Dave Smith and Rob Bernstein celebrate Part Of The Problem's 500th episode, reflecting on their intellectual evolution from minarchism to Rothbardian anarchism and highlighting George Reisman's influence. They critique the "blowback" theory regarding U.S. foreign policy aggression while debunking David Parkman's claims about libertarian views on guns and property rights. The hosts condemn the hypocrisy of the "love it or leave it" tax argument and expose mainstream media incompetence in unsubstantiated attacks on Tulsi Gabbard, ultimately framing these discussions as essential defenses against political and economic tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Supporting The Gas Digital Network00:15:31
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Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
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Dear Joe, I don't know if the settings do it.
We just got to the setup.
What is up, everybody?
What's going on?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
And not just any episode.
Not just any episode.
It is, in fact, the 500th episode of Part of the Problem.
Can you believe it?
I know I can't.
Sometimes it's hard to even wrap my head around the fact that it's 500 of these goddamn podcasts.
It's 500 days of your life that you showed up to work.
Yeah.
That in itself is just remarkable.
I missed a few days because of the AIDS, but I was pretty good for a couple hundred of them.
Yeah, but you know, like people will focus on the shows you missed because of the AIDS, but no one talks about all those days you played through the AIDS.
Your AIDS was acting up a little bit, but Robin Fire still showed up, still came in, still brought the fire.
I went through it live on air.
Look at this hairline.
Yeah.
Oh, look at it.
Oh, when I first met Rob Bernstein, he was Mike Brancatelli.
And then little by little, he turned into Rob Bernstein.
We had to give him a new name.
He slimmed down.
His hair fell out.
It really is.
Oh, my God.
I never even put that together.
It's a complete AIDS transformation.
You're basically Mike Brancatelli on AIDS.
Yeah.
With AIDS.
On AIDS?
Do you do AIDS?
Do you smoke AIDS?
Who'd even care?
AIDS isn't even a thing anymore.
Well, 500, 500 episodes, man.
This is what we're going to do here, by the way, is we're doing a 500-episode week.
So the whole week is the 500th episode.
All right.
So that's what I ended up doing because I didn't plan out well enough to get it all together for this show, but got some fun stuff in store for the next couple episodes as well.
So yeah, it's 500.
We're treating this like a fucking 18-year-old chick's birthday.
We're all enjoying a nice brewski.
We're going to relax.
Rob got me a package of some sort here.
Pick it up.
It is exactly how you would think Rob Bernstein would wrap a present, a paper bag with scotch tape and what was clearly printed out about five minutes ago on like a 1997 printer, like a printer that made a lot of noise while it printed.
I actually thought that this gift was so good.
I was like, I'm going to make that a business.
And I registered the domain name, bodegabaskets.com.
Did you really?
I did.
How much did you spend on that bad boy?
$12.
It's a good investment.
And then they make you pay to keep your information private too, right?
No, it was just $12.
You're like, nah, just keep it.
Think about it.
You get those baskets.
They already come with the old fruit.
So bodegas have old fruit, but they also got like condoms and cigarettes and energy drains.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, gift baskets.
Dudes.
Oh, there you go.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
I'm going to open it in just a second, and we'll see what the hell Robin fired.
That is the finest gift you will have ever received in your entire life, Davey Smith.
Wow, that's quite a my wife gave me a baby.
Now, this is better.
This comes late last year.
This is better.
This comes with everything better than being a father for exactly one hour of joy.
And that's about as much as I can think ahead in life.
Okay, that is the extent of Rob's time preference.
Yes.
He's one hour ahead.
So I thought, you know, for this episode, I don't know.
We're going to do a little bit of a, we'll do some different things.
We're going to talk.
There's a couple things that are going on in the news that I wanted to touch on.
But more on this episode, I thought we would talk about the show a little bit, talk about some of our influences, how we came to view the world the way we do, and things like that, and just kind of have some fun.
But it is a trip for me that it's the 500th episode.
And I try not to be too self-indulgent blatantly on this podcast regularly.
Today's your special day.
Well, you know, listen, also, my entire life and entire career is fairly self-indulgent.
I mean, I'm a stand-up comedian and podcaster.
You know, you have to try to control it to some degree.
But I try not to just talk about myself in my comedy on podcasts.
In general, I like to talk about other things, but I did think it was appropriate on the 500th episode to talk a little bit about this show and where we've kind of come and where we are now.
And it's, you know, it does.
I'm very, okay, one of my pet peeves in life, and I was about to commit it, but is when people say I'm humbled, and what they actually mean is the opposite of that.
And they go, oh, I'm really humbled by getting this great award or something like that.
And you're like, well, that's not humbling at all.
That's, in fact, what that is, is like a shot to your ego.
So let me rephrase that.
It's a real shot to my ego that, and I mean shot in a positive way, a boost to my ego, that we are where we are.
I started this podcast in 2012.
All right.
I wasn't actually sure about that.
I had to go back and look up the date.
So I started it back in 2012.
And then there were a couple breaks where I stopped for a little while and then started again.
And then really in 2013 started going.
But I started this podcast before Barack Obama was re-elected.
You know, it was a different world.
Ron Paul was running for president and there was no audience.
There was like, I mean, literally no audience.
Like there was, I think, a few dozen people who were listening to the show when we first started it.
It was nothing.
It was just that I had read about, you know, libertarianism and I was following politics and I felt like I had something to say and I wanted to kind of vent and get it out of my system.
It was kind of like my therapy in a way.
And I just ranted about this stuff.
And now, so what are we from 2012 to 2019, seven years later, we are one of the biggest libertarian podcasts in the world, the number one Christian conservative podcast in the world.
Can't take that from us.
No, you never, never.
And I don't care about numbers or anything like that.
The biggest Christian conservative, like we're the closest to God, the biggest one.
And I've, you know, I've gotten to kind of build a career around doing this, which is really what I love to do.
I've gotten to meet so many of my heroes, so many of them.
And I, you know, it's really incredible.
I just, so forgive me for the next few minutes, but I just want to thank some people because there's a lot of people who should be thanked.
Can you get award show music going?
No, please don't.
I can't.
That makes me feel way too douchey.
I'll be very quick with this, but I do want to thank personally everybody who was involved with the original startup of part of the problem.
So first and foremost, the two people who convinced me to do this podcast were Louis J. Gomez and Nate Bargetzi.
Those were the two.
Two of my favorite people in the world, two of my best friends to this day.
Louis J. Gomez was always trying to convince me to do the podcast.
He was like, dude, you're fucking brilliant with this political shit.
You need to fucking start doing this and like talking about it and build it up.
He was right.
I thought he was crazy.
He also convinced me to do stand-up comedy, also convinced me to do Legion of Skanks.
It's pretty much everything that I've done in my life that's, you know, built the career that I have now.
I owe it to him.
And, you know, you wouldn't have thought it because he's such a maniac.
You'd have been like, who the fuck would follow this guy?
But, you know, he knew what he was talking about.
He is really a brilliant psychopath.
Anyway, Nate Bargettsi, who's one of the funniest comedians in the world, and he always, really encouraged me.
Really, was like, same thing.
He was like, dude, you are fucking brilliant with this political shit.
You need to keep talking about it.
So I owe those guys everything that we have on this show.
Thank Travis Pignon, who was the guy who I actually, he recorded with me the first few episodes.
It didn't really work well.
And then we stopped doing it together shortly thereafter.
But I do still owe him thanks for recording the first few with me and helping me to just kind of like practice a little bit before we actually got it started.
Jessica Sager, who was my co-host for a while when we brought it back.
She's a great sweetheart.
I haven't seen her or talked to her in forever, but I wish her the best and I'm very appreciative of what she did.
Of course, Mike Brancatelli, Frank Brank, who was the co-host of this show for a long time.
And then, of course, Rob Bernstein, who came on board later and was the perfect co-host for me.
I really mean that.
I love having you on the show.
And I think the show, you coming on board was a big part of the show, like going to the next level.
You fucking add a lot of, you're a really funny dude, but you're also very insightful and you're the perfect guy to do this with.
Everybody at Gast Digital.
So of course, once again, Louis J. Gomez.
Brian does a fucking incredible job for us.
I love having him as a producer.
Best producer we've ever had.
But really, there's not much competition aside from that.
It was pretty much just like a broom with a bucket on its head before Brian came in.
But he's better than that broom.
You know, that broom was late a lot.
And Ralph Sutton.
Did I mention Ralph?
Or I should.
We mentioned Ralph, of course.
Gast Digital, which of course implies Ralph Sutton, Bobby Hutch, everybody else here at Gast Digital.
And then, and of course, everybody who listens to the show.
And on top of that, I just want to thank all of my heroes, many of whom have become friends in this game.
But I should give a special thanks to, of course, the great Ron Paul, who inspired me on this whole journey, who had me on his show, The Ron Paul Liberty Report, came on part of the problem.
Tom Woods, the master, Tom Woods, who's, you know, I just did a week of his podcast.
He was always my inspiration and kind of my North Star in this whole game and somebody who's become like a really good friend and not just somebody who I've learned, has been like an intellectual hero to me, but someone who I go to for advice, who's really just a genuinely great human being.
And Robert Murphy as well, somebody who I've just learned so much from, who's come on the show many times.
I've been on his show and he's just really, you know, they had me on the Contra Cruise, which I'll be back on again next year.
And Lou Rockwell, Jeff Deist, everybody at the Mises Institute.
Fuck the problem with doing this is you always are going to forget some people, and then I feel bad about that.
But anybody else who I'm forgetting your name?
Oh, Scott Horton.
Of course, Scott Horton, the great Scott Horton, the most incredible human being, Scott Horton.
Thank your wife.
I think that's just like something you're talking about.
Holy shit, I really should have thanked my wife earlier.
Of course, my wife and daughter, Lauren and Layla, are literally the most important thing in my life.
And, you know, it's they're they're they're what I don't I don't thank them for the the success of the podcast, but everything I do is to try to thank them.
So there, I think I cleaned it up a little bit after I almost left my family out of it.
Okay, anyway, I apologize for all of that.
I just felt a certain obligation to thank a lot of thank a lot of people.
And if other people come to my mind, I'll thank them.
I was thinking about on my ride down to the studio today is how much the country and the political landscape has changed since 2012.
And how, so in 2012, right, was the year that Barack Obama came out for gay marriage.
Came out as a gay man.
That was the year that he was like, no, I'm for gay marriage.
And it was an obvious ploy to get votes for his reelection campaign.
But isn't that just a crazy thing to think that that year that we started the podcast, there could still be a Democrat in office who was saying, I think marriage should be between a man and a woman.
I mean, that's like, that's basically a fascist view today.
