Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - What I Got Wrong w/ Gene Epstein
Aired: 2020-02-15
Duration: 01:57:10


=== Roll Back The State (06:33) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up!
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:07]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:09]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:11]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:14]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:20]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:25]  You're listening to the part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:29]  Here's your host, James Smith.
[00:00:32]  Hey, what's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:38]  We've got a special one for today.
[00:00:41]  Rob Bernstein is out.
[00:00:43]  He's still off at his gig.
[00:00:44]  He's skiing and hitting on other people's wives.
[00:00:48]  But I have in studio the great Gene Epstein, the dawn of the New York crime family of libertarians.
[00:00:56]  It's very good to have you in.
[00:00:58]  And the theme for this show is going to be what I have gotten wrong.
[00:01:04]  Now, I know a lot of you hear that right away, and you're like, what are you talking about?
[00:01:08]  Dave's right about everything.
[00:01:09]  I get where you're coming from, and I understand the impulse.
[00:01:13]  But it turns out, well, we'll find out.
[00:01:16]  But it seems that there may have been a few things that I have, in fact, gotten wrong, which is very uncharacteristic for me.
[00:01:23]  But you are going to bring these to my attention.
[00:01:26]  Yes, and Dave, and I want to emphasize that I still think your economic batting average is about 96%.
[00:01:33]  Okay.
[00:01:33]  It means you haven't improved.
[00:01:35]  It was 96% last year.
[00:01:37]  But still, still, again, you get it 96%.
[00:01:40]  But that's an A. That's an A.
[00:01:41]  But it's not an A plus.
[00:01:42]  We're trying to get me up to an A plus.
[00:01:44]  Precisely.
[00:01:44]  That's what I'm working on.
[00:01:46]  And, you know, Krugman gets it 96% wrong.
[00:01:49]  You get it 96% right.
[00:01:51]  He's a Nobel Prize winner and you're not.
[00:01:53]  So maybe I should start getting more wrong.
[00:01:56]  I mean, this might be better successful.
[00:01:58]  Let's be Jewish about this.
[00:01:59]  Maybe I should start throwing a few.
[00:02:02]  There's a certain perverse logic in that.
[00:02:03]  Absolutely.
[00:02:03]  Well, I do.
[00:02:04]  I just, of course, if anybody doesn't know, which I'm sure regular listeners to the show know, but Gene Epstein is a brilliant economist.
[00:02:11]  And he is also the director.
[00:02:13]  Oh, he also has music coming.
[00:02:15]  He's also the director of the Soho Forum, the wonderful debate series here in New York.
[00:02:20]  And they got a lot of really fun stuff coming up.
[00:02:22]  So if you are in the New York City area, go log on to thesohoforum.org.
[00:02:27]  You can see all the upcoming shows.
[00:02:29]  A lot of really exciting debates coming up.
[00:02:31]  I'm always at them, hanging out.
[00:02:33]  Gene's always hanging out.
[00:02:34]  It's a real fun time.
[00:02:36]  There's food, there's drinks.
[00:02:37]  Yes, which my wife says is free food and it's drinks at the bar, although free water.
[00:02:44]  And you say the name Tom Woods to me, you get a free drink at the bar.
[00:02:49]  And Dave is being too modest.
[00:02:52]  He is a part of our Soho Forum family.
[00:02:54]  He is our go-to warm-up act.
[00:02:58]  He's been warming up virtually every SOLO Forum for the past year.
[00:03:03]  And then on top of that, he did double duty the last Solo Forum debate, the one I had with Steve Moore on Trump's trade war, which Dave not only warmed up, but moderated.
[00:03:16]  And it was a lot of fun.
[00:03:17]  Yes.
[00:03:17]  It was a very fun night.
[00:03:18]  I enjoyed it.
[00:03:18]  You did a great job.
[00:03:19]  Well, thank you.
[00:03:20]  I thought you did a great job as well.
[00:03:21]  Well, thank you.
[00:03:22]  Even though, according to Oxford-style voting, I lost, I didn't get trounced.
[00:03:28]  I did pick up 14 points.
[00:03:30]  But to my surprise, and according to Dave, to his surprise as well.
[00:03:34]  I was very surprised.
[00:03:35]  Steve picked up more points.
[00:03:37]  But Dave, you're not only laced with good humor and jokes, you also, as I encourage you to do, asked me a question, which was challenging, asked a question of Steve, which is challenging.
[00:03:50]  You were agile at every stage.
[00:03:52]  So you're a switch hitter.
[00:03:54]  And then on top of that, of course, Dave has also been a debater at the SoForum.
[00:03:58]  Dave is the only Soul Forum person who's played all three roles.
[00:04:02]  Moderator, debater, and warm-up act.
[00:04:04]  I've been moderator and debater, but I wouldn't be good at that.
[00:04:07]  You wouldn't do the warm-up act.
[00:04:09]  I wouldn't be good.
[00:04:09]  Next month, Gene's going to have me mopping the floors.
[00:04:12]  There's just everything that can be done.
[00:04:14]  Serving the food.
[00:04:15]  Serving the food.
[00:04:16]  I'm going to be doing the books in the back.
[00:04:19]  Every job.
[00:04:20]  And also, by the way, I should say I am undefeated as a debater.
[00:04:25]  Which you were in.
[00:04:27]  You were in the ranks of Undefeated until this last debate.
[00:04:32]  Well, of course, see, that's it.
[00:04:33]  I have to remind Dave about certain data bias.
[00:04:36]  Dave has done one debate, which he won.
[00:04:39]  Absolutely.
[00:04:40]  And that, by the way, interestingly, in terms of pugilism, that was against a very formidable opponent, Nicholas Sauwer.
[00:04:46]  That's debatable.
[00:04:47]  Well, no, he was definitely skilled.
[00:04:51]  Yes.
[00:04:52]  He might have been full of it, but he was skilled.
[00:04:55]  Yes.
[00:04:55]  That is true.
[00:04:55]  And I almost imagine it, if you imagine it as pugilism, which Dave often talks about debates, analogizing them with a boxing match.
[00:05:05]  It really was Dave in there slugging, really slugging and willing to take blows because he was just heroically fighting for the Libertarian Party's soul, whereas Sauerbourg was a much fancier dancer.
[00:05:20]  And he was on the ropes at times.
[00:05:23]  You definitely took it in a technical knockout.
[00:05:25]  I think it was difficult to knock that guy out because he bobbed and weaved quite artfully.
[00:05:30]  But it was a legitimate win.
