Jeff Deist and James Smith celebrate the 500th episode of The Problem with Politics, arguing that a bloated federal government has strangled intermediary institutions, causing social atomization since the late 1960s. They critique "left libertarians" for prioritizing individual freedoms over traditional family structures while noting how Federal Reserve policies delay home ownership. The discussion highlights the difficulty of repealing entrenched programs like Medicare compared to fighting new ones, observing that corporations increasingly adopt woke narratives to avoid lawsuits. Ultimately, they warn that without Christian cultural foundations, a post-Christian America may become significantly nastier as the state continues to expand its control over land and military bases. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Heshi Socks Sponsorship00:01:28
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Special Part of the Problem00:03:55
All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a very special part of the problem.
It is episode 500 week.
This is episode 500, part two.
That's right.
We're celebrating the 500th episode with a full week, like a 21-year-old girl's birthday, a full week of celebration for this milestone.
And I'm very excited for today's podcast.
You know, I was thinking, who do I want to bring in as the guest episode for the episode 500 week?
And then it hit me, the obvious answer to this was the president of the Mises Institute, the longtime chairman of Ron Paul's congressional staff and an advisor to Ron Paul.
Really, no one has been more influential over me than Ron Paul and the Mises Institute.
So I figured the perfect guest would be the great Jeff Deist, and he was good enough to join us.
So hello.
Thank you for coming on.
How are you, sir?
Hey, Dave Smith.
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Very good.
How are things in the Mises Institute?
Well, I got to ask, you know, Robbie's not here today.
Is this, should I take this personally somehow?
Yes, he was like, I do not want to be associated with them.
That's right.
Robbie, king of the cocks.
No, on the one-on-one episodes, I do it one-on-one.
So I bring a guest on and we talk just us.
Robbie's here.
He's lurking.
Okay, well, I got to say, you know, 500 episodes.
And the thing about your show is I'm sort of in the podcast world.
I do my own podcast.
I had a gas digital description.
I listened to a fair amount of stuff, but you're not quite in that Rogan mode of going three hours or whatever it is, but you go pretty long.
I do.
So 500 is a lot.
I don't know how you do it.
I mean, how do you figure this out?
Well, it's listen.
I don't do those like weak little Tom Woods 25-minute episodes.
You clock out, you celebrate your thousandth episode.
I go between usually an hour to an hour and a half, somewhere in that range.
And I don't do the Rogan style just because I think I just don't have the endurance for it.
I have like too much ADD for that.
That's intense.
But I enjoy doing them.
So we need an hour to an hour and a half worth of material here is what you're saying.
That is what I'm saying.
Oh, by the way, I will let people know, even before we get into anything, if you want to help me celebrate 500th week, we have a brand new shirt at podcastmerch.com, which is the state as the mafia shirt.
It's a great shirt.
You can go grab one there.
And I don't know if I told you this, Jeff, but I have let it be known that I will be donating 10% of the profits to the Mises Institute.
So if you want to help out the Mises Institute and support the show and get a cool shirt, go over to podcastmerch.com.
90% of it goes to my wife and daughter, 10% to the Mises Institute.
Nothing from me.
That's the deal that I made with this whole thing.
Felt like that was getting my priorities straight.
So you are in Auburn, Alabama right now, correct?
You're at the Institute?
I am.
We're heading to LA tomorrow for the weekend.
So that's going to be fun.
But yeah, and the Auburn thing is interesting because I think it's played such a big part in our identity.
And I think it plays a huge part in the mindset and worldview of our critics, to be honest.
Interesting.
Politics and Self-Importance00:15:32
You know, people come to me all the time and they say, why is the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama?
How did this happen?
It seems strange to them.
And it's just interesting to me to sort of get that.
I'm not a Southerner.
I've only been here about four or five years.
So I have a little bit different perspective than a Southerner.
But it's interesting.
It's almost like when someone converts to a religion, they become an annoying, overzealous defender of that religion.
That's kind of how I am with the South.
You know, I've been here a few years now and people say, well, why is the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama?
They think Alabama is some mystifying place.
It's like out of Africa or something.
So I get a lot of this.
And so we do events all over the country, but it's nice to be down here.
People, someday I'm going to write a book or an article called something like On Moving South.
And I'm going to talk about how it's actually a very nice place and how people have a lot of preconceived, and maybe even I did, have a lot of preconceived ideas about it.
But the main thing is that I think it's very important that we're not in Washington, D.C.
And I'm very critical, maybe hyper-critical of organizations that are because nothing good is coming out of that town.
There's no reason to be there.
It's expensive.
It's malevolent.
And it chews people up.
People are in D.C., they get caught up in this sort of very mediocre whirlwind.
You've probably heard this expression that D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people.
Yes.
And that's true to an extent.
There's a lot of very mediocre people there who just ended up.
There's a lot of self-important people.
You know, I'm the vice chair of the subcommittee for blah, blah, blah.
And so there's a very artificial feel to that place.
I guess I lived there three or four years.
But beyond that, if people are watching the World Series and you watch the Nats at home, that's an artificial crowd.
These are people from all over the country who just sort of adopted the Nats.
It's not like being at a Yankees or a Mets game in New York.
It's just there's something about it that people go there, they get chewed up, they never leave, they change, they get absorbed into the Borg.
And from my perspective, I don't really care what someone's politics are.
I'm trying as hard as I can to be post-political or anti-political, whatever you want to call it.
But regardless of your politics, nothing good is going to come out of that town.
Everything that town does makes our national problems worse in my view.
And everything they try to do to ameliorate our problems backfires.
So I don't have faith in D.C.
And I have a fair amount of cognitive dissonance when people want, you know, say, well, I'm going to go to D.C. and do X, Y, and Z for Liberty.
I'm going to make this change.
I generally don't buy it.
I think it's time to turn our backs on DC.
Now, how we do that, I admit, is not so easy, but it's definitely time, Dave.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
And it's a weird thing.
I've even seen the effect that it's had on people in like the cable news world in New York when they just get, they get connected with people from D.C.
And there's something about it.
It's like, I think the Lord of the Rings was like the best analogy ever where it's like, it's like everyone gets close to this power source, and then they just kind of feed on that.
And it's so cool because your whole identity becomes, I know somebody who was Dick Cheney's assistant, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And it's just terrible.
And as you said, there's something about it.
And I think that people are becoming more and more aware of this.
It's seeping into the national conscious that these people are unimpressive.
I mean, just straight up unimpressive.
I mean, who could watch that, the Democrat, the Democratic debates or the Republican debates back in 2016?
I mean, with the exception of Rand Paul, who I did find to be, you know, impressive in some ways, and his father's a really great guy.
But just you look at this field of Democrats.
It's not just that their views are terrible.
You're like, this is the best we've got.
I mean, there are way smarter socialists than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
There are way more impressive people than Joe Biden.
I mean, come on.
And it's really, you're right.
It's very mediocre people who have a very overinflated sense of their own achievements and intelligence and charisma.
And it is, you're right.
And at least it does seem like a lot of people are starting to wake up to that.
But I guess, you know, one of the things that's interesting, and look, nobody's done more for, in my opinion, to spread the understanding and education of like true libertarian philosophy than the Mises Institute.