And yet, you know, Black Jesus, the most progressive president ever, was able to have that opinion.
It's just interesting to me to see how these things have changed so much.
And, you know, that's obviously just the least of it.
But there's, you know, Donald Trump is the fucking president and so many things have changed.
The idea, a social justice warrior, I don't even think that term was around in 2012.
And if it was, it didn't have the meaning that it does today.
You would, if, if you suggested that there were 72 genders or whatever, people would be like, this is just insane.
Nobody takes this seriously.
Now you're like, oh, well, it's insane, but some people take it seriously.
And while all of these things have happened, all the latest, craziest developments, I think I've done my best to stay consistent to my principles.
And that's not to say that I haven't learned from new evidence and read new things and been, you know, influenced in certain ways, but to not just, you know, like one of the things I try to do with this whole thing, with this, this whole business, is to not just go with the fad of the day, but try to stick to what you actually believe in and, you know, kind of, anyway, be as consistent as possible, the most consistent, some would say, and focus on the big picture of all these things.
So it's been quite a ride.
And I'm still, it's still a little bit surreal to me.
It's surreal to me that I'm fucking 36, that I got a wife and a daughter.
I got this beautiful family, that I have one of the biggest libertarian podcasts and one of the biggest comedy podcasts out there.
I mean, it's like, it's just strange.
I still in my soul feel like I should be like a fucking 22-year-old fucking idiot who's trying to split a 20-bag of weed with a friend.
Anyway, but I guess I'm not.
Giving Dollars To Homeless People00:17:36
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So for today's episode, me and you were chatting.
We had some ideas.
Oh, you know what?
Before that, let me open your gift to me.
Let's see what Robbie the Fire got me.
And then I have something for Rob as well.
But I don't have it physically.
Oh, it's chips ahoy.
Chips ahoy cookies.
Oh, that's so nice.
There's a sandwich.
A sandwich of some sorts.
Is this a hot sandwich or a cold sandwich?
It's a cold meatball sub, dude.
A meatball sub.
The best of the sandwiches.
Oh, that's great.
Well, it'll be cold by the time the show's over and I can't really eat on air, but it's that's that I'm still going to enjoy.
You can eat a meatball sub cold.
Absolutely.
Oh, wow.
Happy room.
Thank you so much.
And a couple of beers.
Oh, what a great, what a great present that is.
All right.
That is, thank you, Rob.
That is just wonderful.
That is just literally, I couldn't have asked for a better present from, I couldn't have asked for a better co-host.
So here's my present to you, Rob.
And for those of you watching, I don't actually have it in front of me.
But for those of you listening, I do have it in front of me.
I am going to present you with a 100-episode contract.
100-episode contract for Rob Burns.
There you go.
No more show to show.
Let's get real.
He's got AIDS.
He won't make it through three episodes.
But it just seemed like the right thing to do.
I mean, the kid bought me a sandwich, some beers, and some cookies.
I mean, what do you do with that?
All right.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
So me and you were talking before the show, and we were thinking one of the things, we'll do a few things on today's 500th episode.
But one of the things that you thought might be cool is if we talked about, and this might even be an episode that we just leave up that we don't put behind the paywall.
Maybe we'll keep the 500th episode up.
But it would be cool if we talked about why we are free market, libertarian, anti-war, you know, people and what books we've read.
Because I get this question all the time.
I know people are like, what book should you read?
And then, and maybe just talk about some of the people, the thinkers who have influenced us the most.
Then I got a video that I want to do, a debunking libertarian, debunking libertarianism video that I want to go through and debunk because that's one of the kind of staples of this show.
And then at the very end, there's a couple things just from the news of the last few days that I wanted to go through.
So I thought that would be like a kind of fun episode.
So why don't we start going through some thinkers and some books that we think are like the most important things to go through or the things that had the biggest influence on us, you know, things we would recommend people to look up and books to read.
So why don't since that was your idea and I think it's an excellent idea, why don't we start with you?
What would you start?
Give me a book and a thinker or a writer who had a huge influence on you.
Start with the biggest.
Who's your best who you would who you would recommend?
I would say George Reisman's got to be really high up there for me.
I came across him accidentally in college while writing a paper.
And because he was from the Mises Institute, I didn't even know if I could quote him.
I didn't know if that was like some out there conspiracy theorists that weren't.
And I've never been able to find this article again, but he was kind of just talking about dollar diplomacy and the way that the U.S. has been imperialist.
And I remember just reading it and going, that makes more sense than anything I've read yet.
You know what I mean?
It's just like that little dose of truth.
But then some later articles that I read by the guy that were just so brilliant and completely, I've never sat down for exactly 20 minutes and read something and just had my mind completely changed.
So one of them was on healthcare.
He had an article about healthcare.
And I would have thought, yeah, we should provide healthcare.
Why wouldn't we provide healthcare?
That just makes sense.
Right.
And in one, not even an hour, whatever it took me to read that piece, 15 to 20 minutes.
And it went all the way back to, I think he wrote it in the 80s when Hillary was trying to pass it when Bill was in office.
Just completely changed my view.
In one read, so just some of his bigger arguments, was one, he said, the idea that healthcare is a right.
Well, you're imposing on a doctor to provide that.
So how do you force somebody to do something that they don't want to do?
How is that a natural right?
That was argument number one.
Argument number two was he just talked about how because of all the licensing laws, that's the real drive of all the healthcare costs and the fact that government created initiatives for basically providing insurance.
And then he got into how insurance drives a pricing with, he had an interesting restaurant example, which I'm sure you've heard, which is if you're sitting at a restaurant table, we're all splitting the bill and we're just going to split, you're going to order the most expensive thing because I'm not going to order the bread and soup if you're going to get the most expensive steak.
And that just you have a systematic issue if you're working with the insurance model that since we're pooling everything, everyone always wants the best.
It's just not cost efficient.
And in the 15 minutes I read that, boom, my mind was changed.
Okay, government shouldn't be providing us health care.
They're ruining the market.
Next one I read was on was on guns.
He had a piece on gun control.
I'm like, yeah, of course we should have, like, why wouldn't you have gun control?
You want a bunch of maniacs just walking around with guns?
That sounds insane.
We've got shootings every once in a while.
It doesn't sound safe.
And then he starts talking about, hey, what would have happened in Nazi Germany if all those Jews were armed?
And you got to understand that it's about keeping the government in check and the importance of people owning their guns and the idea of free.
And I was like, oh, my mind's changed on that one.
There you go.
I was like, never thought of it that way.
And then this was the one that really, this one like even took me time for it to settle in, but he had one on environmentalism and like, you know, and where he was, oh, no, no, there were two.
I'll tell you two more that just really blew my mind.
Next one was he had one on why it was bad when Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are giving away their money.
Why that's and that like, and people will go, oh, this is incredible that they're giving charity.
Why that's bad?
And I'm like, all right, you're not going to, you're not going to win me on this one, George Reisman.
There's no way you're going to convince me Warren Buffett.
How is charity not good?
Yeah.
How are you going to convince me that giving charity is not good?
And then he basically just explained the principle of capitalism and that people being good capitalists means that they're the best at just distributing resources.
And that should be cherished because nothing can do more good for the most amount of people than a dude who can just forecast ahead, hey, if I put these resources here, people are going to want it.
Right.
And just at that very root.
If you are literally the best at allocating resources, why would you just give it away to some random charity who maybe is decent at best?
Well, that's the part of it that as you accumulate capital, you get rewarded for both being able to predict where resources will be best served.
You get rewarded for that.
And as you accumulate more and more capital, are you able to make bigger and better investments?
And everybody wins by that.
And then the last one was the charity one.
No, no, I just said the charity one.
Oh, yeah, the environmental one, which I was like, also like, oh, wait, are you going to convince me that we, you know, global warming is good and that we should be able to pollute?
And hell yeah, he did it.
His argument was basically like we like air conditioning and we like living in big cities.
These are all choices.
We like pouring down a whole bunch of cement, stacking ourselves on top of each other and living with air conditioning.
And that's a choice that all of us are making that here's what we prefer.
Yeah.
So why shouldn't we be allowed to choose how we want to prefer, live on earth versus, you know, like your elephant that's a fucking idiot who's just sitting out there, you know?
Yeah.
Fuck that elephant.
Elephants, not capitalists.
That's for sure.
I haven't read that one in a while.
He definitely put it in better terms.
But the point is, in terms of one single person and just reading stuff and having piece by piece systematically the arguments just resonate and go, oh, you changed my mind.
Well, that's a, those are great.
And it's interesting, even as you mention it, it's making me think about, you know, changing my mind.
And I have had my mind changed many times in my life.
And I think, you know, I've gotten the criticism at times.
And I'm sure everybody who's either libertarian or leans libertarian has gotten the criticism that they go, well, you're just going to defend the market no matter what.
And you're always going to blame the government no matter what.
And sure, there is something to be said for the fact that I, you know, the older you get, the more you tend to get dug into whatever position you're in.
But what I try to always, you know, say to people, and what I really try to hold true to myself is that I go, I've had my mind changed on just about everything.
If you present me with a superior argument, I am open to having my mind changed.
And I, like, as you were saying, I was a left-wing guy before I found libertarianism.
And I was even, when I started part of the problem, I was still a, what you would call a minarchist.
I wasn't an anarchist yet.
I think it was in 2013 that I actually became an anarchist.
And that was like five years after I had found libertarianism and slowly started reading it.
And even years after I'd started reading Murray Rothbard and Anarchist Thinkers, I just wasn't quite there yet.
So yeah, it seemed very, for a long time, it seemed very obvious to me.
Certainly like as a young kid, as a teenager, very early 20s, it was like, if you had asked me, should we tax rich people and give it to poor people?
It'd be like, obviously.
I mean, what are you evil?
Of course.
There's somebody who's got a billion dollars and there's somebody who's homeless.
So of course we should take some from the billionaire and give it to the homeless.
I saw Robinhood as a kid.
I mean, of course.
Now, you know, if you really want to break down Robinhood, he was taking from actually like the government, essentially, who had taxed it from the people.
So it was kind of, but I'm just saying, forgetting that even somebody who made it in the market is a bill.
Okay, whatever.
You don't need a billion dollars.
And that guy who's homeless needs money.
So of course we should take it from you and give it to the homeless guy.
But you have to actually think things through a little deeper before you go like, well, you know, here's the thing.
That sounds nice.
But is it just, you know, this is almost like what being on the left entails that you believe, right?
So here's the thing.
A lot of what the left believes and what I used to believe when I was a left-wing kid, a lot of what they believe would make sense if say everything about the current order, let's say nothing existed till five seconds ago and some godlike figure just snapped his finger and all the resources were allocated the way they are.
And this is just how wealth was created.