[00:05:32]  I've had six debates at the Soul Forum, and I've won five, and I lost my last one, the sixth debate against Steve Moore.
[00:05:41]  I have certain sourgrapes reasons for it, but I think that it would be rather graceless for me to go into that.
[00:05:47]  Well, I will say that I was very, very surprised that I felt that you won the debate intellectually.
[00:05:54]  And I was surprised that the audience not more of them didn't agree with me.
[00:06:01]  Anyway, by the way, before we get into where I've gotten wrong, I did just very quickly want to say that it's Valentine's Day.
[00:06:06]  I want to say happy Valentine's Day to my wife, and of course, happy Valentine's Day to your wife, who is here waiting outside.
[00:06:12]  And if we did a survey of our Soul Forum attendees, what's the main reason you come to the Soul Forum?
[00:06:20]  The food, the food for thought, the Warm-Up Act, or the conviviality?
[00:06:25]  Probably the food would be number one.
[00:06:27]  The food is good.
[00:06:28]  That's where my wife caters.
[00:06:29]  That's right.
[00:06:30]  Probably the warm-up act would be number two.
[00:06:32]  And then the debate.

=== Happy Valentine's Day (12:10) ===

[00:06:34]  You're being too kind, giving me number two.
[00:06:35]  But that food probably would take number one.
[00:06:38]  And then in the interest of being accurate and a little bit kind, because I'm so proud of you.
[00:06:44]  I knew you almost from the start, not really.
[00:06:47]  I guess I met you about five years ago, six years ago, through Andrew Heaton.
[00:06:52]  That's right, through Andrew Heaton.
[00:06:53]  Yeah.
[00:06:54]  Or maybe seven years.
[00:06:55]  Anyway, you have become your niche.
[00:07:00]  You do other things well also, but your specialty for me is that you love the political circus and you love it and hate it, but you love it enough to sort of enjoy the irony, the jokes, the nuance.
[00:07:17]  And your lively commentary on the political circus involving Biden and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and most recently Bill Maher and quoting him.
[00:07:29]  It's always enjoyable.
[00:07:30]  It's always an attraction.
[00:07:32]  And I think you're peerless, at least among the people I follow, and I follow a great many good people, good podcasts.
[00:07:39]  You're peerless in that regard.
[00:07:41]  You do other things well.
[00:07:42]  But this is the sort of thing that you do especially well.
[00:07:45]  And so I recommend to anybody just listening for the first or second time, If you want to get a commentary and get up to date on what's happening in that crazy world that you don't necessarily want to take a deep dive into yourself, that's me.
[00:08:00]  I don't like to.
[00:08:01]  Dave is the go-to guy for that.
[00:08:03]  Well, thank you very much.
[00:08:04]  I very much appreciate that, and I can sense you are buttering me up to now knock me down off this pedestal that you've put me on.
[00:08:11]  Well, you know, because now you're going to give me a suspicious Jewish.
[00:08:15]  You gave me a 96% challenge.
[00:08:17]  So we're going over the 4%.
[00:08:18]  But there's going to be another qualitative issue, and Dave reminds me of that Jewish joke.
[00:08:22]  You see, he's got the suspicious Jewish attitude that I'm setting him up.
[00:08:26]  You know, I was in, here's another Gabby story, but it's kind of funny.
[00:08:31]  I was in Romania, and I said something about being Jewish, and I was at dinner with a bunch of professors from the free market, Murray Rothbard Institute, by the way, at the University in Romania.
[00:08:43]  And so I said something about Jewish, being Jewish.
[00:08:46]  And they proceeded to tell me about 11 jokes about Jews.
[00:08:49]  And mostly sort of slightly anti-Semitic, of course.
[00:08:54]  And I heard every one.
[00:08:56]  I knew every single one.
[00:08:58]  I said, my God, did these jokes travel?
[00:09:01]  Then they told me some Romanian jokes, which are funny.
[00:09:03]  But then most recently, I heard a joke about Jews that I'd never heard before.
[00:09:07]  And it's briefly, why must there always be two synagogues, even in the smallest Jewish community?
[00:09:13]  You know, the punchline to that one?
[00:09:14]  Why must there always be two synagogues?
[00:09:16]  Because one Jew must always be able to say to another, I wouldn't be caught dead in your synagogue.
[00:09:22]  And that's, Dave, you know, I wouldn't be caught dead.
[00:09:24]  You know, the suspicion, the, anyway.
[00:09:27]  Okay, so that's what I demonstrated.
[00:09:28]  It was something deep in my genes.
[00:09:33]  I worked that in rather sloppily.
[00:09:35]  But anyway, you've got some clips that you want to play and go over from two different episodes, correct?
[00:09:41]  Well, actually, the second episode with Peter Schiff was the one.
[00:09:46]  No, no, this is all from the same one.
[00:09:47]  All these five are from the same.
[00:09:49]  The Peter Schiff one, I can comment on if we have time.
[00:09:52]  We may not have time.
[00:09:55]  But the thing I want, but now I want to surprise you, Dave, by taking off my economist hat and giving it a framework.
[00:10:02]  There's going to be a lot of economic correction about what you said on this episode, but where I think that it's my facts will be unassailable.
[00:10:11]  But now I want to say something a little bit more contentious and begin with this framework.
[00:10:17]  That I think that what came up in this spirited first, like really was just the first 18 minutes or so of that episode, was really what Walter Block has somewhat sort of awkwardly called thick versus thin libertarianism.
[00:10:36]  And really it was that Walter Block prefers to be this pure philosopher.
[00:10:42]  He's a Talmudic guy.
[00:10:44]  I call him Rabbi Block.
[00:10:45]  He wants to be a thin libertarian.
[00:10:47]  And really, in a way, to my mind, the best working definition is that, first of all, all libertarians respect other people's right to be bigoted.
[00:11:00]  If the gas digital network will not allow you to put Jews on the show, they don't accept Jews, then that's their right.
[00:11:08]  They're close.
[00:11:08]  What?
[00:11:09]  They're getting closer every day.
[00:11:11]  Not allowing Jews on the show.
[00:11:12]  Or firing all the Jewish employees, then a libertarian would say, I don't pass a law against it.
[00:11:19]  I can't comment on it.
[00:11:20]  That's Walter Block.
[00:11:22]  Now, obviously, the rest of us, however, who would say, no, we're slightly thickish libertarians, we would say that if the gas digital network is that bigoted, if it won't allow Jews, and then where's it going to stop?