And I think that Rothbard and Hoppe and, you know, Lou Rockwell and all these guys, they basically lay out what I think is an almost unbeatable case for why respect for private property rights, the non-aggression principle, freedom, free markets, all of these things are what leads to prosperity and civilization and a better society.
But what you touched on right there was the point, I think where libertarians are weakest in a sense, is how do we get from point A to point B?
Like, what is our strategy exactly?
And that's something that is really challenging because we could all agree that, you know, we want to live in Ankapistan, but the starting point to that is living in the United States of America under the biggest, most powerful state in world history.
And I don't, I got to say that's something I struggle with.
For a long time, I thought the Ron Paul revolution was the way to go with that.
Okay, we just wake up as many people as we can.
We show them.
But, you know, Ron Paul couldn't do it forever.
He's an older guy.
He's retired in Texas now.
No one else seems to be taking on that mantle in the same way.
What do you think?
I know you've talked a lot about decentralization, but even that, like, how do we get there?
What do you think the strategy for libertarians ought to be?
Well, tough question.
You know, most people don't want to live in Ankapistan.
That's just it.
And I don't want to impose it on them, frankly.
Look, here's what's not the strategy.
What's not the strategy is trying to get 70 million people to vote for a pretty good president and then who's going to further federalize and centralize everything.
I mean, it does, you know, look, we're never going to come, we're never going to reach agreement on things like climate change and guns and abortion.
These issues are too fraught.
We're never going to get 330 million people to agree.
And just because one side wins, the other side isn't vanquished.
They don't just go away.
I mean, that's the problem with politics.
There are senior citizens in the former Soviet Union today who pine for the old system.
who look back fondly on the old system.
So no amount of history, no amount of 20th century, no amount of Western capitalism could make them change their mind that the former Soviet system was superior.
Now, what are you supposed to do with people like that?
Are you supposed to shoot them in the back of the head?
No.
They go off to their graves thinking that, I guess.
And so, you know, I don't like, what I don't like from libertarians is hubris.
The whole point of being a libertarian is that we don't know.
We don't know what's best for 330 million people.
We sure as hell don't know what's best for 7 billion people.
And so human history is a process of muddling through of private solutions, property, people coming up basically with technology and capital to improve our lives.
Government hasn't come up with technology and capital.
Government's been a hindrance to all of this.
And I don't like to buy into these rosy fantasies about, well, you know, Western liberalism set the conditions for, eh, I don't know about that.
But what I do know is that it's an awfully hard slog to get 70 million people to agree with us.
And even if we did, there's a couple hundred million more in the country who wouldn't.
So beating them in election doesn't change the way they think.
It doesn't change their opinions.
So, and look how poorly both Rand and Ron Paul did.
I mean, even in, I mean, I would argue that Ron actually won Iowa, but I mean, you know, like take the New Hampshire primary, supposedly a fairly libertarian state.
I think Rand Paul got 2% or something.
Yeah.
So, you know, at least GOP primary voters have had the opportunity to actually vote on this stuff to an extent, to a limited extent.
So, you know, I don't like all the time and money and energy and human capital that goes into politics.
I think it's exceedingly wasteful.
I think it's injurious to our mental health, to our well-being.
You know, imagine all the people who are going to be so bent out of shape if Trump wins or loses, who are going to be so emotionally attached to that outcome in a year from now.
I mean, that's a pathology.
I don't know what other word there is for it.
You're absolutely right.
And it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially as we approach 2020, which is going to be an election year.
And it does seem like this, like, I feel like what you just said is something that there still might be a lot of Americans who wouldn't necessarily agree.
There's still kind of these like blanket feel-good vague statements like, well, no, we need to be united, not divided, or we need to come together.
But I think a lot more people would agree with it than did 10 years ago.
A lot more would agree with it than did 20 years ago.
And I think that people are starting to realize, like, for one, I remember there was actually Jordan Peterson when he was on Bill Maher's show.
He said something to a liberal panel.
They were all going off on how stupid Donald Trump is and how he needs to be impeached.
And Jordan Peterson said, well, here's something maybe you should consider.
So let's say you get rid of Trump.
Trump's gone.
What about those 65 million people who voted for him?
I mean, they're still here.
They're not just going away tomorrow.
These are, it seems like, as you were saying, one of two things is going to happen.
Either Donald Trump is going to get re-elected, in which case, the entire opposite side is like, well, that's it.
We've lost the whole country.
Not only did literally Hitler get in once, he got re-elected.
He cheated his way.
I'm sure the Russians cheated for him again or something like that.
They'll have some justification.
And if Donald Trump doesn't get re-elected, all of those people go, you know what?
We put our guy in there and the whole system cheated them out of it.
They had this phony Russia collusion, you know, this phony impeachment, all of these things.
We didn't get our wall.
We spoke loud and clear about what we wanted.
We didn't.
It seems to me that there's no way that there's a result here that doesn't just fracture the country more and more.
And I'm starting to actually think that that might be a good thing.
It might be a good thing if people recognize, like, as you were saying before, we're not going to come together on these issues.
We're not.
I mean, it's like, it's hard from the libertarian anarcho-capitalist perspective to not be like, you know, if some, if there are these issues that when you see somebody like, you know, Paul Ryan propose that we like cut the increase of spending by 2% over the next 300 years or something, and they go, well, you're a monster.
And you're like, man, if he's a monster, you must really think, I mean, I'm the devil then.
So maybe we just can't all operate together.
Maybe this is the best hope, unfortunately, in a tragic kind of sense for liberty-minded people that at least maybe this will open the door to some type of decentralization when people start realizing we're not all in this together.
Yeah, you hope so.
I don't know.
I mean, the number one question that you got to ask any presidential candidate is: can people opt out?
If people don't like some policy or proposal you have, are they allowed to opt out?
And the answer, of course, is no, but nobody asked that question.
That's the only question I have for any politician.
I don't really care what their policies are.
But here's the thing: is what 2016 proved is there's a lot more deplorables than people thought.
There's more of them.
And they're not going away as quickly as the left thought.
But the left thinks that it's winning.
They think that they're winning culturally and they think that they're winning demographically.
And I think both those things are probably true.
So decentralization, secession, breaking up, that's for losers.
Yeah.
Why should they agree to that if they think that they're going to steamroll and get a couple as soon as Texas and Florida, let's say, become blue states, then the route is on.
Now, here's the problem with that: is that let's say America becomes a majority Democratic nation, that more and more states become like California with a supermajority legislature full of Democrats.
Democrats win every national election, even with the Electoral College, et cetera.
Let's say that happens over the next 20 years.
Well, all that's going to happen then is there's going to be a left and right of the Democratic Party.
That's all that's going to happen.
There's still going to be a left and a right.
There's still going to be parameters.
It's just going to be in a different context.
So what I'd like to think is that there are enough good people on the left who would say, hey, we'll let you go if you can't abide by this.
But I don't really think, I don't think that's the case.
And we have to look at this and understand that, first of all, there's federal land throughout the country, military bases, federal installations all across the country.
Medicare and Social Security are huge federal programs.
It would be very, very difficult to sort of undo those.
What you could do, I think in the near term, what you realistically could do is have a much greater degree of federalism with respect to the social issues and just say, hey, look, Alabama doesn't have to have the same abortion laws as Massachusetts.
And that's just it.
And Manhattan doesn't have to have the same, It's one thing to walk down a dirt road in Alaska during moose season with a rifle slung across your back.