Someone snapped their finger, went, here you go.
This guy gets a billion.
This guy gets homeless.
And you went, wait, what?
But they're all kind of the same.
And that's not fair.
So let's redistribute things and make it more fair.
But that's not how wealth was created.
Wealth was created through investment, production, labor, savings, all of these different forces.
So think about it a little bit deeper as a real person.
Is there any difference between the billionaire and the homeless guy, besides one having a billion dollars and one having zero dollars?
Is there actually something that's a little bit different about those two guys?
Is there maybe something different in terms of sanity, stability, talent, ability?
You know what I mean?
Like all of these things.
Like, is there maybe a little bit of a difference between the two of them?
Hey, have you ever met people before?
Come on.
You know that there's obviously clearly a difference.
And truthfully speaking, if you took away all of that billionaire's dollars and left him at zero and the homeless guy at zero, who do you think pulls themselves out of that faster?
The guy who was a billionaire once or the homeless guy?
Or is it just we're all the same?
We're completely equal.
There's no difference between any of us.
So that's like the first step is recognizing that, look, somebody like Bezos, Jeff Bezos, he was born to a middle-class family.
Guys are worth $130 something billion dollars now or something in that ballpark.
Okay.
It's not just that he was exactly the same as the rest of as the rest of us.
He is a badass motherfucker who knew how to run shit and figured out something that probably almost nobody else in the world would have figured out.
You know what I mean?
Like he had he had an insight into something that just about nobody else would have figured out.
It's like, okay, so if we take money and give it to the homeless person, well, okay, I mean, as I was saying recently on an episode, what is a billionaire going to do with their money?
Well, you know, people will say all the time, they go, you know, Amazon pays $0 in federal income tax.
And that's actually, I don't even think technically true, but I mean, you know, if you actually measure the amount of taxes that are generated by Amazon, it's like, well, everyone who gets a salary pays, you know, taxes.
There's tons of payroll taxes.
There's, you know, all of the taxes that follow from that business existing are, you know, we probably don't even have a number on what that is.
But the reason why Amazon pays very little, if anything, in federal income tax is because they reinvest almost all of their profits into new production.
So, okay.
So you think there's no cost to taking more money from them?
You're taking money directly out of them investing in new factories and new production and new technology, you know?
So it's not as if this is just a like, oh, the billionaire loses and the poor guy gets them and nobody else is affected.
That's step number two, realizing that there's actually an effect to taking that money.
And it's not just punishing the billionaire.
There's a lot more to it than that.
Like I said before, it's like somebody builds the yachts.
Somebody builds the mansions.
Somebody plans them, sells them.
There's all these like kind of working class, middle class people involved, even in the most lavish, just, you know, lifestyle living of a billionaire.
There's lots of other, there's a whole economy that's created from that.
There's like somebody's painting a mansion.
You know what I mean?
And that's just a painter.
So that guy loses work too if this billionaire can't have a mansion.
There's a lot of other like levels in this.
And then the real libertarian red pill to me is the following.
And this is what I learned later.
I'll get back into thinkers and books in a second, but just you inspired me to go on this rant.
But here's the real, the next third level, that's the real libertarian red pill, is that what about the other entity in the room that we're not talking about?
See, so often people who are statists who support the government doing anything, all they want you to think about is everything except the government.
Everything except the state.
So a lot of times they'll be like, oh, well, there's this market failure here or the market's not doing this very well.
Well, therefore government.
But nobody ever goes, well, let's compare how the market's doing to how the government's doing, right?
You just look at the failure of the market.
So all they want you to think about here is the billionaire and the poor person.
That's it.
Think about them.
Who needs the money more?
And you go, well, I guess the poor person.
Okay, well, that's okay.
But now you have to think about the third entity in the room, which is the state.
So if you're willing to grant the state power to take from a billionaire and give to this homeless person, well, what about that power that you've created now?
Is that power going to be wielded only to take from billionaires and give to homeless people?
Or have we now put human beings in charge of something powerful that has the legal right to go strip resources from whoever they want and redistribute them to whoever they want?
Well, what are they going to end up doing with that?
Who's going to end up gaming that system?
Who's going to get control of that?
So at least in a market system where someone's becoming a billionaire, they're becoming a billionaire because they're providing a service to the market.
Whereas with the state, now a billionaire might have a lot of power, but how about the state power?
What do they have to do?
All they have to do is propagandize people into checking a box.
And now they have the power to just take away somebody's rights and do it as they see fit.
And isn't it a coincidence that everywhere you see a state, you see them not just taking money from billionaires and giving it to homeless people?
That's never exactly what they do.
Why Two-Party Politics Corrupts00:04:08
I mean, no matter where you go, look at America.
Look at any European country.
Look at any third world country.
You want the most blatant example of where they really have real deal poor people.
And are they just helping out those poor people?
Well, no, these are like the most corrupt states you could think of.
And I mean, I shouldn't even say that because the standard of living is higher, but the corruption is just as bad all throughout first world countries.
And of course, and then you realize what to me is the ultimate libertarian red pill, which goes back to who's the fucking guy.
Oh, I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who famously said it, Lord Atkin, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I think what he actually said, the quote was, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And people know that in general from life.
And so if you think the power of a billionaire corrupts, fair enough.
You know, it probably does.
I don't know if there's any human being who could be a billionaire and not be a little bit corrupted by just that power that you can buy whatever you want, do whatever you want, people kiss your ass, all these things.
But if you want to create a power source strong enough to take on the billionaires, inherently you have to create something more powerful than the billionaires.
So that's just going to be more corrupting.
Okay.
So I'll start with the obvious one to me, which is the first guy who introduced me to all of this, the great Ron Paul.
So Ron Paul, any Ron Paul book you can get your hands on is well worth reading.
If you're going to start with one, I would highly recommend The Revolution, a Manifesto.
Just a phenomenal book, phenomenal book.
It's, you know, you could say slightly outdated because it was very much about what was going on in 2007, 2008, but it is really all of the central messages of it still resonate.
And, you know, there's a lot about the two-party system and how phony it all is.
How, you know, you kind of, there's basically not really a difference between Democrats and Republicans.
And no matter what you vote for, people never seem to actually end up getting what they vote for.
I mean, you can find examples of this today all over the place.
But, you know, it'd say people, you know, vote for Democrats.
You know, at the time, this made sense, but he was saying people vote for Democrats because they're anti-war, but the wars keep going.
They vote for Democrats to, you know, preserve civil liberties, but civil liberties are violated everywhere.
You know, you think about people vote for Republicans to shrink the size of government or to protect the Constitution and they shred the Constitution and they grow the size of government.
And he was like, and by the way, they both do both.
So it's like the Republicans, you know, might say, like, well, we need a strong military, but we don't need all this welfare spending.
And the Democrats say, well, we need all this welfare spending, but we don't need this bloated military budget.
But both of them compromise on the other one.
The Republicans get in there and they say, all right, we'll vote for some more welfare if you vote for this military budget increase.
The Democrats say, well, we'll vote for the military budget increase if you fund this welfare program.
And the state just grows and grows and grows.
As I've said before on this podcast, many, many times, what introduced me to this whole world was the Ron Paul Giuliani moment.
And that is still something that I think, honestly, I think it's almost fallen out of favor.
Like it's more popular these days to blame radical Islam or I don't know a bunch of other different reasons than to really talk about blowback.
But the thing that Ron Paul said that really kind of blew my mind right away, and I still think is as true as anything is that he goes, if you want to understand the phenomenon of terrorism, all you have to ask yourself is what would we do if somebody else was doing to us what we're doing to these people?
And I still very much believe that blowback is by far the main contributor to the problem of terrorism, you know, Islamic terrorism, if you will.
Understanding Terrorism And Blowback00:05:59
And of course, it's not just Islamic.
I mean, there's been different examples throughout history, right?
The Irish were terrorists in the eyes of the British at one point, and then lots of other examples.
It's like, yeah, people tend to not like being dominated.
And one of my favorite things that Scott Horton wrote a lot about this in his book, Fool's Errand.
But imagine, you know, if you would.
And for anybody, I just challenge you to use this thought experiment.
If you were, say, somebody who is like, you know what?
The reason why there's Muslim terrorists is just because Islam is such a crazy religion.
It's not a religion of peace.
It's a religion of violence.
And Muhammad, you know, was a fucking, you know, like a violent guy.
And therefore, there's this direct line from the Quran to jihad.
Like, okay, fine.
I'm not even saying there's not, by the way.
That's never been my argument.
Maybe there is.
Maybe there is like, I don't know, but maybe there is more of a direct line from the Quran to jihad in actual life.
You know, like I understand that there's that, that that's in the Quran, but I'm just making the point, like, you could read Deuteronomy or something and be like, oh, wow, there's some crazy shit in there.
You can read anything in the Old Testament and be like, holy shit, that's really fucking, I mean, there's some parts where we were talking about the other day when, not the other day, I guess this is months ago, but in the Old Testament, when Moses comes down from the mountain and sees the other Jews building golden calves or whatever, and they're worshiping that, and then him and God just start slaughtering people.
Like, there's some real fucked up shit in all those books.
But anyway, just play this thought experiment out for me.
Let's say America.
So let's say Barack Obama.
You remember when there were like those conspiracy theories that Barack Obama was a Muslim, that he wasn't born in America, that he was like illegitimate.
You know, I've never really seen any compelling evidence that that's true, but there were people who believed that.
There were people who were really talking, he's going to come take our guns, he's going to do all this shit.
Okay, let's just say, hypothetically, none of that was a conspiracy and no one even tried to hide it.
Let's say Donald Trump won the presidency, okay?
And Donald Trump, you know, all of these make America great again, people came out and voted for Donald Trump, those fucking, you know, tough coal miners and truckers and all the people who Donald Trump got out to vote for him.
And then let's say another country, I don't know, Saudi Arabia.
They're like the empire.
You know, they're the world empire.
They have the strongest military.
And Saudi Arabia said, we don't like this Donald Trump guy.
We don't think he's good for interests, for Saudi interests.
So Saudi Arabia sent in their secret military, killed a whole bunch of Americans, you know, maybe just like slaughtered a few thousand, some women, some children, get killed, overthrew Donald Trump and propped up Barack Hussein Obama as their puppet dictator.
Like just, and this was not like hidden.
This was like known.
Like, this is what we're doing.
This is a friend of Saudi Arabia.
So he's your leader now.
I know you voted for this other guy, but he's your leader.
And let's say Barack Obama was a brutal dictator, 10 times more brutal than actual Barack Obama was to his own people in America.
And he's throwing right-wingers in fucking jail and torturing them and doing all this fucked up shit.
What do you think the right-wing militias in this country would do?
What do you think we would do about that?