[00:11:34]  No blacks, no Puerto Ricans, no gay people.
[00:11:37]  But even if it's just Jews, we thick libertarians would say that, that that's a reprehensible practice.
[00:11:46]  And we don't, the gas digital network is now just not on our list.
[00:11:51]  We're not going to patronize it.
[00:11:52]  See, I always thought that the difference between thick versus thin libertarians would be whether or not that other part is part of libertarianism.
[00:12:04]  So in other words, because by this sense, nobody, even Walter Bluck, nobody is truly a thin libertarian if they were to say that I can't say anything other than non-aggression principle and private property rights.
[00:12:16]  I mean, even if he just at one point says, like, I don't like pineapple on pizza, you know, like you have some other opinion other than just this.
[00:12:24]  But the point is that whether or not you like pineapple on pizza has nothing to do with libertarianism.
[00:12:29]  It's separate, right?
[00:12:30]  Isn't that the idea?
[00:12:31]  Well, okay.
[00:12:33]  So whether or not you think it's a good, whether you think it's right or wrong to fire all the Jews who work for you, you can have whatever opinion on that you want, but that is separate from libertarianism, which would just say that it's your right to do whatever you want.
[00:12:47]  Well, I guess so, but I personally would say, maybe, I hope you agree with me, I personally would say that precisely because we libertarians do not want the state to interfere with people's right of free association, almost precisely because of that, we want to be, that's my feeling, we want to be especially actually energetic in condemning practices that we don't like.
[00:13:15]  Sure.
[00:13:16]  I mean, with...
[00:13:17]  No, okay, so that makes sense to me.
[00:13:20]  So that's where I think you and I are on the same page.
[00:13:23]  I think that Walter has a penchant for drawing fine distinctions and for purity.
[00:13:31]  He's not here, but I'll knock him behind his back.
[00:13:35]  And that, for example, when he got into that crazy fight with the New York Times, I mean, you know what he did?
[00:13:40]  I mean, he actually sued the New York Times anyway, even though he's a Rothbardian.
[00:13:44]  The New York Times, but he told the New York Times about slavery.
[00:13:48]  And remember what he said.
[00:13:50]  He said the problem with slavery is that you can't quit.
[00:13:52]  He said, but otherwise it might be pleasant to be out there picking cotton in the sunshine.
[00:13:57]  And so because he's such a Talmudic scholar, he wanted to draw this fine distinction.
[00:14:02]  So of course the hostile reporter claimed that Walter thinks slavery is fine because after all, you're out in the sunshine enjoying yourself.
[00:14:10]  And so that's Walter's mind.
[00:14:11]  I'm talking about Walter too much, but I want to finish him off.
[00:14:14]  And then on top of that, he gives us this crazy rationale for why he sued the New York Times because he decided it's a government organ.
[00:14:20]  He's going to sue the government.
[00:14:21]  So he sued the New York Times.
[00:14:22]  But the point is that that's Walter.
[00:14:24]  I believe that thick libertarianism is my credo.
[00:14:28]  And my credo is really that precisely because we don't want the government involved.
[00:14:34]  We want to recognize, however, that people are ethical and moral, and that most of us really do disapprove of bigotry, and that we want to go out of our way to punish if we possibly can without any great, you know, and I don't want to break up, because I understand that you're leading into more points on this.
[00:14:58]  But I think to me that would depend on how we define bigotry, which becomes vague or vague.
[00:15:07]  It just gives an application.
[00:15:09]  Right.
[00:15:09]  So in that example, I completely agree with you.
[00:15:12]  However, if you were to, so if you were to say, I won't hire anyone who's black or I'm firing all the Jews or something like that.
[00:15:18]  But if you were to say somebody who preferred to date a certain group of people or to live around a certain group of people.
[00:15:26]  You can't play hand.
[00:15:27]  No hand.
[00:15:27]  Well, now, but I'm saying I don't actually know.
[00:15:30]  Like as a libertarian, I don't find that objectionable at all.
[00:15:33]  I feel like, oh, that's fine.
[00:15:34]  You can date whoever you want to date.
[00:15:36]  Of course, I completely agree.
[00:15:37]  So I don't have to condemn that.
[00:15:38]  Yeah, well, that's right.
[00:15:39]  Exactly.
[00:15:40]  And that's where the nuance exists and where it's a little bit difficult.
[00:15:44]  I would use another example.
[00:15:45]  I would say that these country clubs, they didn't allow Jews.
[00:15:49]  Screw that.
[00:15:50]  It's a goddamn country club.
[00:15:52]  And I'm going to be bothered that they won't let me in because I'm a Jew.
[00:15:56]  Who cares?
[00:15:58]  I'm going to get exercised about that.
[00:16:00]  The point is, if a merchant, or indeed, obviously the guy who refused to bake the wedding cake for the gay couple and they had actually gone after him.
[00:16:11]  They had so many other places.
[00:16:12]  And the guy actually said, you can buy any cake in the store, but I just don't want to make a gay.
[00:16:17]  And on top of that, if you followed that specific example, he actually referred them to another baker who goes, I'm sure they'd be happy.
[00:16:23]  And it was about catering for their wedding.
[00:16:25]  It wasn't even just baking the cake.
[00:16:26]  It was actually about like, he was like, I just don't want to participate in a gay wedding.
[00:16:30]  Of course.
[00:16:31]  But obviously, certainly where they were.
[00:16:37]  And then, of course, there are Jim Crow laws.
[00:16:40]  Rothbard and others, obviously, the state should not be enforcing bigotry.
[00:16:44]  And that was happening.
[00:16:45]  That's what I tried to explain to people, that really the problem in the South was that we had the local states enforcing bigoted laws.
[00:16:54]  And Rothbard, of course, explicitly said that it should be a constant.
[00:16:57]  So all of those distinctions are valid.
[00:17:00]  But of course, as you said, if the gas digital network didn't do it, then of course the other point made by Thomas Sowell and Gary Becker is that the capitalist marketplace punishes bigots because if you won't allow women in or Jews in or blacks in, then you're cutting yourself off from potential clientele.
[00:17:18]  You're cutting yourself off.
[00:17:19]  So all of those consequentialist issues matter to us.
[00:17:23]  Issues like bigotry matter to us, even though obviously we also want to teach people, and now in a way, what you're doing is playing into my hands.
[00:17:31]  We want to teach people that there are lots of people who might have bigoted attitudes, just like you said.