It's another thing to do that in Central Park.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so this, you know, I'm not even for federalizing the Second Amendment.
I mean, I'm for gun rights, I guess.
But I mean, I don't want to impose my vision of unlimited gun ownership on the on the whole country if that's not what they want.
There are a lot of people in this country who think our gun culture is just crazy.
They think it's crazy and stupid and dangerous and that we have cops in military and Joe Bob doesn't need to have a bunch of rifles in his Ford F-250.
I mean, there's a lot of people who think that.
Now, I happen to live in and among those Jim Bobs and their Ford F-250s.
And so I happen to know that they're harmless with their rifles.
But, oh, okay, not everybody believes that.
So, you know, the first thing we have to do is just look at things truthfully.
Never lie to ourselves, never kid ourselves.
That's number one.
Liberalism vs Actualization00:06:07
Liberalism hasn't held.
The kind of program that Mises laid out in 1927 in the book Liberalism, that didn't hold.
There's been glimpses of it.
There have been episodes where it was stronger and weaker in Western society, but it's never held.
It just hasn't.
And that's the truth.
That's a fact, Jack.
So, you know, the left has an answer to what comes after God in a secular West.
And the answer is the state.
The state is the enforcer and the religion is egalitarianism, which is never egalitarianism, of course.
There's actually a ruling oligarchical class like any society, but that's the mantra.
Okay, so the left has an answer to what comes after God.
The right doesn't.
The right has no answer.
The right just says, well, how about a little less state or a little slower state or whatever it is?
So libertarians have an answer that's not very good.
It's, well, liberty.
Liberty comes after God.
What's that?
The problem is, is that a lot of people have radically different interpretations of that word.
Our friends on the left view it as a positive rights slogan.
No one's free if they don't have health care provided by the state.
No one's free if their electric bill and their food bill and their gas bill and their kids' college tuition can't all be paid on their current salary.
That's not freedom.
Okay, so the left views that word in terms of positive rights.
And the right views it in terms of some sort of national greatness or military power or American hegemony or however, depending on which incarnation of the right you're looking at.
So that's why you may not like this, Dave.
I'm cautious about the word libertarian.
I think usage changes just like the word liberal does in common usage.
You and I might use that term the way Mises used it, but in common usage, liberal in the West now has not necessarily a left connotation, but it definitely has sort of a Francis Fukuyama connotation of what we think of as liberal or open society.
So that could be anything from Mitt Romney to George Soros, and there might be some things in between.
But you and I would say that word doesn't mean the same thing it used to mean.
And so at some point, libertarian becomes a word, I fear, that is losing a lot of its punch and its meaning.
To me, that word simply means private.
It simply means we don't organize society around the state.
Beyond that, there can be all kinds of intermediary institutions anywhere from family on up to God for those who choose to be religious.
And those intermediary institutions are A-OK and ought to be respected as long as they're peaceful.
But for most people, libertarian today means progressive ends, but different means.
In other words, progressives are, you know, we already have a self-actualization movement.
We don't need more of that.
I mean, we already have a movement that says, you know, you need to be who you really are and live out loud and blah, blah, blah.
You know, libertarianism is not about self-actualization to me.
Now, surely a society with less government would be a precondition for a world where you and I or anyone might feel more self-actualized.
But that's not the goal.
The goal is to have no government so that we can get back to caring about things we should care about, like our kids' soccer game or whatever.
But instead, libertarianism has become a set of cultural precepts.
It's become a self-actualization movement.
And that's not something that I'm entirely comfortable with.
And as a result of that, I don't really care, fairly or unfairly.
I think people like me and the Mises Institute are labeled as right or right libertarian or whatever you want to say.
And that's fine.
I'm interested in truth.
Okay, truth and human flourishing.
I think those two things are connected.
And I think libertarianism is moving down a path where it wants to lie to itself.
It wants to tell big lies.
Oh, the West is hopelessly racist.
Well, that's not true.
Go to Asia, go to Central and South America, go to the former Eastern Bloc.
You'll find some real racism.
Go to Japan and talk to people.
See how the Japanese think about the Chinese and the Koreans.
Go to Central and South America and see how the Spanish versus Indigenous people think of one another.
I mean, I'm not justifying this.
I'm just saying America is a place where people are pretty damn friendly.
And if you have the money to move on up to the Beverly Hills or the Hamptons, and people are like, hey, welcome.
You made it.
And they don't much care about, we don't have old money in America, hardly, anymore.
So if we start with these, if we start by lying to ourselves, the climate is in peril, the West is deeply racist, then we tend to reach bad conclusions from that.
So I don't want to start with that.
I want to say, you know, what's true and what's false?
And from that, how do human beings flourish?
And you and I might say, well, human beings flourish in the absence of government.
Human beings flourish in the marketplace.
They flourish under voluntary conditions.
They flourish through exchange.
But is that what most people think of today when they think of the term libertarian?
I'm not sure.
I mean, I'm grappling with it.
Yeah, I grapple with it as well.
And I know that certainly I would agree with you.
Like to use an extreme to paint the picture, as you did, the word liberal.
Flourishing Without Government00:03:20
I would completely agree.
Like that word's long gone.
It's just too, everybody associates this with something else.
People are thinking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and George Soros.
They're certainly not thinking Ludwig von Mises when the word liberal is brought up.
And you wonder if libertarian is going down that path now.
And I'll tell you, you know, I used to, I remember like around 2015, 2016, when like the beginning of the Trump presidential campaign and that whole time.
And there would be a lot of the kind of new right, what are sometimes called the alt-right or the alt-light or, you know, people like in that realm.
And they would say to me, I remember specifically them saying to me, you know, libertarianism has been overtaken by these kind of left libertarians.
And I actually remember thinking, I don't know what the hell you're talking about because I wasn't in that world.
My world was like, I still, I followed like Ron Paul and the Mises Institute and Tom Woods and guys like this.
And I'd be like, libertarians haven't become left.
We're still awesome.
Go look at these guys.
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Actually, more over the last couple years where I've seen what's been going on in the Libertarian Party, having some interactions with the chairman of the Libertarian Party and because of that, some other people in that world, and going up to Porkfest, where there were a lot of really great people up there.
But you do certainly see, like, yeah, there is this thing within the kind of mainstream, you know, what Lou Rockwell calls the regime libertarians, where you're like, yeah, it seems like what this is really all about to these people is kind of like, well, if I want to, you know, smoke pot in, you know, or if I want to, you know, I don't know, if I want to like have promiscuous sex or something like this, well, I have every right.
No one should stop me from doing that.
And fair enough, I guess I do agree with them.
Regime Libertarians and Pot00:15:11
But there's also like a flip side to that, which is that like, you know, I also have, but, you know, you also have the right to say, not want to associate with people like that at all.
You have the right to do that.
And then they would be the first to kind of denigrate someone who felt that way.
One of the biggest, you know, aspects to me of even with the whole illegal immigration or immigration debate and things like that is that people don't have the right to freedom of association in this country.
I mean, I feel like that would solve a huge part of the problem.
It, no, the name of the show there.
But that would solve a huge part of this issue if it was just like, well, you have the right to not hire immigrants if you don't want to, or you have the right to not associate with them, but all that stuff is illegal.
And none of these libertarians seem to have that much of a problem.