Every Texan with a gun, every tough ass right-wing dude, what would you do if a foreign government came in, overthrew your fucking leader?
Now, let's say they put crippling sanctions on the country and hundreds of thousands of people are dying.
And then they just went around dropping bombs.
I mean, you've, you know, a fucking, like one of your kids dies or your friend's kids or family members, all these people, all of them have died.
What the fuck would you do?
Are you telling me you wouldn't be...
Mr. Ben Shapiro, this tiny fucking effeminate Jew is ready to talk about grabbing a gun because Beto O'Rourke is saying maybe, you know, like churches or synagogues shouldn't get taxes exempt status.
What would you do if some other country was really doing that to you?
How many of you would be ready to grab a gun?
I mean, by the way, I would.
Somebody kills a member of my family.
That's that's my line where I'd be ready to grab a gun and go fucking fight back and get and get an eye for an eye.
Okay.
Now, do you think it's possible that while you were going off and killing some people, you might like yell out something about your religion?
You know, like, is it really that crazy that you would go, yeah, it's like, in the name of Jesus, and then fucking shoot some people up?
Is that really that crazy that people under those circumstances might cling to their religion?
So by the way, I'm not, again, I'm not saying that there isn't a direct line between the Quran and waging a jihad.
But if there is, then that's all the more reason to not go fuck with those people.
So that more or less is my, and unless you can, you can look at that hypothetical and go, no, we would never pick up arms, even after all of that, then you got to just admit that blowback is a pretty huge part of this.
And you can talk about how different we all are, but really it's kind of what brings us together.
And by the way, I remember, because I was there, I remember being in New York when George W. Bush came on the week of 9-11, and George W. Bush said, what's that famous quote from him?
Where he's like, he was like, I just want you to know, I hear you, Washington hears you, and the people who knocked down this building, they're going to hear all of us pretty soon.
Collateral Damage In War00:04:22
And I got this huge round of applause.
I remember hearing that and being like, fuck yeah, we're going to go kill those motherfuckers because you fucking killed a bunch of our people and now we're going to go kill a bunch of your people.
And what's the attitude?
What's the attitude?
You killed some of our people.
We're going to show you who the real fucking killers are.
And everybody knows when we were talking about going to war with these people, that there'd be some people who had nothing to do with this who die.
We all know that.
There'd just be some women and children and some random people there.
And what do we call them?
Collateral damage, but you expect that in any war, right?
But we're going to go kill some fucking people.
And if there's some collateral damage, there's some collateral damage.
So somebody killed some of our people.
Let's go fucking kill their people.
That's exactly what's happening to us.
And honestly, it's more a story of what unites us all than what divides us.
It's the way any of us would fucking react.
So that, to me, the Ron Paul blowback, you know, whole theory really opened my mind to all of this stuff.
And then, as I've said before, he kept making this argument about the free market.
And I was like, God damn it, he was so good on this other issue and just seemed so honest to me that I was like, I believe he's honest.
He's telling the truth.
I'm sure he's wrong, but I think he's telling the truth about all of this free market stuff.
And then I found through the internet, I found Tom Woods and Peter Schiff.
And I read Peter Schiff's book, How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes.
And then I read a bunch of Tom Woods books.
Tom Woods at the time was like the real big book was Meltdown.
And then also I read Rollback.
And I highly recommend both of those.
And Real Dissent is the other book of Tom's that I really, really recommend.
And that's when I started getting more interested in the economics side of things.
So what do you, I know another big one for you was Stockman, right?
Yeah, that one was awesome, dude.
I remember I came across that one.
I used to read, like, this is years ago.
I mean, this is back when you and I used to hang out at LOL in my vending machine days.
But I remember I used to get pretty down when I was down.
I was just thinking, you got to read more.
Like, you don't have any ideas in your head.
You know, you're not getting any information.
Just read.
Yeah.
And one of the things I like to read was every Sunday I'd read the New York Times Sunday Review, which was just their short essays.
But if you were, it was ADD friendly, you could get some ideas real quickly.
And they had a piece they were writing up on Stockman's The Great Deformation.
And it was just kind of, you know, it was a two-paragraph piece kind of of his take on the economy.
And it was the same thing I was describing with Reisman where I'm reading this.
I was like, oh, this just makes sense.
Like this is when I was in college, it kind of just seemed to me like this is what was going on, but no one was talking about it.
And he's describing the bubble economy and the Fed.
And I was like, that just sounds to me like that makes sense.
I want to go read more of this.
And then I picked up his book.
And that was funny because you were Mr. Smarty Pants and you were always talking and you knew everything.
And I was like, there's no way Dave's read this one.
And I pulled it out of my bag thinking I was finally going to show you up.
And you're like, yeah, I read that.
And I was like, no, you didn't.
That guy's lying to me.
There's no fucking way.
He sat down and read this thousand-page book.
But that one, you know, front to cover, I didn't understand all of it, but I got some like the big pictures and themes.
And the most fascinating part of that book was when he described with the bailout, how it absolutely did not, the economy did not need that bailout.
Everything that would have affected the mainstream economy was backed up through mandatory insurance and that was state-based regulations.
I've never seen anybody prosecute the case that we didn't need the bailout better.
And it's look, that book is not one that I would recommend to dive into lightly.
That's a really difficult read, but it is the most comprehensive of the history of the Federal Reserve, the history of the crazy monetary policy post-Bretton Woods breakdown, and just prosecuting the case of why we didn't need the bailouts and everything since the 2008 recession.
But it's also what's interesting about it is he worked for the Reagan administration, and it's a brutal critique of Reaganism.
I mean, really a critique of all of that stuff.
And of course, the Great Deformation is a playoff of Ronald Reagan's, they called it the Great Reformation, I think, was the Reaganite slogan.
Critiquing The Military Industrial Complex00:02:08
The big thing that he says is, you know, Reagan ran on this platform, hey, we're going to reduce the government deficits.
And then he did absolutely nothing to unwind the military-industrial complex.
He ended up spending more than anybody else.
And I mean, Stockholm claims, listen, I was there to be the budget director, and I'm going, hey, this is not what we ran on.
This is not what we're supposed to be doing.
But essentially, Reagan, like any other politician, lied.
He didn't stick to what the people voted for or wanted.
From what I understand, I don't know if people were really anti-debt, but he basically said, no, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan won on the idea of cutting government spending, cutting the size and scope of government.
He said in his inaugural address when he got sworn in, he said the famous Ronald Reagan line where I forget the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of he said, So many times people are looking for government as the solution to our problems.
Government is not the solution to our problems.
Government is the problem.
There you go.
It was an unbelievable thing to say as a president's being sworn in.
But then he's going to be able to do it.
And then just increase the size and scope of government.
Ron Paul was one of, I believe, there were two or three members of the House who initially endorsed Ronald Reagan in the primary.
Like Ron Paul supported Ronald Reagan.
And it was his, when his first budget came out, Ron Paul ditched Ronald Reagan.
That's how principled Ron Paul was.
He was just like, oh, okay, we're not doing that.
Then I'm out.
Doesn't matter.
Then we're out.
This is not what I'm here for.
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Looking At Both Sides Of Economics00:03:19
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I would recommend a couple things that had a really big impact on me that I would, because the great deformation is not.
If you're not ready to really sit down and read a very dense thousand-page book and you're looking for something like as a starter or something to give a friend, there's a few, a few like pamphlet-type, you know, smaller things that I would recommend.
So, one that I would really recommend to people is Economics in One Lesson, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, which is basically it gives you a great framework to think about economics.
And I remember after I read that, I think I've never looked at things the same way in terms of economic.
It's one very basic lesson.
And more or less, the lesson is that you have to look at the both sides of an economic equation and you can't just look at one side of it.
So he takes apart the broken window fallacy.
So he the broken window fallacy is more or less like, this is my own telling of it, but there's a storefront with a window and a, you know, a kid throws a baseball through the window accidentally and it's like, oh my God, I'm sorry.
And the kid, you know, the owner's like, fuck, whatever, my window's broken.
So he has to fix the window.
And you could look at that and say, well, look at all the economic productivity that has been derived from this.
I mean, he just had to hire a guy to come, you know, fix the window.
That puts that guy, that gives that guy some work.
That guy had to order a plate glass from some bear.
That puts this glass company in work.
And then all this.
And they're like, look at all this economic creativity.
That's great.
So this was great.
This was like this was a boon to the economy that this window was broken.
And what Henry Hazlitt points out is he's like, well, no, but that's just the scene.
You have to look at the unseen because the guy already had a perfectly good window.
The resources that he's spending on fixing this window could have been spent on something else and something else more productive.
We didn't need to build a whole new window.
We could have.
Maybe he needed another table.
Maybe he needed another.
And you realize that more or less that in every economic equation, you have to look at both sides of it.
And I see this all the time with people like real, you know, very mainstream people will argue like, oh, well, social security is great because it keeps old people from going from being poor.
You're like, okay, that's only one side.
Who pays for Social Security?
Oh, young people who are poorer than old people.
So actually, this is a policy of distributing money from a poorer class to a wealthier class of people.
How do you justify that?
Argumentation Ethics Explained00:07:06
And then there's, and this, this comes up over and over again.
So that's a great one.
The law by Frederick Bastiat, excellent little pamphlet that really gets right down to the heart of like what the role of the law ought to be.
And the biggest one of all of them for me that I really recommend, actually two.
I'll give you two.
Murray Rothbard.
And this is what really took me to the next level is when I started reading Murray Rothbard.
Two pieces by him that I think are just groundbreaking.
And one was war, peace, and the state.
And I really highly recommend everybody go read that if you haven't read it already.
These are pieces you can read in one sitting.
War, peace, and the state.
And he just breaks down what is the libertarian position on war and what is actually the moral way to fight a war or how to think about a war.
And it's just the perfect libertarian breakdown.
And the biggest one to me that was really to me my ultimate red pill and the most life-changing thing I've ever read if I had to point to one thing.
And that was anatomy of the state.
And anatomy of the state to me is just, it really, it opened up something in me where I've never looked at the world the same after reading that.
And he basically just goes through what the state is.
It actually starts with what the state is not.
And then it's what the state is.
And when he breaks down what the state is not, what he really separates out is that the state is not the people.
The state is not the land.
It's not the hills and the mountains and the valleys and the deserts and none of these things.
The state is not us.
It's not like, you know, you hear, because you hear these things all the time.
Like the, we are, you know, yeah, we the people or the state is our representative or something like that.
And, you know, he even, I think at one point says in the thing, he goes like, well, then I guess those Jews in Nazi Germany just committed mass suicide or something like that, right?
I mean, if they are the state, so clearly they weren't the state there, right?
And then he gets into what the state actually is.
