Slovaks.
There was no bloodletting there.
They both seem to have agreed.
Nobody was like, I will fight to keep this together.
So even that can be done democratically.
But he says, well, the smaller a state will be, the more likely it will be for free trade as opposed to protectionism.
Well, not necessarily.
I mean, it really depends on what that small state is trying to accomplish and what it sees as its primary interest.
Taiwan, for example, made a deliberate choice years ago to specialize in semiconductors because they thought that would make it valuable to the US and therefore an ally worth protecting.
Switzerland, of course, is famous for its banking laws which were so secretive that it would allow you to put money there that other governments couldn't get at.
I mean, that's not exactly, you know, open exchange of ideas and information or anything like that.
You could talk about Monaco or whatever else or things in the Cayman Islands where they specialize in basically keeping capital away from other nations.
Or even just Petrol states, small nations that have one really valuable resource are often not super into free trade.
Sure, Singapore, like a city state, will absolutely be into free trade, guaranteedly.
But again, how much you like free trade or not depends more on your resources, I would say, than your size.
And again, the value of those resources will just naturally change with time as technology changes.
And I think if we were talking, take Singapore for example, if we're talking about government, clearly Singapore is not a democracy, clearly we wouldn't...
Whether you say it's limited government or not, some people would actually say, yeah, it actually is limited government, and some people would say, well, no, because if you put chewing gum on the sidewalk, they cane you.
Right.
But I think this kind of misses the whole point, and again, goes back to the original critique.
It's not whether government is big or small, it's what it does and in whose benefit does it act.
Those are the only questions you should be asking.
Well, and how well it does it as well.
I mean, to me, I don't care how big or small or like, oh, look at these words on the paper and the principles.
That's all meaningless.
Like, what's it actually doing?
What are the concrete interests that it's defending?
And people who try to, like, work backwards.
And one thing I will, again, give Hoppe credit for is that he says, look, any written power tends towards the absolute.
That's his quote.
And he's absolutely right about that.
And he says, look, unless you have power in place to check it, The state will inherently grow larger and larger and larger to the point where it consumes itself.
Now that's... Sure, but Hoppe is also not the first person to point this thing out.
No, he's not, he's not, but he's already ahead of the game of these American conservatives who think waving around the Constitution is going to save us.
Right.
You know, at least I have the Constitution in me.
Yeah, granted that Hoppe has thought... And this is the thing, it's like, even now if you say, okay, well, we're still free, we still have property, we're still a capital state, he would say no, and I've...
Frankly, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds, not on racial grounds, and he was basically right.
Here's Hapa.
The modern welfare state has largely stripped private property owners of the right to exclusion
implied in the concept of private property.
Discrimination is outlawed, employers cannot hire whom they want, landlords cannot rent
to whom they want, sellers cannot sell to whomever they wish, buyers cannot buy from
whoever they wish to buy, and groups of private property owners are not permitted to enter
into whatever restrictive covenant they believe to be mutually beneficial.
The state has thus robbed the people of much of their personal and physical protection.
Not to be able to exclude others means not to be able to protect oneself.
Restrictive covenants, obviously, were one of the key victories of the, I would say, pre-civil rights movement.
And if you look at what happened in a lot of these cities that fell apart, and we talk about the Great Replacement in certain American cities, a lot of that happened when restrictive covenants got struck down, and you just saw these neighborhoods basically collapse overnight.
Because unless you have almost that Swiss canton system, where you have a stake in the community, Where you can say, no, we do have a common interest here and it does matter what you do with your property and we can band together on an agreed upon basis.
You're not free.
Yeah, totally agreed.
Hapa is right and you are right, but what's not the case is that there's the simple There's this simple dichotomy of, oh, democracies will inevitably bring about the end of that sort of thing.
I don't think that that is true.
I think it's really difficult to say that that's just automatically, guaranteedly the case.
And I think it's stranger still to say, oh, but if you have monarchies, monarchies will definitely protect that sort of thing.
I don't think there's any kind of guarantee to that.
I mean, I think he would just say that it would protect it better, and his argument for that was that The monarch would protect those kinds of rights because ultimately if he doesn't stand up for those kinds of contracts he undermines his own throne.
But of course in the same book he's also said all these people hate him anyway so I mean it's kind of self-contradictory there.
I mean look the bigger problem the bigger question here ultimately because we can say okay he's good on some stuff but the fundamental things are wrong.
I think we're agreed on that.
He specifically goes after Buchanan.