In fact, I think Gary Johnson said, well, no, we can't allow people the right to discriminate because then we'd be a horrible racist country.
And it is, it does seem that you're right.
I mean, not even just the liberal tradition being dead, but the American tradition is dead.
I mean, if you like America, by today's, you know, standards, 1990 America is like pretty racist.
I mean, you see like articles written about how like Friends and Seinfeld were horribly racist shows, even though they were the exact opposite.
I mean, if anyone was like racist on that show, they would have been the villain immediately in that episode.
1980s America is clearly racist.
1950s America is basically fascism.
I mean, like, so there is no respect for any of the tradition of America or Western civilization.
And I agree with you that it's just, I think to people like me and you, you just kind of look around and go, well, maybe compared to some perfect standard, we're a racist country.
But compared to just about everything else, I mean, we're pretty darn cool.
It's almost hard to have a conversation with someone when you see the world in such drastically different ways.
Well, the race thing, of course, has really poisoned the atmosphere.
And it's a status narrative.
Let's face it.
If you lead with the idea, or if you even believe, seriously, that America is a deeply racist country, most people's response to that is not going to be, oh, you're right.
Let's get rid of government.
You know, most people are going to say, you're right.
Government should fix that.
I mean, here's the problem.
You know, I don't have a lot of respect for American political traditions.
I think most American history is pretty fraught.
I'd rather read Rothbard on American history than even Howard Zinn or someone like that.
But if you live in the West today, if you're fortunate enough to live in today's West and you even make, let's say, $40,000 a year, as Tom Woods has pointed out, this puts you in the 1% of everyone on earth in 2019, which puts you in the top 0001% of all human beings who ever walked the earth.
Okay, so you're a privileged person.
Okay, fine.
So what that means is that if somebody wants to say I'm collectivist for thinking that we have an owe a debt of gratitude to the past and the people whose shoulders we're standing on, screw them.
I mean, a lot of our grandparents and great-grandparents and generations before us worked really, really hard to build up this somewhat capitalist society that's all around us so that when you walk out in the street in Brooklyn, whatever, there's 10 zillion restaurants and shops and it's just unbelievable.
Okay, so I'm sorry if you think that's collectivist.
We do owe a debt of gratitude.
And the flip side of that is that we have an obligation to the future to not screw this up to our kids, to our future grandkids, to other people's kids and grandkids.
We have an obligation to not screw this up because we have it so materially well.
We're so comfortable.
We all have hot and cold running water at our fingertips, electricity, food in our fridges, all that stuff.
So libertarians don't want to hear that.
To them, that sounds like some sort of traditionalist conservatism.
Okay, so be it.
You know, we didn't just emanate from the ether.
We all didn't just come into the world spontaneously from nothing.
We came from a long line of people who had it worse.
And that's it.
So, you know, I don't like the hostility towards the past.
I don't like the hostility towards the future.
I don't like the self-actualization, uber alis mindset that just says live for today.
And, you know, this idea that Americans would be falling over themselves to discriminate against black people or something in hiring.
I don't think that's true.
I think that would be a very minor problem.
But more importantly, if we actually want to make, if we actually want to improve race relations in this country, the unfortunate truth is that the best thing to do is to shut up about race.
That's the truth.
And that's what nobody wants to do because a lot of people sort of make their living or at least get their derive their politics from this agitation that, you know, everyone, everyone wants to act like they're living in gone with the wind and they're up against it.
And that, you know, they're, they're fighting this oppression.
It's all bullshit.
But it gives people a sense of mystique in life.
It gives them some sort of, you know, if their lives, you know, most of us have pretty humdrum lives.
Let's face it.
Most of us are pretty average people by definition.
And so it creates this romanticism to our lives if we can politicize this idea that there's this oppressive boogeyman out there, white supremacy or something like that.
And oh, okay.
And libertarians, I'm guilty of this too.
I certainly make a boogeyman of the state.
And what's the state?
It's just a bunch of boring people who used to go to zoning meetings on Tuesday nights and eventually became a congressman because they just hung around long enough, like Tracy Flick in election or something.
Yeah.
But not as good looking.
So I mean, Reese Witherspoon is like a hard 10 in Washington.
Well, you're, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Well, look, I mean, it's funny that you say that because what it brings to my mind is that I got the comment from a lot of people after I did that debate with the chairman of the LP.
And I would get this comment, people tweeting at me, YouTube comments, messages.
Everyone kept saying, Dave, you should be the chairman of the LP.
You would totally win if you ran for that.
I go, there is nothing less I want to do.
There's absolutely nothing less I want to do.
I mean, that would be like the worst punishment in the world to me.
It's like, I'm going to be running meetings and sitting around these boring procedural decisions.
And it's kind of the same reason, like what you're saying, it's the reason why there's not a better, there's not better people who are president or there's not better people on, there's a reason why it's not the best person on your block who's on the neighborhood board.
It's like, because that's the guy or woman who ends up getting that position is just the one who is willing to hang around and do these kind of boring things.
And it's a really lame way to be.
It's just, there's nothing interesting or fun about that.
Well, you know, I don't begrudge people who engage in politics.
I like third parties.
I like the LP.
I like the idea of it.
Sure.
And I like the idea of people voting against the two parties and that maybe there'd be enough votes there for a third party candidate to overcome the difference between the two major party candidates.
I like that.
I like the protest vote.
I like everything about it.
So I encourage this.
I haven't been involved in the LP since the early 90s, a long, long time ago in California.
So I was very involved for a very short time.
So it's not my cup of tea, but anybody wants to do it and it should knock themselves out.
It's just that the question becomes use of time and resources.
I think that's the question.
What do we want to do with our lifetimes?
It's funny, you mentioned going up to Porkfest.
And I'd like to say a little bit more about left libertarians.
And I'm going to say something actually in defense of them.
And a good thing, which is, there's a book, a series of essays, an edited series of essays called Markets, Not Capitalism.
So it's sort of a left libertarian Bible of sorts.
It was edited, I believe, by Gary Chartier, who's a prof out in Riverside, California.
And so he, I think he would self-identify as a left libertarian.
It's got some essays in there that are old by people like Carl Hess and Murray Rothbard.
It's also got some essays by people who are around now, like Charles Johnson.
I'm not sure who else is in there.
If you read that book, it's actually, well, if you read these essays, and the great thing about it is you can skip around.
And I think there's an anti-IP essay in there.
So if you go and find the free PDF online and print it, you don't have to feel bad about stealing.
And so, you know, if you read some of the essays in that book, and some of it I think is just awful and I disagree.
But it's not full of hubris.
It doesn't have that sort of Cato reason feel of grandiosity, of globalism, of, you know, we're, you know, everything applies to everyone.
It's got a really localist, decentralist feel.
It taught, you know, there are essays that talk about how everyone should have a plot of land and a garden and be involved in agorism and that sort of thing.
So to me, you know, again, peaceful, I got no problem with it.
I have no problem with anybody who wants to smoke pot all day or, you know, whatever kind of polyamorous relationships float your boat.
I mean, the problem is that if we say anything peaceful, okay, well, you know, sitting around on the couch and smoking pot and eating Doritos is peaceful.
But you can't build a society that way.
Right.
You know, so if enough people do that, society actually suffers.