And the state is essentially a group of people who maintain the legal monopoly on robbing, enslaving, kidnapping, and killing people.
And the state does all of these things that if any other group of people did, we would all be outraged over.
And this to me was like the ultimate ANCAP red pill experience, reading anatomy of the state.
Even today, you see, right, like the... people who argue for gun control or gun confiscation.
How many of them are actually arguing that the cops give up guns too?
I mean, I'm not saying you've never met somebody who's doing that, but pretty much none of the serious people who you hear saying like, we need gun control are saying the cops shouldn't have guns or the military shouldn't have guns.
There's no problem with a group of people having guns as long as we call them the state.
Because they're what?
What are they?
Aren't they just people?
Isn't the state just a group of people?
If you don't want some other group of people to have them, why should the state?
What if I just decide everybody here at Gas Digital should have a whole bunch of fucking machine guns?
It's like, I don't know.
You know, I mean, sure, we got a few, but not enough.
But, you know, if I go, no, we'll go through some training or blah, blah, whatever.
It's like, well, no, if you're so against that, why would you be okay with this other group?
And don't give me any of this bullshit.
Like, we come together and decide.
No, we don't.
No, we fucking don't.
This social contract or any of this other shit.
There's no fucking social contract.
Well, we come together and we decide that this is the way things are.
Our constitution was written in the 1770s or 1780s.
What are you talking about?
Like, what is any of this?
This is all just bullshit.
This is just an excuse.
It's just like a mass delusion.
So that one was big to me too.
All right, let's rattle off a few more books that we think are real important real quick.
I'll give you Hans Hermann Hoppe, Democracy the God That Failed, unbelievable, unbelievable book, mind-blowing.
Also, just read up on argumentation ethics by Hans Hermann Hoppe, which is to me like really the ultimate, like secular proof of a libertarian social order being the only logically consistent way to organize society.
And more or less, and I'll try to break this down very quickly.
Also, Mises, human action.
But anyway, back to the argumentation ethics, more or less, the idea.
And I did a whole episode on this back in the day, but just to break it down, which is really, it's really high level, like kind of heady stuff, but I think it's really the most brilliant thing ever.
But more or less, what Hans Hermann Hoppe argues is that he goes, look, if you have a society and you have a people living together and you want to have a civilization, what you have to have are rules in order to avoid conflict.
That's kind of the idea.
And he has this starting point of arguing.
So he goes, anybody who argues, which basically means anybody who's in this sphere of talking about what they believe in politics.
Have you ever read about argumentation ethics?
Okay, so here's the principle more or less.
Anybody who gets in this sphere, so where you are, where I am, anyone you ever know, left, right, center, anything who's ever argued a point about any way we should order society, the fact that they argue, that's like the axiom you start with.
The fact that you're arguing, there's things that you can deduce from the fact that somebody would argue.
So what you could deduce from that is that argumentation is preferable to violence in their mind.
So they're arguing.
In other words, they'd like to try to argue and convince you rather than just resort to conflict right away.
So you're already acknowledging that you prefer talking to conflict.
Because if you prefer conflict to talking, we'd probably just go to conflict and not even have this conversation at all.
You're also clearly acknowledging that you are the one making the argument.
Like this comes from you and that you are the one receiving the argument.
Like if I try to argue with you, you can presuppose that I'm arguing and you are hearing or I'm trying to get some type of reaction out of you one way or the other.
So you kind of already acknowledge that conflict avoidance is good and that I'm me and you're you and we kind of own the effects of our argument, right?
Like if I was controlling your argument, I wouldn't really need to argue with you, right?
So then what he basically says is that if we want to avoid conflict, well, what does conflict come from?
Why Nations Fail Due To Corruption00:15:24
It comes from scarcity.
It comes from the fact that we can't all have everything we want because there's scarce resources.
We might fight over resources.
We might fight over a woman.
We might fight over a territory.
There's different things that we can be conflicted about.
And then from that, you can deduce that we have to have some type of rules of system of how people can distribute, not even distribute, but how what is the just the best way to avoid conflict with property because that's really what it's all about.
I mean, there's scarcity, so somebody's got to have the right to control this.
And he goes through this step-by-step, detailed logical analysis and basically says that private property rights, self-ownership, the non-aggression principle is the only logical way to avoid conflict.
And in fact, you are contradicting yourself somewhere if you're not arguing for those things.
It's really high level, really brilliant stuff, but I highly recommend you check it out if you're into it.
All right, give me another book or another thinker.
And then we're going to move on to the next part of this.
Okay, this isn't as, this is not as direct to the libertarian thinkers, but it was a really interesting book.
And it was even before I was reading more of the libertarian stuff.
I was reading Why Nations Fail.
I don't know if you ever read that one.
I did not.
Well, actually.
Yeah, you got me.
You shouldn't have pulled out Stockman back in the day.
I've heard it's excellent.
Yeah, I found that one because prior to that, I found PJ Rourke, who's a legendary comedy writer.
And he had written a book.
It was something to do with that he'd gone down to Cuba and he was trying to figure out why some countries are successful and other ones are messes.
And I read very little of that book.
And then I was just blown away by that topic.
I thought that topic was fascinating of why some countries are successful and other ones aren't.
Yeah.
This is still this day just a great, great topic.
That was kind of my introduction to getting more interested in the ideas of liberty was kind of researching, oh, I'm fascinated to understand the political structures of why some countries are being successful and other ones aren't.
So I graduated in slight from PJ Rourke, who introduced me to that topic.
And I was like, oh, I never really considered that.
To then seeing this book, Why Nations Fail was a more academic book on that topic.
I read this years ago, but the primary point of that book was that countries and political structures that allow for basically new products to be developed where they don't close people out of the markets and you can be an entrepreneur and you can invent something and you can go and you can do it.
Those countries tend to flourish.
And the best examples are things like replacing the tailors with the spinning wheels.
So some countries said, hey, we are going to put all these people out of business.
So they didn't let them go ahead and operate.
And those basically got left in the dust.
And the countries that are very successful, it has nothing to do with like the climate, the resources.
It has nothing to do with the fact that like countries like Afghanistan have all these minerals on the ground.
That means nothing.
It all comes down to a government that is open enough that it will allow people to come in and just compete in the marketplace, invent new stuff, and be really successful.
Now, here's where when nations fail gets very interesting: it basically explains that government by nature, whenever you have a government, it seems to expand and it seems to try and protect the interest of private individuals.
And it was the book, in some ways, explains how America is the failed experiment of can you have a government restrained by a document?
Where the like that was the other, oh my, and now I'm starting to remember the book.
The other thing that was really interesting about this book is it explains kind of all the literature that the forefathers read in terms of trying to make a free country and what their idea for what the United States should look like.
And that was the basic premise: we understand government has this inherent thing where it's going to continue to expand, and certain individuals are going to start to manipulate it so that they can favor themselves in the market, and that's bad for everybody.
And then when you get to the end of the book, you kind of realize, like, oh, well, we created that constitution document, but we don't actually hold ourselves to it.
So there is no real restraining government by a document.
Yeah.
Well, that's for sure.
It is such a that is like such a fascinating topic to dive into.
But why it is.
I mean, human beings are interesting fucking creatures, man.
Like, if you look at any other animal, any other species, you'll pretty much see, you know, if you find like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of an example, but if you find the way like ants in America or ants in Europe or ants in some other country live, they pretty much live a similar life, right?
I mean, maybe some of them are in a slightly better climate than others.
And if they are, you can pretty easily tell why, well, this is why they're doing, okay, there was like a downpour here, so they all died, or the, but here they're fine.
You know, there's no real other species where like some of them are living in fucking shambles and some of them are inventing supercomputers and fucking spaceships and like all these, you know what I mean?
Like that's very interesting to go, why are there some countries that fail, that collapse, and others that don't?
Why do some countries look like Central Africa?
Some countries look like North Korea.
Some countries look like, you know, the, you know, the Soviet Union while people are starving or Mao's China.
And then some look like Connecticut.
Like, what's going on here?
You know what I mean?
And maybe there is to some degree like a genetic explanation.
Maybe there is a cultural explanation.
But even after that, you're like, so, but what?
What did that lead to?
What did that culture lead to?
What did those genetics lead to?
Like, what did they do that made things different?
And that to me was right at the heart of why I got so interested in libertarianism: is that you realize it's like, oh, that's what it all came down to.
Coming to the conclusion, however you got there, to the idea that like, yeah, we should pretty much be free and let people innovate and create and keep the wealth that they produce.
And this is actually what lifts everybody up and creates all of this stuff.
Because really, as Tom Woods said once, and I thought this was such a great way to put it, but he said, you know, a lot of times he goes, we're almost so wealthy that we ask the wrong question.
So people will say, why is there poverty?
But that's not really the right question.
The right question is, why is there wealth?
I mean, why is there poverty?
It's like, well, that's what we're born into.
That's the state of the world.
The state of nature is poverty.
The question is, why is there wealth?
What happens?
And then you start to realize that what it takes is work, capital investment, labor, you know, like all of these forces that require markets.
And there's a reason why, basically, for, you know, human beings have been modern humans for like, what, 150,000 years, 200,000 years?
And yet, how long have we really had wealth in terms of the way we know it?
I mean, what, since 1870, something like that?
I mean, before that, there's basically no wealth in terms of the way we think of wealth now.
There's nothing.
Pre-industrial revolution, there's nothing.
There's economic growth for all of human history is just like a flat line.
And then all of a sudden in the late 1800s, it zooms up.
And this is all, you know, and this is what the socialists looked at, the Marxists and all of them looked at and went, oh my God, exploitation.
You're like, things are getting good for the first time ever.
What the hell are you talking about?
All right.
I'm sure there's other books and thinkers that we could think of, but I'm just trying to think.
Of course, Lou Rockwell, everybody over at the Mises Institute.
Go check those guys out if you're interested in this stuff and you want to learn more.
But okay, let's, anyone else you just want to mention?
Just names real quick?
All right.
So for the remaining time in the episode, a couple other things that I wanted to get to.
So one was I thought we'd do a debunking, a debunking, because that's one of our favorite things that I've always loved doing on this show.
And this one that I found, I was just looking.
No one even sent me this one.
I was just like, let's find one and let's look.
And I found this one.
And I think I might have actually taken this on in one of the early, early part of the problem episodes.
But, you know, it's years later and I've got a, you know, I've grown to some degree.
And I know this guy.
Yeah, well, let's see how I take on it now.
I didn't even watch it.
I watched like literally 10 seconds of it and was like, you know what?
Let's take this on again.
I can't actually remember if I did this on an episode or just watched this and did this in my head back in the day, but I think I did.
But so this is David Parkman, who's built himself up.