He goes after what he calls a conservative socialism.
And he says, no, you cannot achieve socially conservative ends with the state.
And he says, anyone who's social conservative must be not just a libertarian, but radically anti-statist, essentially revolutionary.
And then, of course, he flips the same thing to libertarians.
He says, if you're a libertarian, you have to be social conservative.
Now, I just didn't find this very persuasive, because to me, if people respond to incentives, if the state is creating negative incentives, which you've just spent the entire book describing, It follows that it can also create positive incentives too, and it's just a question of finding out what those things are, and we can point to states doing positive things like here and now.
Yeah, in the real world.
Yeah, and this is like one of the things that I would say the right, broadly speaking, has over the left, is if you ask a leftist, like, in what kind of society would you be a conservative?
Would you be happy?
They don't really have many answers.
Like, oh, for that brief part during the Spanish Civil War when, like, anarcho-communists were in charge for about a month or, like, some random... The Paris Commune.
Right, yeah, the Paris Commune while you were getting, like, shelled all day and had no food.
Like, that was great.
Whereas, you know, broadly speaking on the right, if you said, you know, what do you want?
I could, well, that.
You know, this thing over here.
That exists now, or existed 20 years ago, or Switzerland, yeah.
These aren't like crazy ideas.
I mean, I have more romantic ambitions too, but if you were like, what would be something you'd be happy in?
This.
And let's like, take Hungary for example.
I mean, they are succeeding in raising native birth rates.
And the way you do that is by making it affordable for people to have kids.
This isn't particularly complicated.
And if you say, oh, well, If you have big government, you're inherently going to get this kind of social breakdown.
It's like, well, not necessarily, because we can point to plenty of times when the state fortified traditional morality, not undermine it.
Well, the state, again, even in the realm of economics, there are these huge success stories of the state, like whether it's NASA and getting to the moon, or inventing the atom bomb.
I mean, that was a really successful state-sponsored endeavor.
The free market did not do that.
And the internet.
The AK-47 as well, a Stalinist Soviet Russia project, that's like the greatest gun ever invented.
Again, I've basically said this a few times already, but it's just not that simple.
Every time the government creates a policy, it will automatically fail because it is the government and the government is always bad.
And the inverse of that is also not true.
It's just this very Pollyanna-ish view of, oh, if there was no government and we just had these private insurance companies, Things would be great all of the time because everything would be decided by the free market.
I think instead of talking in terms of market failure, as you were bringing up earlier before we got on the air, you know, even Aristotle says, he takes the state as a given.
He basically says a man who is not inside the state is either a god or an animal.
And instead of talking about market failure, we really should be talking about state failure.
Because a lot of the times you start seeing these things emerge, private security companies, certain new authorities, even kings and new forms of sovereignty.
It comes when the state fails to fulfill its essential responsibilities.
And we're kind of seeing that happen in real time.
Now, I mean, we saw it to a small extent in Seattle.
We're seeing it with these private security companies are cropping up now.
We're seeing it with all these little arrangements people are making to get around, you know, the vice grip that the state we live under has us in.
You could argue that cryptocurrency is probably one of those ways.
In that, you've got people don't trust even the national currency in some cases because they feel it's been devalued
so they start turning to other things.
And ultimately, the state's legitimacy, that is not a given.
And that can fail.
And once that fails, a lot of what he talks about becomes more relevant.
But that's only because things are bad and this is the best we can do.
It's not because this is actually a good thing.
Right.
You and I would view the rise of private security companies.
As basically a bad thing because it means that crime is increasing and that the police cannot make up the difference.
It depends on the situation.
You know like if I'm besieged by like lunatics then the private security company comes along and you know especially if it's run by my friends or something and says like hey we're gonna protect your property I'd be like okay and if things get really bad and somebody is like guess what I'm you know the king now and I'm gonna make sure everything here is fine I'd be like all right like you're obviously the one who's Fulfilling the role of the state but things aren't supposed to get to that level Yeah, and if things do get to that level something has gone wrong.
It's not like a glorious achievement again I'm reminded of Milton Friedman who wrote in capitalism and freedom where he was talking about the schools the public school system now under massive resistance Uh, everybody in Virginia, I think they abolished the public school system for like a year in Virginia.
Really?
Yeah, and Friedman was like, oh this is a glorious example of like the free market, and it's like, no, it's just because they don't want to have integrated schools.
We're also seeing the same thing kind of happen now, where you're seeing an increase in homeschooling, you're seeing an increase in people pushing bills with what they call fund students, not systems, where basically we're not going to fund public education so much as we're going to fund the right to education, but you can choose what kind.