[00:17:40]  If some guy only wants to date a Jewish woman or some guy only wants to date white women, then he's cutting himself off from some potentially interesting people.
[00:17:51]  He may be odious personally, but is that odious even personally?
[00:17:57]  I mean, I find that's completely reasonable.
[00:18:01]  I said corrected.
[00:18:02]  I said, you know, maybe, may or may not.
[00:18:04]  I mean, you know, there are some people who are so damn nasty about other people.
[00:18:08]  You know, I love, you know, so that's my point.
[00:18:11]  But that's almost the key difference there is whether you're really nasty about it or not, I think.
[00:18:16]  Yeah, yeah, but clearly, I will say, for example, that Richard Epstein, who's really, who says he's 85% libertarian, indeed, that's what he is, he says that, oh, you should have a law preventing airlines and public utilities from not servicing blacks.
[00:18:35]  That if Con Edison says, we're not going to allow you to buy electricity from us because you're black, then we should pass a law against it.

=== Outsourced Child Rearing (14:55) ===

[00:18:44]  And of course, it gets a little bit ridiculous because Con Ed is obviously going to sell electricity to whoever wants to buy it.
[00:18:51]  And the airlines are going to...
[00:18:52]  So it gets a little ridiculous.
[00:18:54]  But my point, though, is that clearly we can see examples where bigotry is happening, where it matters, and we want to speak out against it.
[00:19:03]  Sure.
[00:19:03]  And then so on.
[00:19:04]  All right, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Amigo.
[00:19:09]  Amigo creates life-changing bidets that are incredibly easy to install.
[00:19:14]  You don't need to get a new toilet or call a plumber.
[00:19:17]  All you have to do is attach Amigo's seat to your old toilet and you have your own luxury bidet.
[00:19:23]  These things are life-changing.
[00:19:26]  They sent one to our studio, and in 15 minutes we installed it, and everyone's been smiling a lot more around this place.
[00:19:33]  It really is.
[00:19:34]  It will make you realize that you've been doing it wrong your entire life, okay?
[00:19:38]  You instantly turn your toilet into a heated seat bidet by getting an amigo.
[00:19:43]  Think about it: you wash your hands with water, you wash your hair with water, why not treat your butt with the same respect?
[00:19:49]  Plus, a bidet will stop you from walking around with an itchy butt all day.
[00:19:53]  You have to check them out.
[00:19:55]  They start at just $69.
[00:19:57]  You will use this every day.
[00:19:58]  You and your partner or anyone at your place will be impressed.
[00:20:02]  Keep 2020 going with a better bathroom experience.
[00:20:05]  Check them out at myamigo.com/slash gas.
[00:20:10]  That's M-Y-O-M-I-G-O dot com slash gas.
[00:20:14]  It'll get you 15% off.
[00:20:17]  This is life-changing.
[00:20:18]  You got to check it out.
[00:20:19]  It's very affordable.
[00:20:20]  It's super easy to install.
[00:20:22]  MyOmigo.com/slash gas.
[00:20:25]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:20:27]  But you've just made another point.
[00:20:29]  And now what I want to do is read an excerpt, a brief excerpt from a recent video, recent interview that Nicholaspi did with Penn Gillette.
[00:20:41]  And Penn Gillette had to answer the question to explain the chapter in his book called Why I'm a Libertarian.
[00:20:49]  And this is what Pen Jillette said in brief, and I'm going to quote sentences from it.
[00:20:55]  He said, I remember hearing PJ O'Rourke say to other libertarians, What we all have in common is that everyone in this room does not know what's best for everyone else.
[00:21:10]  The point about libertarianism for me, he said, that's Penn, is simply that I don't know what's best for other people.
[00:21:20]  And then he went on to say, There is a quality in seeing Hillary Clinton when she's speaking.
[00:21:27]  He thought she meant well.
[00:21:28]  She means well, but she thinks she knows what's best for others.
[00:21:33]  And I don't think there's anything more insulting than acting like you know what's best for someone else.
[00:21:41]  So, Pen Gillette and P.J. O'Rourke, I believe that they're both very weak on many other issues involving libertarianism, but I think they struck a nice chord.
[00:21:51]  P.J. O'Rourke's recent book is called None of My Business.
[00:21:55]  And Penn Gillette felt that the touchstone, the core issue of libertarianism, is that we can't preach to other people.
[00:22:05]  Our default position, our default position, which is in a way what you're saying, our default position is to say that if people make free choices, then our default position is just to respect it and not condemn it.
[00:22:18]  Or I like another related line from Henry David Thoreau, who I think had very good libertarian impulses as well.
[00:22:26]  He wrote in Walden, his classic book, If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, he said somewhat facetiously.
[00:22:41]  But again, you know, people thinking that they know what's best for you, what's best for your personal choices.
[00:22:48]  And so I submit to you that now I want you to play those particular three or four minutes.
[00:22:56]  I submit to you that when you spoke of these people who aren't, in your view, raising their own children, even though that was an exaggeration, you said, even when they just hire nannies, this is something that we libertarians, we should be thick libertarians, and speak out against.
[00:23:16]  That I think that you were falling into sort of the Hillary Clinton trap because you're not, I want to play those two and a half minutes.
[00:23:24]  Well, let's play the two minutes and I think I'm going to defend this position as well.
[00:23:28]  Well, we have a okay, we're going to do Oxford cell voting with a 50,000 listener And see, well, I could lose again, I guess.
[00:23:35]  We'll see.
[00:23:37]  And I said something about parents not raising their children in our country.
[00:23:44]  And I said that so often libertarians, you know, I don't want to go through the whole thing again, but I basically said, so often libertarians talk about all of these transformations in our society, going from a gold standard to a fiat-based currency model or going from a republic to an empire, going, the rise of the whatever, the national security state, things like this.
[00:24:10]  There's probably 15 others that you can rattle off in your head right now.
[00:24:14]  I said, but one of the things that very rarely gets brought up by libertarians is that we transitioned from a society where families raise their children to one where it's outsourced and parents really don't raise their children anymore.
[00:24:27]  And to me, I was like, this is like the most profound, most bottom-up change.
[00:24:33]  Not that it came from a bottom-up direction, but you understand what I'm saying?
[00:24:36]  Like it affects the bottom all the way up.
[00:24:39]  And that I think this is something libertarians should talk about.
[00:24:42]  And, you know, if you think you're going to have a libertarian social order.
[00:24:48]  And when I say that, I mean, obviously, libertarianism is a legal order, but human beings are human beings.