He's like a real big YouTuber, a left-wing guy.
And this is from years ago, like five, six years ago or something like that.
And he did a debunking libertarianism video.
And now it's years later.
He's at a different place.
We're at a different place.
But let's take a look at this and see how people were talking about libertarianism when we were kind of becoming mainstreamed and see if we can't go back and forth.
Let's have a good fun debunking, debunking libertarianism.
All right, let's go.
We've had some pretty good response when we've debunked juvenile, absolutist, libertarian ideals in the past.
You'll remember a while back we talked about is slavery or is taxation a form of slavery?
This is a common refrain from some libertarians.
We debunked that.
The reaction was huge on both sides, people agreeing and disagreeing.
So we're going to do another one here, okay?
So let's pause for a second already on that.
So the idea of taxation being slavery.
Well, it does, I will grant you that it seems a little bit crazy to point to anybody in 2019 in America and say, you're a slave.
Because what comes to your mind right away is you're like, well, I'm not getting whipped on a plantation, right?
I mean, my life's pretty good.
I got HBO and Netflix and fucking cold meatball sub in front of me.
I mean, life could be worse.
And I got some chips of hoy to dig into after that meatball sub.
I got a good podcast co-host who got me all this stuff.
I mean, you know, am I really a slave?
But if you're talking about the more philosophical question of is taxation slavery, I mean, what if 100% of your money was taxed?
Right?
So let's say you just worked and all of the money went to somebody else.
Do you think that would be reasonable to call that slavery?
Because isn't that kind of what slavery was?
You're working and then all of your money went to someone else.
Now you could still say there's a difference.
I guess you choose what job you want to do, but you don't keep any of the money.
100% of it is taxed.
Okay.
Well, I guess you don't have to work, right?
So I'm not saying there's no difference, but couldn't you kind of see where, look, if 100% of your money is taxed and you don't get to choose what job you do and you're forced to work, we all agree that's slavery, right?
That's what slavery is, like the literal definition of slavery, right?
You're forced to do a job.
You don't get to choose whether or not you do it and you keep none of the money.
You keep none of the, forget the money, just none of the, you know, fruits of your labor, right?
Okay, so that's slavery.
So when does it become not slavery?
I'm not saying taxation is slavery.
I never use that statement.
I always say taxation is theft.
I think it's a little hyperbolic to say taxation is slavery, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
What if you get to choose the job you have, but you have to do a job and you keep none of your money?
Is that slavery now?
Or is that not slavery because you get to choose?
Still seems like slavery to me.
Well, what if you get to, you know, you don't have to work, but if you do work, we keep 100% of your money.
Is that still slavery?
Is there a debate here?
Okay.
Well, what about 90% gets taxed?
80% gets taxed.
Like, when exactly does it stop being slavery if someone, if you can work all day and then someone else can just come in and take all of it?
Because by the way, if you really want to break it down, slaves, like slaves in America, right?
Like slaves in the South or the North for that matter in America.
I mean, they kind of had a choice to not work, but if they didn't work, they'd probably die.
But that's kind of the truth for everybody, right?
If you don't work, you're probably, I mean, maybe you won't die, but you're going to have a very bad life.
And I mean, they got some things.
They got housing and food.
I mean, assuming they were all alive, right?
So they were like being kept alive by their slave masters.
Maybe not all of them, but a good amount of them.
So it's just an interesting question.
Like when exactly, it's not something that's so easy to debunk.
I mean, surely it's a little bit hyperbolic, but there is some question worth asking, right?
Like what, if somebody else can just come in and tell you what to do, is that relationship completely different from master and servant?
I don't know.
You tell me, but I think it's an interesting question.
If somebody can tell you you can't smoke a joint or you can't start a business or you can't do something, you can't just do something that you'd like to do with your freedom.
Isn't that relationship somewhat akin to a master and a servant, a master and a slave?
I think there's a similarity there.
So again, but by the way, taxation is slavery is not something that I hear a lot of libertarians say.
I have heard a few.
I hear taxation is theft quite a bit more.
And that's a much harder one to debunk.
But maybe that's why you take on taxation as slavery.
All right, let's keep playing.
Libertarians are against men with guns using force to enforce the law.
Okay.
So many libertarians.
Pause it right there.
No.
That's just not.
Never heard a libertarian say that in my life.
Libertarians are against men with guns using force to enforce the law.
Well, no, what libertarians are against is people violating the non-aggression principle.
I actually think men with guns enforcing the law is the best way to enforce the law.
So like if somebody's coming to like kill you, I would like there to be some men with guns who enforce the fact that they can't kill you.
And I've never in my life heard a libertarian who didn't agree with that statement.
Never once heard a libertarian.
Libertarians are against men with guns?
No, we're all about men with guns.
We think there should be a whole lot more men with guns making sure we enforce the law.
We just think the law should be a respect for private property and the non-initiation of violence against peaceful people.
So private property rights and the non-aggression principle, which almost nobody ever takes on in a debunking libertarianism video or article or any of that shit.
But no, of course we're not against men with guns enforcing the law.
We're for laws and that's how laws get enforced by men with guns.
I don't think it should be all based around one centralized monopoly who initiates violence in a given geographical territory that they have no claim to.
Taxes Are Not Legitimate Fees00:15:44
That's the argument.
Okay, let's keep playing.
Proof that the government is oppressive or an illegal force will say, you know what?
If you don't do what the government says, whether it's taxation, whether it's following certain rules, whatever the case may be, ultimately they send men with guns to force you into doing it.
And so let's pause.
Actually, let him say that by definition, what?
Definition is oppressive and a sign that government is completely illegitimate.
All right, so let's pause it right there.
Okay, so he says that government, at one point he said government is illegal.
And I don't know that that's a little bit strange because it's like, well, obviously right now governments are writing the law.
So no, by the letter of the law, they're not illegal.
I think what we're talking about is whether or not they're immoral.
Because, you know, like you even started by saying taxation isn't slavery, but I assume David Parkman would agree that slavery was immoral.
Certainly wasn't illegal.
Slavery was legal.
It was codified in every law, federal, state, all the laws acknowledge slavery in America up until 1865.
And or maybe even 66.
But so sure, it's legal.
Look, libertarians have never said that the government, if you don't follow what they say, they will send men with guns as proof that government is illegitimate.
It's simply a statement of fact that this is what the government is.
What the government is, is an organization that will send men with guns to get you if you don't follow their rules.
And they seemingly can write whatever rules they want to.
So yeah, it's like that's just the reality of the situation that if you don't follow the law, there are men with guns on the other side of that law.
So you would think from that, you could reasonably deduce that the law should be limited in some way.
Like in some way, you shouldn't just be able to send men with guns to make you do whatever somebody, at the whims of some politician, wants to do.
There should be some type of limit.
And again, it should be the respect for private property rights and the non-aggression principle.
Let's keep playing.
So let's explore that, right?
If you don't pay taxes, eventually someone will show up at your house with guns.
They'll take you into custody and they'll put you in jail and you won't be able to run away because they have guns and they're physically restraining you.
And that is, of course, bad.
This is not a spontaneous initiation of force, right?
This is the enforcement of a social contract.
This is, in this particular case with taxation, it's a very explicit social contract.
Many libertarians will make a big deal out of the men with guns enforcing laws, yet they overlook the fact that men with guns are the basis of enforcement for any social system.
If you think of the libertarian social system, right?
Everybody fends for themselves.
You delineate and protect your property.
You are in charge of your own security for people not stealing stuff from you.
Right.
So all of this.
It's amazing these people who are so popular.
And like, this guy's like a big YouTuber and all these things.
And he just has never looked into libertarianism at all, never given it any honest consideration or read anything about it.
And then does this like debunking it video?
And they always do the same thing where they start with a false understanding of what it is and then debunk this false thing and just never get into it.
So it's like I said at the beginning, it's like, no, libertarians have never said men with guns can enforce laws.
That's not the claim at all.
But then he goes, but the libertarian thing is everyone fending for themselves, everyone defending their own law with guns.
Like, no.
No.
I don't know what to say.
Never once said that.
I've never said that.
I've never heard any libertarian ever say, what we're arguing for is everyone fending for themselves.
Isn't this a weird thing that, and by the way, as who I recommended before, Frederick Bastiat, he wrote about this, how he said that socialists he was talking about, but today I think this could be applied to leftists in general, are basically incapable of distinguishing between society and the state.
Like there's no distinguishing between people and the government, as if we're all the same thing.
Like as if a group of people are the cops.
So in other words, if I were to say that Gas Digital Network, this podcast studio, I don't think it should be run by the government.
I don't think the government should come in and own the studios, own every microphone and every table.
The government shouldn't pay everyone who works at Gas Digital and the government shouldn't decide everything that's said on these podcasts, right?
Let's say I make that claim and your response to that is, oh, so you're just saying everyone has to run their own podcast network by themselves.
Wouldn't you see where you'd go like, well, what?
No.
I mean, we're all still doing this together.
Like, there's a lot of people who work at Gas Digital.
There's a lot of people who go into producing every show.
There's like a whole bunch of people here right now.
Everybody, I see one, two, three, four, five, just within my vision.
I see six people.
Everybody here is working in different capacities.
Some of us in multiple capacities at Gas Digital.
No one's saying you have to do it yourself.
We're just saying it shouldn't be done by this one central monopoly.
We just don't want cops involved.
Imagine walking down the street right now and not being able to differentiate between the people and the cops.
And if you go, I don't think the cops should run the restaurant, going, so I guess everybody just has to run a restaurant by themselves.
Well, no, that's not the position at all.
It's just that it should be done voluntarily.
That's all.
And in terms of this, like, actually, let's play what he's going to say because I think I'm responding to the next thing.
I think.
You would also be doing the enforcement with guns.
And it is arbitrary to say that it would be more or less legitimate for those individuals to be using those exact same guns to enforce their security or their land ownership.
This is an obvious Lewis blind spot for this absolutist libertarian allegation about.
So, no, it's not a blind spot.
You're just misunderstanding what libertarians say.
But it's not arbitrary to say you would be doing something with that same exact gun.
Like, because the gun is the same, it's arbitrary what you do with it.
So, let's say somebody walks a school shooter runs into a school and starts shooting random children up, right?
And then somebody else comes with a gun.
Let's say it's the same make-and-model gun and shoots the guy who's shooting a whole bunch of school children up and kills them.
Saves a whole bunch of people's lives.
Would you say, well, I mean, you're for this guy doing something with the same gun that you're against this guy doing.
Isn't that kind of arbitrary to say the guy who stopped the school shooter is good, but the school shooter is bad?
I mean, they both were men with guns.
Isn't that kind of arbitrary?
It's like, no, no, that is not arbitrary at all.