I support that, but it's because the public schools are bad.
But I'm not willing to concede that they were always bad.
Right, or that they always will be bad, and that it would be impossible to create a public school system that was good.
Right.
Because we can point to times in history where that's not true, you know?
Yeah, this just seems... I mean, the public school system in this country, when it was really set up in the cities, it was done deliberately to facilitate Americanization.
Especially when you had a lot of these, like, Catholic migrants who a lot of the Protestants thought they viewed it suspiciously and everything else.
Huntington talked a lot about this and who are we?
And in that respect, it basically succeeded.
The Catholic school system, which in some ways was designed as an alternative to that, Even that ultimately ended up becoming, essentially, nationalist and pro-American.
This whole, like, foreign thing, like, oh, they're actually loyal to Rome.
Like, that actually didn't play out.
But the difference is now you have schools that are not teaching even civic nationalism.
They're basically teaching you to undermine the state and teaching you to... Yeah, teaching anti-civic nationalism.
Well, they're teaching you to be a parasite.
And higher education, if you say, well, is higher education a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, it depends.
I mean, what are they being educated in?
I mean, at this point, I would say if you have somebody who has a graduate degree in ethnic studies, I mean, that person's an active liability to whatever company he's a part of, but also to the entire society, because the only thing he's been trained to do is make up grievances and file lawsuits against you.
But does that mean, therefore, that all colleges and all education or all liberal arts education is inherently bad?
No.
Does that mean that the state should not be involved in these things?
No.
Arguably, if the state had been more involved in these things from the beginning, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Well, this is an amusing inversion of the way I would critique a socialist who's insistent that we need to nationalize X, Y, and Z industry.
If a socialist approached me and was like, You know, we need to, you know, the state needs to take control of all car manufacturing in the United States.
It's like, you know, my sense would be like, well, why?
I mean, cars are generally available, they're largely affordable.
I mean, sure, they could be cheaper in the sense that I guess everything could be cheaper.
Right.
But we don't really have a supply issue with cars, nor do we have an enormous affordability issue with cars.
System as is is working decently.
So why further complicate it by having the government seize the means of production in this one particular industry?
It would be a lot more open to the government doing that if there was an obvious market failure.
But in this example with car production, there is not an obvious market failure whatsoever.
And Hoppe is just the other side of that.
Anything in which the government is involved in must be privatized.
Well, only if it's not doing it very well.
I don't feel this overwhelming need to privatize mail delivery or the post office because it seems to generally work.
The fact that the government is behind it just doesn't automatically make it terrible.
There are certain things that... we have to work from where we are, right?
So if you said right now Do you want to make it so public schools don't automatically get money and instead parents get money to choose whatever kind of system they want?
I would say yes, given where we are now.
Ditto, yeah.
In terms of higher education, you know, I'd be, you know, seize the endowments and use that to pay off student debt, that kind of thing.
I mean, you know, whatever you got to do because we're in the situation we are now, we have to deal with the institutions we have now.
But, The problem is when you're wedded to an ideology that says, here is this formula.
And I can take this formula and dump it on whatever historical situation, on whatever people, on whatever race, at whatever time, and the optimum outcome is going to occur.
That's just not true.
And you have to, and this is a big problem with the American right because, and maybe with Americans generally, because these people literally, we, literally believe that our country came into existence when a bunch of guys signed a document.
And that's not true!
True, yeah.
Well, this is something I would, I wonder if anybody has ever asked Hoppa this, of like, okay, so if you had the option to just snap your fingers and make America a monarchy, would you do it?
And my answer is like, well, who would the monarch be?
It would really depend!
I mean, you know, it's not, it's not automatically going to be better or worse once we abolish democracy and have a king.
Like, it's going to matter a lot who that king is, because that king is going to have some pretty unchecked power.
Imagine, I mean, I, I'm a traditionalist, and so I'm probably more given to more romantic monarchism than most, but I mean, let's say Britain, they got rid of the universal subversion and went back to a more or less, maybe not an absolute monarchy, but a monarch with some real power.
Like, it's gonna matter a lot whether it's, say, William or Perry, you know?
I mean, like, it really does matter who the person is, and if you just focus on the system, You miss all that and this is why I think Identitarianism is really the way forward and why we should claim that label because fundamentally what we're talking about is, you know, what is the goal?
What is the point of human existence?
What is the point of politics?