Now, even Jon Stuart Mill told us that's not, that's not justification to come in and use laws and put a gun to their head to make them not smoke pot and eat Doritos all day.
But nonetheless, it's like, is this our great effing achievement?
You know, to create a world where you're free to smoke pot and eat Doritos?
No.
Right, right.
So wouldn't the proper human response, if you're a libertarian, the proper human response to be like, yes, it is peaceful.
You do have a right to do it.
But I also have a right to not praise that, to think of that as like, yeah, that's kind of lame and kind of a waste of your existence.
And whereas somebody, if they like, I don't know, you know, contribute to society, have some children and raise them in a good way.
So they're like actually putting some decent human beings out into the world and furthering civilization, I like admire and respect that.
Whereas if you just want to like, you know, do the other stuff, you know, sit on your ass and smoke pot or whatever, it's like, fine, no one should bring violence toward you.
But why would we respect that?
Why would we pretend that there's like, it's like, this is the thing Ayn Rand used to say, which I did.
I'm sure others have said this too, even though I'm sure Ayn Rand would tell you she's the only one who's ever said this.
But she said, which I really liked, was when she was like, if you love everybody, then you love nobody.
And if you respect everybody, then you respect nobody.
Because those words don't mean anything if they just apply to everyone.
So if I just respect, you know, when they say respect everyone's individual choice.
No, I don't.
I mean, I respect certain choices.
I respect your right to choose whatever you want to do peacefully.
But yes, I agree.
And that's, I agree.
There are a lot of good people who are left libertarians.
Sometimes they make some good points that I like.
But what drives me crazy is the idea that somehow you think that like the sex worker should be on the same level of respect as the family man or the mother or the father.
And it's like, I'm sorry.
I'm just, I'm not going to feel that way because just as you pointed out before, we inherited such a great deal compared to what so many human beings have inherited.
And that's precisely because people didn't just do that or we would have inherited nothing.
You know, like it just seems obvious.
Well, if, I mean, if cultural relativism is correct, then what's the normative argument against the state?
I don't know.
I don't think there is one.
So here's the test for any left libertarian or any right libertarian, I guess.
If you had a magic button to press tomorrow, which would radically shrink the state in size and influence and importance.
And as a result of this, your cultural preferences did not come to the fore.
would you still press the button?
That's the question.
Yeah.
That is a great question.
And so, you know, I, I think that, I think that the state has has sort of strangled those intermediary institutions that actually make life more tolerable and smooth some of the rough edges in society.
Stuff like the Kiwanis Club and your, you know, the, you know, the bowling league and all that other stuff.
Of course, the internet hasn't helped.
We've certainly become more atomized.
But, you know, nonetheless, I think if the state was to shrink in importance, I think those intermediary institutions would reassert themselves somewhat, including religion, including family.
And left libertarians want to view all that stuff as a big drag.
Oh, my God.
You know, the church is just as oppressive as the state and some sort of family structure.
Oh, you know, why should why should someone's dad have any say over them?
It's like, screw you.
You know, show your dad some respect.
Why should your dad have any say over you?
How about he paid for your ass for 18 years?
Yeah.
How about your mom gave birth to you?
Now, that doesn't mean that there are bad parents, alcoholics, abusive, et cetera, but you get my point here.
Yeah, but I think the two might be related in a way.
Because when I do see that, what I kind of see, and maybe this is, I'm falling down something I try not to do, which is like psychoanalyze people who you don't know.
And I'm not even equipped to psychoanalyze people I do know.
But it seems like you're just an angry child.
And then it does kind of seem like, yeah, maybe your parents did kind of mess up in some way.
And maybe, you know, I wonder sometimes when we look at things like the culture in America where so many of these institutions fell apart, you know, religion, family structure, chivalry, basic understanding of human decency.
I mean, all of these things really fell apart.
And it really started in the late 60s and early 70s and kind of dwindled and dwindled from there.
And I, you know, I've always thought, and it's just a hypothesis.
I don't really know.
But I really think that like, I think the Vietnam War had a lot to do with this.
And I think that the fact that it's like, it was just so obvious to so many people that we were the bad guys.
And I know that's a collectivist way of thinking.
But this is how human beings tend to think.
They have these kind of nationalistic worldviews.
And it was so obvious.
It was like, man, we're just like slaughtering brown people in some third world country.
Misguided Left Intentions00:04:21
We're not the good guys here.
How can you even defend this?
And that gave such a shot in the arm to the counterculture movement to take the moral high ground and be like, this whole system that you're defending, this is evil.
What are we doing?
We're butcherers.
We're not the, you know, this guy.
You know, it's not the image of America in the 40s and 50s, like we're the good guys saving the world.
We're the bad guys.
And it's almost like when, you know, like that then leads to the whole thing unraveling.
And I do wonder, like maybe, maybe it does start first with the family units kind of breaking up and then people having this attitude of like, yeah, why should I show any respect to the generation that came before me?
Because I don't know.
I just, I think, I mean, look, my daughter's only 10 months.
She shows me absolutely no respect, screams right in my face all the time.
But I do think, you know, like you kind of, if you, if you raise your kids in a loving way and you do a good job, my guess is that that's not going to be how it turns out.
Maybe I'm like, maybe that's being idealistic and naive, but I don't know.
Well, you never know how they're going to turn out.
But there's more than just hating your parents.
There's also not having kids.
And a lot of people, you know, are making that choice.
And I blame the Fed, believe it or not, for a lot of that, because without the Fed, I'm not sure this whole student loan and mortgage bubble would be allowed to would exist to the extent it does.
So a lot of younger people are saddled with debt, which delays marriage, which delays home buying.
So it's not so easy if you're 25 today to just go out and buy a house in Brooklyn.
I mean, let's face it, very, very difficult to go out and buy a house in Brooklyn.
So we got to understand some of the underlying forces here.
But when you talk about Vietnam, I think that was a turning point for a lot of Americans in the counterculture.
And this is, I think, I think this embeds itself in libertarianism.
I think most libertarians think that the left is well-intentioned, but just misguided.
And I think most libertarians think the right is per se evil, bigoted, et cetera.
I think both of those are false.
I think they're silly.
What is it about the history of the 20th century that leads us to believe that the left is well-intentioned?
I mean, this is crazy.
These aren't well-intentioned people for the most part, at least not those who are political.
There's plenty of people who would just consider themselves left ideologically, and they go out and vote and they're not super active.
But the idea that deep down, you know, Hillary Clinton is well-intentioned, that's just not true.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Or something like that.
Yeah.
Of course.
I mean, so, you know, this, we don't like the left-right continuum as a, you know, as a tool.
We like to say, well, libertarianism's neither, and I get that.
But most people are kind of wired left to right.
That's the problem.
Most people are kind of, hey, they're more freaky dicky or they're a little bit more pro-tradition God family.
You know, I mean, that's just that there's something, I don't know where that comes from.
Is it nature or nurture?
I don't know.
But to say that there isn't sort of a general wiring in most people, I think is probably wrong.
And that's Doug Casey's point.
Doug Casey says libertarians have just an odd gene or something that sort of sets us apart from all that.
But, you know, I don't know.
I don't know how to solve the cultural problem.
I will say that religion's not coming back.
You know, the secularization of the West is going to continue apace.
You know, it's like a wave coming in and you're standing on the shore.
You can scream at it or something.