That's actually very consistent with morality.
One of them was initiating violence on a group of people and one of them was defending a group of innocent people, maybe defending himself as well.
No, see, aggression and defense, distinguishing them, is not arbitrary.
It's not arbitrary at all.
In fact, it's the cornerstone of morality in every sense of the word.
In anything, name me one thing that is universally accepted as immoral activity, and I will show you somebody initiating violence against peaceful people.
Slavery, genocide, fucking, you know, assault, murder, rape, you know, robbing people, anything.
Anything that's universally considered bad by all different, you know, sides of the political spectrum.
So no, it's not arbitrary to say whether men with guns.
And by the way, I don't think, and most libertarians don't agree too, if a cop saw someone shooting up a school and shot that guy, there's no libertarians out there who would say that was wrong because it was a government guy with a gun.
It's like, no, he was acting defensively in that instance.
So that was justified.
What's not justified is coming at somebody who's done nothing wrong, who hasn't initiated violence against anyone, hasn't infringed on anyone's rights, has just worked, putting a gun to his head and saying, give me some of the fucking money you just worked for.
That would be wrong in the same way that the guy going into the school to shoot people up is wrong, but the guy stopping him is not.
And there's nothing arbitrary about that.
All right, let's keep playing.
About men with guns using force.
Right.
Also, the guns are really there as a precautionary measure in case you don't comply.
You know, it's not like the guns are drawn.
And also, chances are the men with guns aren't going to show up on your first tax offense.
Well, that's not.
Okay, pause that right there.
Okay.
The guns are really just there in case you don't comply.
Yeah, that's the point.
They're there in case you don't comply.
What type of argument is that?
Well, listen, you know, most people who get mugged don't get shot.
Like most people who get mugged at gunpoint don't get shot.
The gun's really just there in case you don't comply.
Yeah, but it's also the reason why every other person who gets mugged gives up the money.
Because if you don't comply, you'll get shot.
And yeah, they don't show up on the first time.
Okay, so I guess just like anyone, like the mafia is completely justified.
If they come by and go, you know, I think you better give 10% over to the mafia.
And then if you don't, you get a note.
And then if you don't, you know, whatever, something out of a movie, the Godfather Horse's Head or something like that.
And then if you don't, we come shoot you.
And you're like, well, I mean, there were four things before he came and shot you.
And the gun was really just there in case you didn't comply.
He wasn't going to shoot you unless you didn't comply.
Like, yeah, what?
What type of moral justification for something is this?
It's like, okay, get into my cellar.
You're my slave now.
And I have a gun on my hip.
And they're like, well, you're a man with a gun forcing me into slavery.
And you go, yeah, but only if you don't comply.
And I'll give you several warnings.
So we're all good here, right?
I mean, this is the deep, this is the deep moral thinking of popular YouTubers who criticize libertarians.
All right, let's keep going.
Social contract, right?
Some will deny they're participating in a social contract by using government roads or working and owing taxes as a result of working or whatever the case may be.
But they've benefited from the government assistance and infrastructure.
Everything they own was delivered on government maintained and built roads.
They presumably, if they have a job, they earn a living from a company that is at least to some extent regulated by the government.
The reason their employer can't make them work 150 hours a week is because of the government.
They aren't, they've received the exact same benefits as everybody else.
So then to say that in spite of all of the benefits and protections that the government has provided them specifically, they are against the government using guns to enforce any lawsuits.
Wait, hold on, let me just finish this.
Hypocritical and juvenile.
Utterly hypocritical and juvenile.
You know, isn't it funny for a video who started just alluding to the fact that he debunked previously taxation being slavery, then coming back to using a justification that could perfectly fit slavery?
Like perfectly fit slavery, right?
I mean, it'd be like, well, dude, I mean, sure, these slaves say they don't like slavery, but your food was provided for you.
This plantation is provided for you.
Your housing is provided for you.
I mean, none of you guys have a job that hasn't been propped up by the plantation owner, right?
I mean, like, come on, man.
Like, think this through.
You have to be smart enough to think really, really hard and think about why, if the government is illegitimate, them forcefully claiming a monopoly on the roads, which they got from extracting your money to begin with.
The other problem with this is it's like a circular line of argumentation where you're going like, oh, well, taxes are legitimate because you drove on government roads.
And how did we fund those government roads?
Oh, yeah, with taxes.
So, okay, you really never got to the like core of this argument.
But sure, just because someone takes something from you, if you were provided any benefit, now you owe money back to them?
It is.
It really is.
And also, let me take this in the other direction, right?
First off, that's just like dumbass fucking logic, moral.
The most like softest conception of morality you could possibly imagine.
Like it literally would justify slavery.
It would justify concentration camps.
Do you justify any evil with this?
But the government gave you your food.
The government gave you this bed.
So of course you owe something back.
But how about this?
If you, if you're saying, right, well, great regulations are the reason why you have such a good job and great government roads and all these things, government schools or whatever, are the reason why you're making money.
So of course you owe some money to the government.
Well, what if they're bad?
I mean, are you arguing that all government schooling, all government roads, all government regulations have always helped people?
Like, what if they hurt people?
I mean, what if you're a guy who doesn't have that good of a job because you got busted a few times for possession of a controlled substance or something like that?
And now you got a fucking, you know, like you're a multiple time felon and so you can't get a fucking good job.
Does the government owe you some money for that?
Can we all start collecting money around tax time?
How exactly do you measure up whether or not the government has been a net, you know, benefactor or has taken money away from you or beneficiary, whatever the right word fucking is.
You know what I mean.
Anyway, this is just what a fucking dumbass logic.
Well, the government fucking has the roads.
How would anyone compare this to slavery?
Your master gave you everything.
You owe your master some food.
You owe your master that cotton.
It's just fucking straight up slave master fucking logic.
All right, let's keep going.
It is.
It really is silly, but you're not going to convince them of anything, David.
They are very strongly.
It's going to sound like Sam Roberts.
I say feverant.
They're feverant about this.
Yeah, and they're basically in essence, they're trying to be freeloaders, right?
They are participating in the society that the government is an integral part of, whether it's the providing of security, whether it's labor law, roads, utilities, etc.
They're receiving all-slave argument.
We get it.
But somehow they don't want to be participating in what funds that.
Yeah, go ahead.
Maybe they don't even think about it.
Maybe you'd have to say to them, well, try living your life for a week or a month without using anything that the government provides you in any way, shape, or form.
Stop Accusing Libertarians Of Freeloading00:05:55
And if they say that I can't really do it in this country, then you say, well, you have the choice to find a different country.
If you can't find a different country where that's the case, maybe you need to reconsider whether it's really a good system if absolutely no country has adopted it.
And if you look at the countries that are closer to what you would call an absolute libertarian state of affairs, I don't think they're places you would really like to live.
Okay, let's pause right there.
That guy's got a suit and this guy looks like he just finished cleaning the janitor's closet.
It's like they're doing two different shows at the same time.
Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know what to even like take on there.
But so it's like, oh, yeah, well, these, you know, if you, if you tell these libertarians that they have to live in a system without government, well, they'll tell you they can't do it because they have to go to another society.
It's like, well, you know, if you don't like it, then you can leave.
Love it or leave it, you know?
So after the slavery, the pro-slavery argument in essence, it's the love it or leave it argument.
It's like, I wonder why these leftists can never apply that logic to themselves.
So let's say all these guys, how do you feel about Donald Trump being the president?
Oh, you don't like it?
So bail.
Get out.
Get the hell out of the country then.
Oh, you don't want to leave?
You want to not live under Donald Trump here?
No, sorry.
Leave.
What else don't you like about our system?
Get out.
Sorry.
It's like, well, no, what are you going to do?
You're going to stay here and try to change that system, right?
Okay, so so are we.
And in terms of like this, like, oh, well, you know, I don't think you'd want to live in the more libertarian places.
Like, yeah, no, you would.
You absolutely would.
You would rather live.
Go look at the Economic Freedom Index.
You'd rather live in the freer places than the less free places.
I guarantee that.
As the least free place on the planet is North Korea, I think.
Or one country like that.
That's where you don't want to live.
You don't want to live in North Korea.
You don't want to live in Venezuela.
You don't want to live in places where there's rampant violence.
You want to live in places.
You're telling me there's a place where more or less they respect private property rights and the non-aggression principle, but you really wouldn't want to live there.
No, actually, I think that's exactly where you want to live.
Literally, exactly.
All right, let's play the rest of this.
Though perhaps not legally, you are free to roam into the wilderness of Montana, live completely off the grid and fend for yourself and not work.
And I don't know, maybe that will work for a few of them.
It is your choice.
Maybe you would avoid the men with guns enforcing any laws if you did that.
Okay, let's take a break.
We have a great Friday show for you today.
I think you're right.
So that's it.
Man, it's funny, man.
Like the idea that you could accuse libertarians of wanting to be freeloaders.
Do you think that what is it?
Like, look.
I like freeloading.
Well, yeah, sure.
I mean, who doesn't?
But actually, if anything, you know, it's just ironic to hear leftists who advocate for a welfare state.
Yeah.
But to hear people who advocate for a welfare state telling libertarians that they just want to be freeloaders, it's like, since when are you against freeloaders?
I mean, isn't that the nature of government that they're taxing from some people and then giving that money to others?
Okay.
Now, nobody who's a serious libertarian has ever not thought through the fact that like, yeah, we're going to have to pay for things.
I mean, if the roads are private, if schools are private, if all of these things are private, you're not going to be able to just get them for free.
I mean, maybe if someone wants to donate them to you, someone wants to voluntarily pay your way.
And I actually do think there would be a decent amount of that in a libertarian society.
But no, it's not saying that we want a freeload.
I'm happy to pay.
I'm happy to pay for what I use.
What I don't think I should have to pay is 50% of my income so that we can fight never-ending wars, imprison nonviolent criminals, regulate every nook and cranny of the economy, spend $80,000 a toilet bowl over at the Pentagon.
You know, this type of shit.
Do you know, think about it like this.
Let me ask you this.
Anybody who like works, who makes decent money out here, think about what you actually use.
Okay, yeah, you use roads and you use schools and all these things.
Think about what do you pay?
What's the biggest tax burden that you pay?
You know, is it your state and local taxes?
Is it your property taxes, your sales tax?
Or is it the federal income tax?
Yeah, that motherfucker, the federal government, the one that does the least for you, that's the most removed from you, just happens to be the government that has the most power.
Yeah, that's kind of the one who robs you the most.
Ah, what a dumbass fucking anti-libertarian argument.
This is the shit that passes.
And by the way, this is the crazy thing.
And this is what we've been battling against for fucking seven years since I've been doing this show is that this motherfucker, while they're accusing us of being like, well, maybe they just don't even think about these things.