And I would say it's the highest possible development of yourself, of your people, of the state.
You know, the greatest development of power, the greatest accomplishment, the greatest wealth, the greatest happiness.
Always going upward.
That's what you should be looking at.
But you have to have flexibility in terms of how you achieve these things because one thing I will say from Hayek is what he called the pretense of knowledge, right?
You can't just assume that you have all the answers to this is the perfect system and everything else.
New information is going to come at you.
You need to have a way to reconcile it to reality.
And if you're imprisoned by this theory, whether it's socialist or anarcho-capitalist... Imprisoned by this theory?
That is a great expression.
Well, that's... because that's Hape's huge limitation, and it's the limitation of all of these other often interesting and insightful libertarian thinkers, whether it be Rothbard or von Mises, Milton Friedman, etc.
They are just imprisoned by these ideologies.
Yeah.
It just limits your imagination so much.
And you get into these arguments that just are Completely disconnected from it.
Did you have the inherent right to a tank?
But what if you know your neighbor said that?
He's not allowed to go on the grass so you could kill his family.
I mean just like crazy arguing about this Go anywhere with that thing you were talking about of like, you know slavery versus climate, right?
Who cares?
I don't know.
Well, that was like early in the book.
Yeah, not a very meaningful debate But the problem is that he's basing so much of what he's saying on these kinds of things, these extreme situations, and reducto ad absurdum and everything else.
And it's also a big problem when even on examples as extreme as slavery, he's getting the basic facts wrong.
Yeah.
Well, and again, this happens.
I mean, you and I have both experienced this because we lived and worked in the beltway in mainstream libertarianism, mainstream conservatism.
You do meet these people where they have this burning drive to solve this riddle of like, oh, do humans have a right to sell themselves into slavery?
And they really, really want to get to the bottom of this question.
And it's like, Why?
Even if you had the answer to that question, it just wouldn't matter that much, because the number of people who would sell themselves into slavery if it were legal is tiny, and the number of people who would be like, oh man, I can't sell myself into slavery, that's such an injustice, I want true freedom, is equally tiny.
Why not talk about something with immediate, tangible impact?
When he's talking about, in this book, it's of fundamental importance that we get rid of Social Security, that we get rid of Medicare, that we get rid of these things.
If you're falling back on public opinion, oh we need to change public opinion as he ultimately does, you're just wasting your time because you're just not going to get those things through democratically.
Now what you could do is you could create alternative institutions that would work more effectively and can solve some of these problems that could be done in the private sector, but again I think the reason we're being forced to turn to those things is just because we're under a system that's failing us.
It's state failure.
It's not because like this is the best way to do things.
And this is also true, ironically enough, with these kings.
I mean, one of the very first things he says in the book is, when the Roman Empire fell and Europe was politically divided, these kings rose up.
Well, these kings rose up because they were basically military warlords.
They were the insurance companies of their day and basically took over an area and then just said, okay, I'm in charge.
It was private, yeah.
Nobody agreed on it.
There was nothing voluntary about it.
It sure wasn't a utopia.
No, and also like even the idea of rights These abstractions don't matter.
And the biggest problem with where we are now is instead of trying to imagine that you can write the perfect constitution or thinking, oh, if the Supreme Court had decided this way or that way, you have to say, no, who not what?
Who are we trying to defend?
What is our community?
What are the people that we have a duty to?
And then what do we see as the good for that group of people?
How we get there, that's a technical question.
I mean, I'm willing to accept any means as long as it can change based on new information.
It's not just that it can change, it's that it will change.
Right.
I mean, if you had even something like you were talking about with cars, I mean, if you had, during World War II, when the government basically took over production and said, okay, we're going to build these Jeeps and tanks and everything else, it's not a question of right or wrong, it's a question of this is the objective that needs to be accomplished.
Exactly.
And it just becomes a question of what's the most efficient way of doing it.
Right.
And sometimes the most efficient way of doing something is through state power.
Right.
More often than not.
This is a libertarian myth that a state-based solution is always inefficient and that there's always a more efficient way of doing it through the free market.
It's just not true.
If it were true, there wouldn't be an AK-47, there wouldn't be the atom bomb, we wouldn't have made it to the moon, etc.
etc.
Yeah, we wouldn't have the internet, you wouldn't have had that tremendous productivity and everything else.
And I think that Libertarianism, the reason why I guess we focus so much on it in this podcast is because that really is the starting point for so many people because it's the only alternative to mainstream conservatism you get when you're a kid and you're basically like, all right, well, this is stupid.