[00:24:54]  And if you think you're going to have a social order that supports a libertarian legal order when children aren't being raised by their families, I think you've got another thing coming.
[00:25:04]  And that's not going to work out very well.
[00:25:06]  And I was, there were a few people, three or four, maybe five people, libertarians who responded to me because this clip got posted by the part of the problem clips Twitter page.
[00:25:19]  And a few people responded and they said basically that libertarians shouldn't be talking about this because libertarians don't have any opinion on the matter.
[00:25:29]  Like libertarians say you should be free to organize your family however you want to.
[00:25:34]  If you want to leave your kid with a nanny or in daycare or something like that, that's your choice.
[00:25:39]  There should be no law against that.
[00:25:40]  And that's that.
[00:25:40]  It's the libertarians basically have nothing to say about this.
[00:25:43]  And I really couldn't help but think to myself, I go, this is why libertarianism is seen as a joke by so many people.
[00:25:54]  This is the exact reason why people write us off.
[00:25:58]  And if people are taking that attitude, I got to say, particularly as somebody who's a father, I get it.
[00:26:05]  I get why they would write you off if that's your attitude.
[00:26:08]  If you can't state a preference between a child being raised by their parents or a child being basically just dumped in daycare, if you can't state a preference between the two of those things, why should anybody take you seriously as a person?
[00:26:27]  No, okay, you're going to defend yourself in a moment, but let me just plunge in with a couple of things.
[00:26:31]  And then, of course, you want to defend yourself.
[00:26:34]  First of all, let me give you a couple of facts from the Census Bureau.
[00:26:39]  You know, we could talk about how good their data are, but in fact, this, they take frequent snapshots.
[00:26:46]  And for what it's worth, more than one in three women are stay-at-home moms for children under age of six, under the age of six.
[00:26:57]  More than one in three.
[00:26:58]  So at least let's understand that it isn't not going to impress you too much, but I just want some facts on the table.
[00:27:04]  And then for children who are age six to 17, one in four are stay-at-home moms still to this day.
[00:27:13]  But then, of course, rhetorically, to say, you're not raising your children if you only see them, if you only call them up during the day, see them in the evenings and weekends, or take them on vacation.
[00:27:23]  Obviously, you know, of course, you were being a little bit rhetorically over the top.
[00:27:30]  They're with a nanny during the day at the age of six.
[00:27:32]  And of course, the age of five.
[00:27:34]  And of course, they're usually in a government-run school when they're six or seven, which of course is a different issue altogether.
[00:27:42]  If you're a stay-at-home mom, they're in that damn government-home-owned school.
[00:27:45]  So that's a separate issue.
[00:27:47]  And you are conflating the two.
[00:27:48]  The point is, but let me finish with one other point.
[00:27:51]  Let me just say as well that the reason why I would say that this fits into the category of, you know, the guy just wants to go out with... white women, so maybe he's a nice guy and he just thinks they're sexier.
[00:28:05]  I don't know, or whatever.
[00:28:06]  But the point is that there might be women, that's two out of three, two out of three who are under the age of six.
[00:28:14]  First of all, we're going to get into the economics maybe later, but there might be women who just love their jobs and they want to have kids.
[00:28:24]  If they get a decent nanny, then who's to judge?
[00:28:28]  I didn't meet these people.
[00:28:29]  Obviously, if we know particular individuals who parked their kid with some mean nanny, that's bad.
[00:28:36]  But you do know, obviously, they are still present in their children's lives.
[00:28:40]  They're still living with their kids.
[00:28:42]  So they're raising them and they're forming it out to a nanny.
[00:28:45]  If you don't want your darling Layla to be taken care of by a nanny, wonderful.
[00:28:52]  Do it.
[00:28:52]  But the idea that you want to single this particular practice out and talk about how we're not going to have a sustainable libertarian society if people aren't home with their kids.
[00:29:03]  I mean, look, there may be a mother could be resentful.
[00:29:07]  It might be better to have mom happy at her job and returning to her kids at the end of the day.
[00:29:12]  Who the hell knows?
[00:29:13]  Then, of course, there are also people who have some financial constraints and financial burdens.
[00:29:18]  So condemning this situation generally, I think, is a little bit like, again, saying that this guy who only wants to go out with white women, hey, we can't have a, we're not going to have a libertarian society if we allow him to do that.
[00:29:31]  So go ahead, Dave.
[00:29:32]  Okay, well, let me flip this around a little bit.
[00:29:34]  First off, what I will concede is that certainly it's not true that everybody isn't raising their children.
[00:29:41]  And perhaps I should have, I was a little bit over the top with that.
[00:29:44]  But if you did look, and I would say that.
[00:29:45]  Well, even the raising of their children, again, is a metaphor.
[00:29:48]  Sure, sure.
[00:29:49]  You need to live with your kids.
[00:29:50]  You're raising them pretty much.
[00:29:52]  Okay, but so then it's more of a problem.
[00:29:55]  You recognize it's a rhetorical overstatement.
[00:29:58]  To some degree, sure.
[00:30:00]  But let me just say this.
[00:30:01]  And by the way, I don't know what clips you're pulling up here, and I wanted to go into it like that so I could see.
[00:30:07]  So I didn't actually watch this clip back before.
[00:30:09]  So just to make the point, I don't have numbers in front of me.
[00:30:12]  But if you were to look at, say, the illegitimacy rate, the single motherhood rate, it has really picked up.
[00:30:18]  You're changing the subject.
[00:30:19]  No, I'm just making the point that these things have dramatically increased over the last year.
[00:30:24]  Well, but that's not, but again, Dave, again, that's the reason why I wanted to start with the idea of thick libertarianism, because I wanted to talk about how, in so many ways, you and I are not far apart.
[00:30:39]  The point is that we should definitely understand the role of the state in that particular case.
[00:30:46]  Oh, no question.
[00:30:47]  But I made this point.
[00:30:48]  When I was talking about it, there's also, of course, there's state-run daycares, there's public schools.
[00:30:54]  Oftentimes, it is the government who's filling this role.
[00:30:56]  Hold on, let me just make the point.
[00:30:59]  In the same sense that you said, you know, if there was a company who wanted to fire all the blacks or fire all the Jews, that we might want to speak out against that so that the government doesn't have to intervene, right?
[00:31:10]  Because you want kind of there to be some type of market solution.
[00:31:12]  Similarly, I think you could say that, I don't know, maybe doing heroin is to some degree an exercise in liberty and that the government, we don't want the government to intervene.