Yes, you're right.
Libertarians have never thought about these things.
We've never come across the argument of people who believe in a government, except the fact that every single one of us started as one of those people and then came over here.
But these guys can finish this video and then go, yeah, we showed them.
We did a good job there.
The Pelican Face got us again.
All right.
Now, I'll tell you, before we wrap up this 500th episode, I will say this.
One of the things that our show has really evolved into in the years, you know, it started with, and this is where even doing that video, it's going back to our roots a little bit.
You know, the show started with the stuff that I've talked about that, you know, a lot of the stuff we've read and the libertarian philosophy.
And at first, I just kind of wanted to talk about the libertarian philosophy.
And really, to be completely honest, the show started as a show to really boost fucking Ron Paul 2012.
Like, that's what I was all about was like the Ron Paul fucking political movement was going on, the liberty movement, the love illusion, all that stuff.
Tulsi Gabbard As A Russian Asset00:11:54
And, you know, it was about that.
And after a while, you know, there's only so much you can say.
You kind of like say all these things and, you know, it's fun to kind of go over them on this show.
But after a while, you're like, okay, well, this is the philosophy and this is what I believe, but what the fuck else am I going to say about it?
And what I started doing more and more was commenting on the media and the state of affairs in politics today.
And that's really what the show's grown into.
And part of the reason why I like to do that is because, number one, I don't see another show from our perspective that does That regularly.
And if we're just getting deep into philosophical stuff, there's probably people more qualified for that.
But if we're just fucking ripping apart CNN and that, you know, the MSNBC, well, that's Fox News, whatever.
Like, I can do that as well as anybody, I feel like.
And also, once you've seen these things and you've read all those people who we were talking about before, and you look at things through this philosophical, you know, lens, as I've said before, it kind of gives you an insight that others don't have quite often.
And so I've really enjoyed doing that, talking about the topical news of the day and breaking things down.
And I think a big part of that is why we were able to break down the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and all these other things that go on and the election in 2016 and break it down in an interesting way that's different than what a lot of other people are doing.
And so I wanted to just do a little bit of that on our last show.
So one of the things, there was one particular segment that really caught my eye.
Of course, the last episode that we talked about, what to me has been the most interesting story of the last few days, which was Hillary Clinton coming out and calling Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset.
So let's, there was a clip from MSNBC.
But first, actually, because I just want to give the proper context, let's just play what Hillary Clinton said on this podcast last week about Tulsi Gabbard.
So let's play that.
They're also going to do third-party attempt.
And I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.
She's a favorite of the Russians.
They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.
And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset.
Yeah, she's a Russian asset.
I mean, totally.
All right, so she may not be running, but there is Hillary Clinton.
That was her quote.
It's like Alex Jones.
Oh, I mean, Alex Jones would be right sometimes.
Yeah.
It was actually substantially worse than Alex Jones.
So here's Hillary Clinton.
And by the way, I just love every bit of this.
As I said last time, it's just great to have Hillary Clinton as a political rival.
It's just, it really is amazing to watch her just become more and more unhinged and jump the shark.
This is a woman who just cannot deal with the fact that Donald Trump beat her.
She cannot deal with the fact that she lost what was supposed to be a sure thing to this fucking cartoon character.
She was supposed to be the most powerful human being on the planet sitting in the Oval Office, deciding what nations rise and what nations fall.
And instead, she's doing a goddamn podcast and fucking claiming people are Russian assets.
So anyway, so as we told you last episode, Tulsi came back with three fiery tweets, really put her in her place.
Called her the queen of warmongering and the source of the rot of the Democratic Party.
They called her the most corrupt person and all of these things.
And it's been great.
Tulsi's been making the rounds.
It's been impossible for people to not cover Tulsi Gabbard now.
And most people who I've seen, to be fair, have been, listen, most people have been like, yeah, she shouldn't have done that.
Here's how bad it is.
Carl Rove, okay?
Carl Rove, the George W. Bush architect, is George W. Bush's top advisor, neocon fucking general fucking, you know, master, Carl Rove.
He even said, he was like, yeah, you can't do this, Hillary.
You can't do this.
You can't just call people Russian assets.
He goes, I hate Tulsi Gabbard.
I hate her foreign policy.
I disagree with her on just about anything.
But like, you can't, you can't just call people Russian assets.
I mean, it's just not right.
Even he had the decency.
Even this guy who will gladly defend and engineer policies that butcher hundreds of thousands of human beings was like, I don't know.
This is a little bit too much for me.
They did it to Trump for two years.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
And it sounds like she might be raising Tulsi's profile a little bit.
Oh, no, it's definitely good for Tulsi.
But I will say, I saw this one clip on MSNBC that actually I just could not believe.
And it made me, somebody, if you remember, when we were taking questions from the part of the problem inner circle last week, somebody actually asked, do you think the media is jumping the shark with this whole thing?
And my take at first was kind of like, oh, I mean, you know, they sold the war in Iraq and that didn't seem to have any consequences.
The Trump-Russia collusion thing doesn't seem to have any consequences.
Who knows if they're actually jumping the shark?
But I saw this clip and it actually made me think, maybe this might actually be the moment where some in the media are jumping the shark.
And that's why other people, even Carl Rove, Van Jones, people who you would not expect to be decent on this have been like, Hillary shouldn't be doing this.
Because I think even they're concerned that they're like, this is going to like, this is too much.
This is going to expose us, you know?
But here was Jonathan Capart, this little fucking annoying fruitcake on MSNBC.
And he was hosting a panel show.
Let's just go to this.
Let's play this clip.
It's really unbelievable.
Sorry, Hillary.
One thing that was interesting about Tulsi Gabbard's response, I mean, she went after Hillary Clinton.
She was strong.
She said that she wasn't going to run as a third-party candidate.
She never denied being a Russian asset.
That's the one asset that was missing from her response.
Which you think that would be the first time in the first line or two.
It was not there.
When Hillary Clinton says there's a Russian asset, doesn't say anybody's name, and Tulsi Gabbard goes, how dare you call me a Russian asset?
I mean, you know, this is.
John Adams came back.
She didn't say it.
She didn't even say she wasn't.
Julia said.
To your point, Hillary Clinton didn't name names, but there's Congresswoman Gabbard who's like, me, me, me, me.
You know, so she wanted the attention, of course.
And, you know, look, Hillary Clinton, maybe she's rooting for the Washington now.
Wow.
It's like Buba from Friday Night Lights.
Oh, I just love the fucking laughing.
She never denied that she was a Russian asset.
Wow.
Wow.
What fucking hacks you guys are?
What fucking embarrassments you are, Jonathan Gapart.
Are you out of your fucking mind?
You really think, like, how stupid are you?
Or a better question.
How stupid do you think your fucking audience is?
How stupid do you think your audience is?
Hillary Clinton never named her.
You're right.
Okay, so Hillary Clinton never named her.
So by the way, then, if that's your case, then it's not just that Tulsi Gabbard assumed she was talking about her.
It's that everybody else in the media except your dumbass fucking show assumed she was talking about Tulsi too.
Because of course she was.
Of course she was talking about Tulsi Gabbard.
What do you think?
You think she was calling Kamala Harris a Russian asset?
Was she saying that half of her former staff are working for a Russian asset now?
Was she calling Elizabeth Warren a Russian asset?
Or maybe Amy Klobuchar?
Was she calling her a Russian asset?
No, of course she's talking about Tulsi Gabbard.
Hillary Clinton, by the way, someone from a staffer, or not a staffer, like a representative for Hillary Clinton admitted that they were talking about Tulsi Gabbard since this has happened.
So she's almost just fucking full of shit.
Oh, isn't that?
And by the way, she never denied it.
Ooh, isn't that fucking creepy and Orwellian?
She never denied it.
So let me see if I get this straight.
You now can.
And by the way, I'm not a fucking statist.
I don't think that military members deserve some special protection.
I don't think congresswomen deserve some special protection.
But you guys are all fucking statists and all believe in both of those things.
So let me just get this straight.
This is how it works now.
You can just accuse somebody who served in the military of being a traitor.
And you're required to present no evidence.
You can say someone's a Russian asset and go, oh, why?
Well, why are they a Russian asset?
Like, how do you know that?
Nah, they are.
They're grooming.
They're grooming her.
She's a Russian asset.
So is Jill Stein.
So is everyone who's opposed to me politically.
Donald Trump, Jill Stein.
They're all probably Russian assets.
Tulsi Gabbard, she's a Russian asset too.
Okay.
And you don't have to provide any evidence.
Not one single shred of evidence.
Just kind of, well, they have bots and they have stuff.
So she's a Russian asset.
And then if she doesn't deny it, everybody laughs and goes, man, I mean, she didn't deny it.
That's pretty crazy.
Okay.
So how about this, Hillary Clinton?
If you have any evidence, and you don't think you need to let people know, you just put the accusation out there.
Let me ask you this question to all these fucking statists.
Hillary Clinton has evidence that a sitting member of Congress is a Russian asset.
You think maybe you should present that evidence to someone?
You think maybe there's an obligation on you to report this, to go to your precious government and try to do something about it?
Or no, you just try to score cheap political points on a podcast.
Is there something, is there anything that you could think of that is more despicable, okay, than Hillary Rodham Clinton calling somebody who served in a war that she voted for, that she championed, someone who went over to Iraq, a war that just about everyone agrees now we shouldn't have thought was an absolute disaster.
Somebody who went there for two tours, comes home and goes, I think this war is a mistake and we should never fight in a war like that again.
And then she can just slander you as a traitor to your country and have, and there's no, like, no, like, you should provide any one ounce of evidence of that.
And then you have these MSNBC fucking hacks, these fucking pathetic excuses for fucking newsmen.
And they're, they're just sitting there laughing at Tulsi Gabbard.
Well, she just assumed she was talking about her.
Everyone knows she was talking about her.
She never denied it.
She never presented an argument.
What should she have to fucking deny?
Oh, man.
You know, 500 episodes into part of the problem.
I really, I am lucky that the mainstream media makes it this easy.
Makes it this easy.
That's the state that we live in today.
That's why this podcast is 500 episodes long.
That's why we've been so successful and why we're going to continue to do this because these fucking media whores are so fucking retarded that even a couple idiot comedians like us can tear them to shreds with ease.
And that's episode 500, part one.
Episode 500 week continues on Wednesday and Friday.
Got some fun stuff planned.
So bodegabags.com.
Bodegabags.com.
Go follow Robbie at Robbie the Fire on Twitter.
Check out the Run Your Mouth podcast.
That's Rob's podcast.
And yeah, thank you guys so much for listening.
I love every one of you and I really appreciate you guys listening.