But it's happening.
So, but I will say this, and I'll say this to my left libertarian friends.
I suspect you're not going to like post-Christian America as much as you think you're going to like it.
I think you're going to find out it's a nastier, meaner place than you imagined.
And I think you're going to find out that culturally Christianity had a lot to do with what's good and prosperous about the West.
And you can throw all that in the bin like a child with a tantrum if you want to, but you might not like what's up around that corner.
Post-Christian America Warning00:14:37
You know, incentives matter.
You know, when people are not just going to get up every morning and produce all the energy and food and buildings and wonderment that's all around us.
They're just not going to produce that under any conditions or any incentives or lack thereof.
You know, this isn't magical.
It's spontaneous, yes, but it's not magic.
So this idea that we can somehow have what the Elizabeth Warrens of the world have in mind for us, which is a really vicious and ugly form of identity politics where the identity of someone's the speaker or the holder of views is far more important than the views themselves.
Right.
And couple that with a really aggressive assault on private wealth.
You know, we're not talking about an income tax.
We're talking about a wealth tax, a tax on basically on your balance sheet.
And this will be promoted the same way the income tax was promoted 100 years ago.
They say, oh my gosh, it only applies to people with over $5 million and it's only 1%.
They'll start it with some really small thing.
Who could be against that?
This doesn't affect you.
This just affects those rich fat cats.
And even then, they're only got to give a few points.
You know, that's how they'll start.
And then, of course, it'll come down to the rest of us.
And you know, that's and I just want to agree with you and emphasize that point that there's something.
I remember when Ron Paul said once, and of course he was talking about, as you just alluded to, the creation of the income tax.
And this is exactly how it was sold to people.
It's only going to be to the top 1%.
It'll only be 1 or 2% of their income.
Why would you, Joe Six-Pack, even care about this?
Of course, this will just, and now, by the way, for Joe Six-Pack, it's probably his biggest bill of the year is the federal income tax.
But Ron Paul said, and I remember was a great line.
He said, when you give away 1%, you give away 100% of the principal because you've already said that the government can take your income.
And once you've given up that principle, they're going to take more and more.
And we've seen over time, if you just want to talk about strategy and what's effective, it is like 100,000 times more difficult to repeal an existing government program than it is to fight off a proposed new program.
So think about, like you can think of examples, lots of examples, actually, where proposed new government programs didn't work out.
I mean, look, Hillary and Bill Clinton tried to push universal health care in the 90s and it failed.
I mean, okay, we ended up getting Obamacare, but it failed for a long time, for a couple of decades before we ended up getting it.
Or at least a little less than that, I guess, 15 years.
There's been lots of proposals.
Every couple of years, there's some new crazy proposal that doesn't go through, but try to get rid of Medicare.
Try to get rid of something, even try to get rid of Obamacare.
I mean, try to get rid of something that's already there.
So if libertarians want to be practical, you have to ferociously fight the idea that we would propose a new wealth tax.
And it's not like they're saying repeal the income tax and install a wealth tax.
She's just talking about in addition to this.
And I just wanted to also add to the point you made, because I think it's more than just, and me and you actually spoke about this privately.
We spoke on the phone about this last month.
But the idea that you say, well, the left is just full of good intentions and the right people are really evil.
You know, the left has, that's like the left libertarian perspective.
And actually, this is what Nick Sarwak explicitly said to me, that communism is misguided, but racism is evil.
And then, of course, you get to define racism as, you know, anybody, I guess, who I don't like.
But it's not just that that's wrong.
And like you said before, we're searching for truth here.
And if you look through the 20th century or look, you know, I mean, at left-wing governments and, you know, that are still around today in South America or wherever, I mean, it's, there's no evidence that this is true at all.
There's no, there's no reason to think Antifa or Hillary Clinton are just of the best intentions, but happen to be really evil or misguided or something like that.
But the other part of it, too, is that you also hand the left the entire game if you set those as the parameters.
Then how are they not going to win?
You're basically saying like, well, these are all good people who are just misguided.
But if there's somebody who, you know, for whatever reason has a has a preference about other races, like let's let's just say they are the word, whatever the word even means.
Let's say racist does apply to them, but they're peaceful.
You know, they're racist, but they're peaceful.
Like, I don't like black people.
I don't want to hang around them.
You know, I'd personally be like, I don't know.
I know some really cool black people.
I don't, I don't think that's the way to go.
But I mean, if you're not being violent, you're not doing anything to them.
I kind of think, well, you're consistent with libertarianism and take that to somebody who goes, I love all races of people, but I'm a socialist.
I mean, obviously the latter is a much bigger threat to people who have the value, to have libertarian values.
And yet, so the other point there is just that the left libertarians, they hand the game to the statists if you set those parameters.
And I think that's what they miss, or maybe they don't miss it, but if they don't, it's game over if you agree to those rules.
Well, I don't like this phony dichotomy between domestic and foreign policy.
But I've had people say to me, well, you can teach the left economics.
You can't teach the right peace.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It seems to me that at least in the last few years, it's rallies on the right were saying, get out of Afghanistan, get out of Iraq.
We have no interest there.
We have no business there.
I think they get bigger cheers.
I don't know if Trump's on the right.
He's certainly on the populist end of things, but I mean, he gets cheers at that rally.
And this is his biggest moral failure is that he hasn't done this, is that he hasn't lived up to some of his campaign rhetoric about a less, not even less aggressive foreign policy, but just a less prolific foreign policy.
I mean, literally just fewer people in fewer places.
That's all we ask.
I mean, at this point, with foreign policy since the last 20, 30 years, we'd take anything.
I mean, we'd pull some guy out of a, out of a barracks in Moldovia somewhere and send him to Toledo.
I mean, God.
But I don't know.
I don't know if you can teach the left economics.
And I will say this.
Look at Rand Paul.
Look at Cato and Sue.
Look at someone like Jason Brennan at Georgetown who fancies himself a left libertarian.
They get savaged.
They get savaged by the left on social media the minute they suggest, if you suggest touching one hair on the head of Social Security or Obamacare, they get savaged.
They were gleeful when Rand got his ribs broken by that guy next door.
They were absolutely beside themselves with glee over that.
Okay.
Jason Brennan wrote a book, a book against democracy, in effect.
And he's a philosophy PhD at Georgetown.
I've read most of the book.
I haven't quite finished it.
And it makes some good points.
He's a tenured prof. So it's not quite as gutsy if you think about it that way.
But he got absolutely savaged by the site and the magazine Jacobin for this.
I mean, in other words, they don't give you, Rand Paul can go to Howard University and talk about criminal justice reform until the cows come home.
And he doesn't get an iota of thanks and respect for this.
So, you know, at this point, I think people on the right are more favorable to a Tulsi or somebody like that.
Oh, it's other people favorable to Iran.
Isn't that, by the way, you hit so many really fascinating and important points there.
Number one, let's start in reverse, the Tulsi thing.
I mean, it's really unbelievable that even the left-wing people will be trashing her.
Well, why do so many people from the right like her?
I mean, listen, there is nothing, nothing about Tulsi Gabbard that any of us like other than her anti-war stance.
That's it.
It's the only reason why she could be pulling in these so-called right-wing people.
You know, if you really want to, it's the only thing.
Everything else about her is pretty bad.