[00:31:23]  However, it might, right?
[00:31:26]  It might not be a bad idea for sound, sane libertarians to say, hey, I think doing heroin is a really bad idea.
[00:31:33]  Well, I don't know.
[00:31:33]  Like, I think that's a really bad thing to do.
[00:31:35]  My understanding, Dave, even okay, you're using a whole different number of examples.
[00:31:40]  Bear in mind what you just did, Dave.
[00:31:43]  This is an interesting self-form debate, and we don't have a moderator.
[00:31:47]  I'm trying to moderate it and bully you a little bit, Dave.
[00:31:50]  But the point is, that obviously, what you're doing is you're latching upon a whole lot of other issues that are only indirectly related.
[00:32:00]  The fact of the matter is, I mean, anticipating one thing.
[00:32:02]  You actually did say that women going off to work is factually untrue.
[00:32:08]  The decision of women to go off to work, by the way, started in the 1950s.
[00:32:14]  The influx of women into the workforce was true for every decade since World War II.
[00:32:20]  And there's absolutely no evidence that the government had much to do with it.
[00:32:25]  By the way, the real influx of the baby boomer women into the workforce coincided with the baby bust.
[00:32:32]  These women were not having babies at all.
[00:32:35]  They weren't having kids.
[00:32:37]  They were going into the workforce especially quickly in the 70s and 80s, even though it was happening pretty rapidly in the 50s and 60s as well.
[00:32:48]  And it was by and large for the freedom of the economy, the fact that the revolution in the home, that in the kitchen, the fact that you had washers and dryers and dishwashers and all the rest that freed women up to get jobs.
[00:33:04]  And most of us would say, seemingly it's a good thing.
[00:33:07]  A lot of women do want to achieve their identities as workers and the economy.
[00:33:13]  Therefore, you actually said, Dave, I mean, you said it was the CIA was involved.
[00:33:18]  You were sounding like a power.
[00:33:20]  You know, the CIA, what I said was that the CIA was involved in the feminist movement, which they absolutely were.
[00:33:26]  Well, tell me, then that's something I didn't know.
[00:33:30]  Oh, the CIA was funding different feminist publications.
[00:33:34]  They had different feminists who were working with them.
[00:33:37]  Why were they doing this?
[00:33:38]  I don't know.
[00:33:39]  Tell me why.

=== CIA Funding Feminism (03:39) ===

[00:33:40]  Well, I mean, I don't know exactly what they're doing.
[00:33:42]  I mean, they really cared about taxes, about getting taxes for the government.
[00:33:46]  They're such obsessive.
[00:33:47]  Well, I don't know about that, but I think that the breakup of the family unit has in many ways played into the state's hands.
[00:33:55]  And listen, I don't claim to know exactly why, but this.
[00:33:58]  You probably do know.
[00:33:59]  You probably do know that, maybe you're too young to know, that when Murphy Brown, the popular sitcom character, decided to have her baby and become a single mom, Vice President Dan Quayle, then still vice president, in the name of the White House and the national government, condemned her as a whore.
[00:34:22]  And so, therefore, again, those idiots in government don't know what the heck they're doing.
[00:34:26]  Well, yes, because no, but this is what the conservatives do.
[00:34:28]  The conservatives play that they're on team family values as they lose more and more and more.
[00:34:34]  So he's trying to get votes from the people who look at shows like this and go, well, why are we as a culture celebrating a single mother who works all the time?
[00:34:44]  And by selling.
[00:34:48]  But it has, I mean, Gene, this is undeniable.
[00:34:50]  For the last, for my entire life, there has been an absolute celebration of single motherhood, that they are the champions, they are the heroes, they are the real ones that we need to praise.
[00:34:58]  Every Oprah show and all of these different pop culture things.
[00:35:02]  Yes, absolute celebration.
[00:35:04]  And I think what most of the conservative base that Dan Quayle needed to get votes from was looking at things like this and going, why are we celebrating that?
[00:35:13]  But if you remember, even back then when Hillary Clinton first said that she came onto the scene, it was in 1991 or 92, I believe, when they were running for president.
[00:35:21]  And she said, you know, a lot of people are just expecting the wife of the president to sit at home and bake cookies or something along those lines.
[00:35:28]  And it got a big backlash from conservative women who are like, why are we denigrating housewives?
[00:35:33]  And so I understand.
[00:35:36]  And why should we not?
[00:35:37]  Why should libertarians not say that if I was going to choose to celebrate one or the other, I would celebrate families staying having children when you're actually going to be more active in their lives?
[00:35:52]  And why would we not?
[00:35:53]  Well, well, okay.
[00:35:55]  Again, you seem to be basically agreeing with my point, really, that the default position is simply with respect to these individual choices is to recognize, for example, by the way, that all the data on single mothers as a very good book called The Nurture Assumption, which I recommend highly to you by Rudith Rich Judith Rich Harris, fascinating book.
[00:36:17]  It's available on Audible.
[00:36:19]  She actually died a year ago at the age of 80.
[00:36:22]  But she said that the single motherhood problem really was all mixed up by the fact that the vast majority of single mothers were 16 and shooting up when they had their kids.
[00:36:32]  The Murphy Brown type, there's no evidence that women, that kids raised by single mothers who are together in their lives are any more harmed or any impaired in any way.
[00:36:43]  So the data was driven by the confusion of that other point.
[00:36:46]  But the point is that precisely right that a libertarian simply says that, that unless if the state is involved in any way, through its iron fist, the state is involved in any way by taking resources from others forcibly and giving it to others, then unless that's the case, if it seems to be mostly a matter of free choice,
[00:37:12]  then we may have our private opinions, but it's difficult to make any generalizations about it.

=== Blue Chew Prescription Deal (02:38) ===

[00:37:20]  If women want to work.
[00:37:21]  Now, let's now go to the next tape, because then this is where you ran into a little bit of a trouble.
[00:37:27]  So let's listen to the next one.
[00:37:29]  Let's listen.
[00:37:30]  It's not as if the government is not involved in this dynamic.
[00:37:35]  It's not like that families just decided they don't want to raise their children anymore.
[00:37:42]  And that was just some type of like, you know, organic market decision.
[00:37:46]  They just went, oh, you know, we, you know, in our like individualist pursuit of happiness, we would rather not raise our children anymore.
[00:37:54]  It's not what happened.
[00:37:56]  What happened was that, you know, well, first off, you had this kind of like women into the workforce, women into the workforce second wave feminist movement that was largely funded by government.