What else is there?
Right.
Well, that rising tide of libertarianism from 2007 until Trump basically ended it in 2015 was enormously influential for a lot of people, largely because the George W. Bush presidency was such a colossal, horrific failure.
It basically destroyed our entire generation on the GOP.
Yeah, on like every level, so then the only alternative on the right that there was was libertarianism, and we're still Kind of dealing with that legacy.
And it also matters because even if you're not a libertarian, you look at this group of people and you say, okay, politically, it really matters whether these guys go with Hoppe or, say, the Cato Institute on questions like immigration, if you're trying to build a political coalition.
You really do want the right libertarians.
And again, Murray Rothbard, who Hoppe exalts in in this book and calls him the most influential libertarian theorist and everything else.
Rothbard was fanatically opposed to Pat Buchanan's trade policies, but ultimately he did support him.
With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we will repeal the 20th century, all that.
That was Rothbard.
He was apparently in that room with Sam Francis and I guess Russell Kirk and whoever else when they decided he was going to run for president.
Politically, this does matter, even if it gets kind of esoteric, because ultimately to get to where we want to go, we're going to need a coalition.
As far as questions about secession and giving people a way out of the system, this work is valuable because it gives you a theoretical grounding of like, yeah, you do have the right to opt out of a system that's failing you.
I would just say that the reason you opt out of the system is to create a better system, not to hand over your life to some insurance company or whatever else.
Crazy scheme, right.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm.
Don't download one, call State Farm.
Sell your children into slavery.
I would recommend, I mean, for our younger listeners, I would recommend not really diving into the weeds of all of this libertarian theory and stuff.
I mean, the libertarian moment has really passed.
I think there are a lot better books out there and a lot more engaging intellectual movements and arguments.
I should say, I mean, okay, when Greg and I do this podcast, we are never speaking on behalf of Jared Taylor, but that is especially true of this episode.
Mr. Taylor, I know, is a really big fan of Hans Hermann Hoppe and his body of work, and he thinks Democracy of God and the Failed is a really, really stupendous work.
I think both you and I would count as post-libertarians.
Yeah.
Although you were maybe never even a libertarian.
I mean, I was full black and gold flag and all that.
Yeah, I never took it that far.
But yeah, I read Wilmot Robertson instead, guys.
Quite frankly, I read Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, who have much more nuanced views on the state and state power and limitations.
And who constitutes the elite.
Yeah.
The idea that, again, when we talk about the managerial class, there are certain incentives in place structurally, but ultimately it is a question of, alright, but who are these elites?
There's that old, it was a leftist quote, but the world's not being destroyed, it's being murdered, and the people who are doing it have names and addresses.
That was some environmentalist, I think.
Are we quoting from the Earth Liberation Front?
It was something like that, yeah.
But the point is that There are specific people who push for specific things.
And sometimes, if you try to create a theoretical framework to explain things, you end up missing what's right in front of your face.
It's like, no, I don't need this complicated 600-year theory.
All I need to know, it's this guy right here who did this.
And here's who inspired him.
Here's where he got his funding from.
This is what he was trying to do.
How do I know that?
Because he said it right here.
And that's how we need to approach politics.
Who, not what?
I guess like the last thing and I'll kick it over to you as the token leftist I guess on this.
I mean, do you think the kind of conservative socialism that, not socialism, I don't think, I mean that word is just wrong, but let's call it nationalist populism.
Sure, yeah.
Is that the wave that's still coming?
Even though Trump has largely failed, is that still where the momentum is?
Yeah, I would say that's absolutely true.
And what would you say is the distinction between that and kind of the AOC socialism, other than obviously the racial and cultural questions?
I think national populism is much more realistic about, I mean, the national populists are aware of the limitations of state power.
They don't, I mean, AOC and company are like, and all these socialists are like a foil to Hoppe, where Hoppe thinks, you know, absolutely anything done by government is automatically going to fail.
AOC and company think, well, absolutely anything government does is going to work.
The national populists strike a much more realist note on it, of like, We know we can use the state, you know, selectively to do specific things with the knowledge that, you know, sometimes state actions really do fail and they do create, you know, unintended consequences, you know, unforeseen, like, negative results.
And that awareness is really important because, like, yes, I mean, Hoppe and all these libertarians are correct.
Plenty of state programs do fail and do create perverse incentives and you do need to be aware of that.
And I think You know, writers at the American Conservative or politicians like Josh Hawley are aware of that and that awareness is really important.