Maybe not quite as bad as like Bernie Sanders, but it's pretty bad.
She basically signed on to the Green New Deal.
She endorses Medicare for all.
She's anti-gun ownership.
She has all these other policies that we hate.
We just think the war thing is so important that if there's one person talking about it.
So they would never say like passionate anti-war people support Tulsi Gabbard because that just doesn't sound quite as evil as right-wing.
And to your point, I've heard people make that argument.
And I will say that in the George W. Bush days, it might have sounded somewhat plausible to me that maybe it would be easier to teach economics to the left than it would be to teach anti-war values to the right.
And I might have even believed that at the time.
At the time, I remember kind of thinking, like when I first became a libertarian around 2007, 2008, I remember actually thinking the right was worse than the left because I was like, well, at least on the biggest issue, you know, like at least they're not for the Pentagon budget, slaughtering people in Iraq, spying on citizens.
They don't want to lock people up for nonviolent crimes.
You know, that was kind of my thinking.
But you got to kind of look at the evidence over the last, you know, the last 12, 13 years or whatever it's been since then.
And no, I mean, what success has there been in teaching the left economics?
I mean, less than zero.
Negative.
The right is useless.
The political right is useless.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're worse than useless because they give some lip service and dialogue about free markets and capitalism.
And then they don't follow through on that.
And so bad things happen, like housing bubbles.
And so they actually are worse than useless.
They're harmful because they employ a certain degree of free market rhetoric, like Reagan did.
Right.
And they're also, and they have no values and it's transparent.
It's transparent that they stand for nothing.
So the ones who will kind of lead the charge about how awful racism is and how we live in a racist country.
And if you were to do anything wrong, you know what I mean?
Like they'll accuse Trump of being a racist all this, but then they also like praise the founding fathers and praise these, like say they want to return to an older time.
And then you're like, I mean, if you could, that older time would be considered white nationalist.
That would be considered an ethno-state by today's standards.
And yet you claim you praise that, but you'll call anybody who just wants to like enforce some immigration restrictions as some type of bigot.
It's like it's just so transparent and obvious.
You stand for nothing.
And it's almost, it almost seems to me, if I, you know, turn on the conspiratorial part of my brain, it almost seems like you're, this is like a WWF, like you're here to get the other guys over.
Like that's what conservatism like Inc. seems like.
It seems like they're there to just pretend to be an opponent to the left and ultimately let them pin them at the end of the day and just get one more victory, one more victory, one more victory, and then concede the last one.
And our friend Michael Malis always is a great quote where he says, conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.
That it's basically just whatever the progressives wanted 10 years ago is what the conservatives embrace now.
And yeah, they are useless.
They conserve nothing and they fight the left on basically nothing.
Yeah, and I have to be fair, culturally, I'm probably more comfortable with average folks on the right.
But just like I want the left to stop talking about race, stop talking about sex and sexuality in a political context.
I think that's dangerous.
I think that's horrific.
I think it's evil and immoral.
And libertarians shouldn't fall into that trap.
It makes me absolutely sick.
But, you know, the right ought to stop talking about religion.
And, you know, I mean, in the same vein, do your thing.
But here's something important, though, is that, yes, the right is useless, but libertarians who want to sort of go along and boost or amplify the narrative or accept the zeitgeist as legitimate and just think that somehow like our current mania regarding transgenderism was absolutely organic.
It just happened in the marketplace of ideas.
It wasn't somehow driven by academia and NGOs and taxpayer dollars.
this is all just you know what people really care about you know some tiny percent of the population all of a sudden all we can talk about is lgbt no that's not organic that didn't just happen naturally in the marketplace of ideas or something you know whatever here's the thing that libertarians don't want to accept is that if you look at the 20th century and now the 21st if you're not a statist and and you know you alluded earlier to to uh incrementalism which seems to be a one-way street by the way if you're an anti-statist Okay,
by definition, by definition, that forces you into the posture of being a reactionary.
I mean, everything we think about as libertarians is a reaction to the 20th century.
Central banking, an income tax, two horrific world wars, which rearranged the jigsaw puzzles, not only of Europe, but the Middle East too.
You know, the New Deal and Social Security retirement insurance, then the great society programs of LBJ, welfare, which has just absolutely killed black people.
There's less black home ownership today.
Black schools were better under segregation.
Black home ownership was higher under segregation.
Then you have a couple of police actions, a couple of incursions into Korea and Vietnam, which set the stage for Reagan to come along and go full on neoconservative, just full-blown Dick Cheney, budgets don't matter.
We create our own reality.
America is the world's dominant global superpower.
The Soviet Union has fallen.
The Cold War is over.
The end of history, all of that, dead wrong, horrifically, badly, dead wrong.
Accepting the Current Zeitgeist00:04:34
And a libertarian almost by definition opposes all of that.
And so this is what the reason magazine types don't want to accept.
You're a reactionary or you're a wimpy sellout.
You know, that's basically the deal.
You have to be against all that.
And so if you want to come along and say, you know, today, the zeitgeist is great.
You know, what can we do to combat racism?
What can we do to fight climate change?
And you just accept the framework of the debate.
Well, no, that doesn't work.
But the person who asks the questions, who frames the debate, generally wins.
And we all know that.
So we're over here trying to pull the rug out from under the debate itself and reclassify it utterly and look at it and go at it a wholly different way.
And so this is what I think is so craven oftentimes amongst libertarians is just this willingness to go along and sort of accept the world as it's presented to us.
Now, from a tactical or strategic standpoint, fine, you know, the world's the world and you got to go out.
And if you think that means engaging in politics, knock yourself out.
But to sort of accept the zeitgeist, that irritates me.
Yeah, I agree.
And if you, and particularly within that accepting of the zeitgeist, if you're going to say that in some way, somebody having mean thoughts or mean opinions about someone, which I think the term racism is like such a broad term that you can never pin down what exactly they mean by that.
You know, like using the wrong vernacular can be racist today.
I don't know.
But if you, as a libertarian, are going to accept that somebody having mean thoughts or even saying mean words to somebody is more outrageous than state violence, I just, then we might as well just give up and not even try to do anything.
Because if you accept that, the whole thing's over.
And it seems to me, and I've thought this for basically the whole time I've been in this libertarian business.
It's really not that hard to just make your argument.
You don't even need to be like that bold about it, but to go, I don't know, isn't like dropping a bomb on a wedding in Yemen a lot worse than somebody, you know, like saying they don't like a certain group of people.
Like if we could agree, they're both wrong, but isn't one drastically worse than the other?
But Americans just aren't that racist.
Yeah, we already have the mechanism for dealing this with this and improving this.
It's called civil society and markets.
I mean, people in America get along.
I mean, you go, you know, some guy, you know, some guy in Texas might bitch about Mexicans coming over and stealing jobs, but, you know, he goes to the Mexican restaurant and does so very peaceably and says hi to the to the owner.
And, you know, the busboys and back are illegal and the whole thing just happens smoothly and it's fine.
So markets and civil society are the way you get people.
You know, and I don't want some utopian thing where we're all, you know, people are going to self-segregate to an extent.
Sure.
That's just how it is.
Whatever.
You know, go to high school and look around.
But, you know, leave people alone and see what they do.
Okay.
That's all.
That's all you need to do.
And you may not like what they do.
Okay.
That's part of it.