[00:38:07]  I mean, straight up CIA funded in many cases.
[00:38:11]  And of course, there's lots of incentives for the government to do this.
[00:38:14]  It's not just that they wanted to break up the family unit.
[00:38:17]  That's part of it, but there's just, you know, blatant economic incentives.
[00:38:21]  Like if you get women into the workforce, you get to tax the labor of women.
[00:38:26]  If women are at home taking care of kids, there's nothing to tax there.
[00:38:29]  And then if you're hiring a nanny, you can tax her too.
[00:38:32]  You get a lot more tax revenue if you break up the family unit.
[00:38:35]  That's, you know, that's just the reality of the situation.
[00:38:38]  The government was very incentivized to get into this.
[00:38:40]  And of course, you see this all over the place.
[00:38:42]  And libertarians should be hip to this.
[00:38:44]  All right, guys, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Blue Chew.
[00:38:48]  If you like sex, you're going to love Blue Chew.
[00:38:51]  You can grab them at bluechew.com.
[00:38:53]  Blue Chew offers men a performance enhancement for the bedroom at bluechew.com.
[00:38:58]  You can get the first chewables with the same active ingredients as Viagra and Cialis.
[00:39:03]  Chewables can work faster than pills, up to twice as fast.
[00:39:06]  And the chewables from bluechew.com can be taken on a full or empty stomach.
[00:39:10]  The online physician consultant is free, so it ends up being a lot cheaper than those other two.
[00:39:15]  It only takes a few minutes to connect with a bluechew.com affiliated physician.
[00:39:19]  And if you qualify, you get prescribed online quickly.
[00:39:22]  There's no in-person doctor visit, no awkward conversation, no waiting in line at a pharmacy.
[00:39:27]  It ships directly to your door in discrete packaging.
[00:39:30]  The chewables from Blue Chew.com are prescribed online by a doctor and made in the USA.
[00:39:36]  Blue Chew gives you the confidence in the bedroom every time.
[00:39:39]  You and your partner will love it.
[00:39:41]  And here's a great deal for you guys.
[00:39:42]  If you visit BlueChew.com, you'll get your first order for free when you use the promo code PROBLEBLEM.
[00:39:48]  You just pay $5 shipping, but the order is free at B-L-U-E-Chew.com promo code problem.
[00:39:56]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:39:57]  Well, now let me comment.

=== Single Earner Families (08:23) ===

[00:39:58]  Let me give you some numbers, Dave.
[00:40:00]  What are you looking up?
[00:40:01]  No, I was just looking up something about CIA.
[00:40:04]  Okay, look, Dave, I'm not going to.
[00:40:06]  No, I just wanted to have a little something in case you pushed me on this morning.
[00:40:09]  Okay, look, I'm going to respect your facts in that regard.
[00:40:12]  Look, let me just give you a couple of minutes.
[00:40:13]  Gloria Steinem was CIA connected.
[00:40:15]  She was the most famous feminist of the time.
[00:40:17]  Yes, indeed, yeah, I guess.
[00:40:18]  Yeah, in 1949, in 1949, 33.1% of women were in the labor force.
[00:40:25]  Okay.
[00:40:26]  Dave, I'm going to believe.
[00:40:27]  Okay, Gloria Stein.
[00:40:28]  No, no, no, I'm sorry.
[00:40:28]  I'm listening.
[00:40:30]  33.1% in 1949.
[00:40:32]  By 1969, 20 years later, it was up to 42.7%.
[00:40:39]  It increased in the 50s and in the 60s.
[00:40:42]  Interestingly enough, when women were having a lot of kids, it's a little strange.
[00:40:46]  Now, then came the baby bust.
[00:40:50]  And if you looked at the numbers, the birth rate actually was cut in half.
[00:40:53]  It's amazing.
[00:40:55]  The birth rate is actually interestingly defined, the number of babies born each year in relation for every thousand women between the age of 25 and 44.
[00:41:08]  15 and 4, 15 and 44.
[00:41:10]  I'm sorry.
[00:41:11]  Every thousand women between the age of 15 and 44, they compute the number of births per thousand women.
[00:41:16]  So there was a real bust.
[00:41:17]  So they weren't having babies.
[00:41:19]  Men were...
[00:41:20]  No, but that's not because necessarily, maybe I'm misunderstanding the data, but I think what would lead to that is that the old, you know, the old style having five, six kids families stopped and people started having one or two children.
[00:41:32]  Dave, come on, no, no.
[00:41:33]  Okay, that's a good question.
[00:41:34]  But look, no, look, in the 50s and 60s, they weren't having five kids.
[00:41:40]  That was for the immigrants.
[00:41:42]  They were having the two kids, maybe three.
[00:41:45]  No, you know that.
[00:41:46]  They just were having, there was no five-kid families common in the 50s and 60s.
[00:41:51]  The Jews were having like, you know, two.
[00:41:53]  I was one of, you know, no, really.
[00:41:55]  The Jews.
[00:41:56]  That's only 2% of the population.
[00:41:58]  It's funny.
[00:41:59]  I go back to the Jews.
[00:42:00]  You got me there, Dave.
[00:42:01]  It's like the Jews are like the center of the universe.
[00:42:04]  No, indeed, they weren't.
[00:42:05]  They were marginal.
[00:42:06]  But no, honestly, yeah, the Catholics were having a few.
[00:42:09]  Yeah, the Catholics were having tons of kids.
[00:42:10]  Okay, but the Catholics, you know, you think the Catholics stopped.
[00:42:13]  Okay, Dave.
[00:42:14]  We're just going to throw the Catholics out.
[00:42:16]  Don't they count too?
[00:42:18]  My point is that the Catholics were probably still very fertile into the 70s and 80s.
[00:42:22]  The Catholics never stopped.
[00:42:24]  Okay, fair enough.
[00:42:25]  Look, Dave, all I'm trying to say is that, is that really the idea that the fact that Gloria Steinem was getting some CIA money and that that's supposed to be supposed to have been the cause of the reason why.
[00:42:39]  Again, the influx of women into the labor force in the 50s and 60s was pretty rapid.
[00:42:45]  It accelerated once the baby boomers started to come of age with the baby bust.
[00:42:50]  And as you know, then gays were coming out.
[00:42:52]  Men weren't getting married.
[00:42:54]  Divorces were happening.
[00:42:56]  That was a big reason, by the way, of course, for the baby bust, because divorces were often happening before they could even have kids or before they could even have their second kid.