You do need that realism.
And it gives it a class foundation, too.
Basically, you know, I think what's the foundation of any nationalist movement, which is the middle class, especially the middle class that's worried about falling into the lower class.
Yeah.
The people who have a stake in it.
That's right.
And this is also one of the big problems, I guess.
And then we'll close on it when he talks about elites, because he talks so much about elite leadership and everything else.
But the problem is elites don't really have a stake in the society.
They can always leave.
That's one of the things about being really, really rich is you really don't have a homeland.
And if you're really, really poor, you don't have a homeland.
And so, if you're somebody who, you know, this is my house, my equity is tied in here, this is my small piece of property, here's my farm, here's this thing, you know, where my ancestors were buried, like, those are the people who have a stake in the country and ultimately the political order has to be based on those guys because they're the only ones who will defend it.
That would be another difference between the National Populists and Bernie Kratz.
Bernie Kratz socialism is oftentimes a lot more oriented towards helping the poor, like the bottom quintile of earners, and National Populism is much more about the middle quintile, which I think is, especially in the contemporary American context, is really important.
It's worse because they're importing The bottom quintile.
I mean, this is, I think, the ultimate thing that we have to say to socialists who are saying, oh, look at the poor and everything else.
Like, no, everything you're doing is ensuring that now we'll have two permanent underclasses.
Yeah, that's right.
And furthermore, one is not enough.
And this is also where I think Hoppe was right, is that Their incentive is to bring in people because they're not productive, because they have nothing to offer.
There's a reason why white South African farmers who would be productive are not allowed into this country, whereas if you crawl across the border burning an American flag, everyone gives you a pat on the back and Catholic Charities throws $1,000 at you or whatever.
And that ultimately has to be the attack.
It's not just, well, the left socialists are bad because they're unrealistic.
It's because they're pursuing perverse ends.
But again, Hoppe is right, but almost for the wrong reasons about this.
I mean, it's not, the reason they're bringing in unproductive people isn't just because,
oh, that's naturally how it goes with democracy.
This has a lot more to do with racial antagonisms and, I mean, the ideology of wokeness and
multiculturalism and all of these things.
That is the issue.
The fact that people vote every couple years is not what guarantees this open borders and
the exclusion of white South African farmers.
Right.
It's the fact that the other side is mobilized constantly.
Right, and their ideology is hegemonic right now, and that ideology isn't necessarily tied to democracy in the sense of just voting for leadership.
But Hoppe's binary of just everything is the state or not the state, everything is democracy or not democracy, just doesn't let you perceive this much more complicated situation.
And that's why I'm telling everybody to not spend too much time Reading Rothbard and von Mises and all these people.
Be familiar with it, but not much beyond that.
I mean, I would read egalitarianism as a revolt against nature.
That's a great essay.
Yeah, I recommended that, I think, on our first ever podcast.
Some of these guys have good essays.
Ludwig von Mises, he wrote Economic Calculation and the Socialist Commonwealth.
That's a really good read on the limitations of how much you can use the state to direct economic activity.
And why central planning ultimately fails if you try to do it on a large enough scale.
Exactly.
Because no system can get all the information.
There are these nuggets of information and these decent critiques, but if you're trying to understand the state or elites or democracy, you're just so much better off reading Again, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, James Burnham, or even certain leftists like Chris Hedges have just...
Yeah, they just kind of grasp the multifacetedness of the system we're in.
We don't live in a world filled with these simple binaries of capitalism versus socialism, or democracy versus autocracy.
And we're still dealing with the legacy of the Cold War on the American right, where people are still thinking in those terms.
Sure, it's just not that simple.
I guess I'll close with this.
You know ultimately I mean if I had some grand intellectual ambition it would be you know a theory of Identitarianism like this is how I perceive history and everything else, but I think the starting point has to be it's not about a System so much is it's the history of peoples and it's the history of people's genetic and cultural inherent abilities and preferences and what drives them to succeed or fail and Really, you have to be opportunistic with what comes at you in terms of knowledge, because at the end of the day, it's an evolutionary thing.
It's what works.
It's not what looks good and is an elegant theory.
The problem, of course, is that And maybe this is the biggest problem with libertarianism.
People aren't rational, and even libertarians who say they're rational may be driven by irrational ends.
They want a theory that explains everything and that gives them a feeling of righteousness, even if that's not how the world works.
Alright, we'll close it there, I think.
Alright guys, and we really appreciate your feedback and thank you for listening.
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