But this idea that we have to, you know, constantly police, I don't think that racism is something that animates America today.
And maybe that's because of the left.
I don't really think so, but it just isn't.
So I don't like the obsession with talking about it.
And I think we should just move past it.
Listen, I agree with you.
So let me ask you something.
And before we wrap up here, I wanted to get your take on one other thought that's something that really has kind of caught me off guard.
And I don't know exactly how to process it.
And I'm curious what you think of this.
And this is the kind of phenomenon that's been labeled as woke capitalism.
And we see this all over the place now.
And I think it has to do with what you were saying with the whole zeitgeist being changed and now people operating within that framework.
Woke Capitalism Phenomenon00:04:04
But so I was over at a, I was doing Kennedy last night and I was talking to a couple of the producers behind the scenes.
And I had heard about this months ago, but I didn't realize that it was still a thing that was going on over at Fox News.
And so Tucker Carlson, who, by the way, just very quick aside, another great example of the thing you were saying, where these maniacs on the left give you no credit no matter where you you are on these issues.
So you know I mean Tucker Carlson for being the best conservative of my lifetime gets like mobs showing up on his door like he's.
He's literally like the most anti-war.
You know like I.
I disagree with him on some stuff.
I'm sure you do too, but he's really good on a few really important issues.
Gets no credit for it, just hated more than anyone else because he's not for like, open borders or something like that.
Um, but so they were saying so.
Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson Show, both of these shows are huge shows.
They're two of the three or four biggest shows in cable news.
Now they're not huge by 1970s, 1960s standards, but they get like millions of people watching every show and they have real trouble getting advertisers.
They are, they are still having trouble getting advertisers because they are so um, you know, like worried, I guess, about something, about the optics of it all, and I always thought like if I had just thought this through a priori in in my head, I would have gone.
Yeah, if they keep having an audience that size, eventually somebody's going to want to sell to those people on their audience.
But I don't know.
Now i'm looking at some of this evidence and you're like maybe that's not actually true and there does seem to be.
To me it's not just now.
We have to acknowledge.
I mean it certainly started with academia and politicians and Hollywood, but now it also seems to be that huge corporations are pushing this social justice narrative about as much as anybody else.
What do you, what do you think about that?
I mean, what's Tucker Carlson's audience every night?
Three, four million, five million, something I don't know.
I mean hello, Hashy socks, Robinhood.com yeah, that's better.
I mean um, you know, you know, mypillow.com is that is?
I think that's the big advertiser on Tucker's show.
They yeah, some some conservative guy mypillow.com I don't know what that is, but my wife has one.
She swears by it.
You know um, not everyone can have away luggage and be king of the airport.
Uh I, you know James Grant.
Let me just as an aside, Jim Grant who, who writes Grants, Interest RATE Observer, brilliant guy, also a Brooklynite, by the way.
Yeah, I read his great, great guest.
I've read his book the uh, the.
What was it the?
Um, the crash of 1921, something.
The title was something like that.
He wrote a book on on the crash you never heard of uh of 1919.
Uh, and and so anyway, he's got a new podcast called Current Yield and he I was, I was amazed the other day to be listening and he he's promoting away luggage like Tom Wood.
So I thought I it's very interesting to me to see you know, as a cultural phenomenon, what kind of advertisers are willing to step into these new mediums of podcasts and give it a go.
I mean, people aren't listening to I don't know who listens to Laura Ingram.
I guess people do no offense to her, but my god, and and I i'm the same way with Sean Hannity.
I mean that to me is so so, incredibly vapid.
Oh yeah, it's like saccharin it's, it's like cotton candy, but it's not even sweet.
It's like if cotton candy was flavored like soybeans.
You know, there's just no substance to it and it's so.
And and the other thing is that HDTV is not doing these, these aging people, any good.
You know they.
That's why the Tomylerns of the world exist.
Yeah, because HDTV shows all um, but and you got to tell Kennedy you know enough with these Reason Magazine guests.
She needs to get some Mises Institute guests on that show.
I told Judge Knap that as well.
Kennedy, you need to get some Mises institute guests on your FOX business show, because you know how many more times we got to listen to Matt Walt Welch, or whatever his name is, from Reason.
My God.
I've told her the same thing.
Vapid Culture Statements00:02:44
Yeah, but the thing is, is you know, you got to hand it to the left because sometimes they really do put their money where their mouth is.
And they were, you know, they, I think that they, a lot of companies on the left are just doing the math and saying that we have to be woke, even if that maybe hurts us short term.
I mean, some people have argued that that Gillette ad about men being better or something hurt them.
They, they did have an accounting write-off this year, but there's actually some, some, I won't bore you, but there's some underlying facts that may not have been related to that ad campaign, whatever.
You know, but I think, I think two things.
One, they're looking at the, at the possibility of lawsuits in our new woke culture, whether that's from their own employees or from the consumers of their goods and services, saying, we don't want any of that.
And two, I think they're saying, hey, long term, we got to make a bet.
Who's going to win?
The woke scolds or the deplorables?
And we're betting on the woke scolds over time and, you know, and that women are going to, more and more women are going to be single.
More and more women are going to be controlling household finances, i.e. their own household of one.
And so, you know, if we have to choose A or B, we're going to go with A because that's just, you know, that's where we think the future is.
So I think there's a lot going on there.
I mean, if Tucker Carlson has a huge audience and he's not getting Toyota or somebody to advertise during his show, but instead he's got mypillow.com, that's a strong statement.
You know, that's a statement about our culture.
And that shows you that I think in many ways, the difference between the left and the right is that the left isn't joking.
Yeah.
The left is not joking.
When they tell you they're going to have gay marriage in this country, they go out and 20 years later, they got it.
Okay, that's it.
They sat down one day and said, we are going to have gay marriage.
And they did.
If libertarians sat down and said, we are going to get rid of the income tax, and just said, that's it.
By hook or by crook, we'll use the legislature.
If we can't do it that way, we'll use the courts.
If we can't do it that way, we'll do Irish democracy and agorism.
If we can't do it that way, we'll do sit-downs, whatever it would be.
So the left isn't kidding.
When the right says, oh, we should get rid of the income tax.
We should abolish the Department of Education.
We should get rid of the Department of Energy.
They're not serious.
And nobody thinks we should ban abortion.
They're not serious.
They're kidding.
They have no intention of doing that.
They'll never do that.
That's the difference.
The left isn't kidding.
Yeah, that's, you know what?
Wrap Up and Agorism00:00:57
That is a really, that's a great observation.
And it is empirically really played out in every way you can imagine.
All right, look, we're up against the end of it, so we got to wrap there.
But man, this was a really great conversation.
We got to do this again sometime soon.
So thank you so much, President Jeff Dice, my president, Jeff Dice, for everything you do at the Mises Institute.
Thanks for coming on.
This was the perfect show, I think, for our 500th episode.
So I really appreciate it.
And look forward to talking to you soon.
And I will be sending you guys a check in a few weeks, as long as a lot of people go and buy this t-shirt.
Thanks a lot.
Congratulations on this many.
But no congratulations to Robbie the Fire.
Okay, there you heard it, everybody.
I'm going to cut that and make that my new voicemail.
All right, everybody.
Thank you very much to Jeff Dice.
Thank you guys all so much for listening and watching.
And we will be back on Friday with a brand new episode.