[00:43:03]  So that was another reason for the fact that women were getting jobs.
[00:43:07]  But I believe that you'd probably agree with me that The liberation of women by the capitalists in the kitchen and in the home was the real factor.
[00:43:21]  Why women and then women had the natural ambition to work, to do something in the world.
[00:43:28]  And then the idea that then women could either be teachers or teachers or the, what was the other one that was an easy one?
[00:43:36]  Why am I forgetting?
[00:43:37]  But anyway, teachers was the main thing.
[00:43:39]  And then they could become other jobs.
[00:43:41]  They could get other jobs in the workplace and not just become teachers or nurses.
[00:43:46]  They could.
[00:43:47]  Sure.
[00:43:47]  So listen, I will completely grant you.
[00:43:51]  But the point is, if you meet a woman who said there was a lot of feminist women who said they feel that useless at home, there's not a whole lot for them to do.
[00:44:01]  It's no longer a full-time job to run a home.
[00:44:03]  I want to get a job.
[00:44:05]  I want to better ourselves financially.
[00:44:07]  I'll have somebody take care of my kid during the day.
[00:44:11]  I can't judge that.
[00:44:12]  But I totally agree with you that we neither want to celebrate women in the home.
[00:44:20]  We don't want to celebrate women in the workplace.
[00:44:22]  We don't want to generalize about it at all.
[00:44:24]  We simply want to say that it was by and large capitalist acts between consenting adults, not really influenced by the government.
[00:44:32]  That's all.
[00:44:33]  Well, see, this I don't, that part I don't, I agree with a big portion of what you just said, about 50% of it.
[00:44:40]  And I think that there's no question that the reason why the women's liberation or whatever you want to call it occurred was in large part due to a bunch of capitalist innovations.
[00:44:52]  And, you know, like you said, the kitchen stuff, the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, the dishwasher.
[00:44:58]  This took, made homemaking from a grueling full-time job into something that you're kind of like, you know, you're pushing a few buttons and basically it isn't taken care of.
[00:45:11]  I'll tell you what's funny.
[00:45:11]  And also on the other end of it, the other aspect of it, right, is that what male work, male work went from, you know, like after, say, post-Industrial Revolution up until even like mid-1900s, the work that men were doing was pretty backbreaking, grueling factory work for a lot of the country.
[00:45:31]  And then that became a lot more cubicle, office work, which women could more.
[00:45:36]  So there was a natural realignment that was driven by capitalism, no question about that, right?
[00:45:42]  Where it was like all of a sudden, if you go back, I mean, if you look before, say, 19, just to pick a number, like 1920 or before, gender roles were just so obvious.
[00:45:53]  Like it was just going to happen.
[00:45:54]  Women were having more children.
[00:45:56]  There was a lot of work to be done in the home.
[00:45:59]  You were going to be pregnant, you know, like several times in your life.
[00:46:02]  And the work that men were doing was for the most part work that women couldn't do, whether it was agricultural or factory work.
[00:46:09]  And the actual work of running a home was probably more grueling and more.
[00:46:13]  Oh, yes, in many ways.
[00:46:14]  And really, but of course, as you know, then there was the Great Depression, and then there was World War II, where women did go to the factory.
[00:46:21]  Going to the factory to some degree.
[00:46:23]  But by and large, really, it was the boom in prosperity that started in the 1950s.
[00:46:29]  And let me make an interesting point that's related to household income inequality.
[00:46:34]  In the 1950s, a high-earning man was disproportionately likely to be married to a lady who lunched, a woman of leisure, because that was like the trophy.
[00:46:47]  In the last 20 years, a high-earning man is now disproportionately likely to be married to a high-earning woman.
[00:46:54]  And so that was like double duty, and that has actually exacerbated household income inequality.
[00:47:02]  Do you think part of that, well, I don't want to get too off track, but I mean, I also think part of that might be related to the fact that, you know, when you're talking about high-earning men, disproportionately, you're talking about more intelligent men, not all the time, but in general, you're usually talking about more intelligent people.
[00:47:20]  And this might just be more intelligent planning for the modern era, especially if you want to have a family where the price of housing is very, very high, the price of health care, things like this are very, very high.
[00:47:30]  Well, Dave, there I just have to correct you.
[00:47:33]  It's definitely true that where the government gets involved, the price of sending a kid to school, the price of health care, and the price of housing is higher.
[00:47:43]  But, of course, obviously, in the 1950s, you were married to a very bright woman, too.
[00:47:48]  You married a bright woman, but basically she was a lady of leisure because that was the custom.
[00:47:53]  But then, of course, even in the 50s and 60s, they were moving into the labor force, but clearly they reached critical mass by the 80s.
[00:48:01]  But Dave, I want to correct you about one thing.
[00:48:03]  By and large, by and large, you seem to be flirting with the idea that a single earner could support a family in the 1950s, whereas now it takes two earners to support a family today.
[00:48:19]  And that's absolutely right.
[00:48:20]  No, quite the opposite.

=== Part Time Parenting Philosophy (15:59) ===

[00:48:21]  I'm not suggesting that at all.
[00:48:23]  It's cheaper to live now.
[00:48:24]  I'm saying that.
[00:48:25]  Yes, yes.
[00:48:26]  You could live on that one man's income better, despite the things that we think.
[00:48:29]  That's right.
[00:48:30]  That's kind of the essence of my point.
[00:48:32]  Oh, sorry.
[00:48:32]  You don't need to have two parents working and nobody spending more time with the kids.
[00:48:37]  You could have both of you working part-time and spending more time with your kids.
[00:48:40]  Now, as far as the libertarian, should libertarians, how about this?
[00:48:46]  Just to take a separate thing to try to establish the principles of it.
[00:48:50]  Can libertarians have an opinion on whether or not you're kind to your children, whether you hug them, whether you show them love?
[00:48:57]  Can I have an opinion on that?
[00:48:59]  Or is that just individual people making their choices about how they raise their kids?
[00:49:02]  Great.
[00:49:02]  Okay, yes, yes.
[00:49:04]  So what would you say to that?
[00:49:06]  The answer is absolutely yes.
[00:49:08]  And of course, obviously, we don't have data on that.
[00:49:11]  So happily, the government is not, although, of course, they give you the bullshit about happiness research, but that's obviously only a related issue.
[00:49:21]  But that's the point.
[00:49:22]  It may well be, for all I know, that women who go off to work when the kid is three and are careful to leave the kid with a decent caretaker are, for that reason, kinder to their kids.
[00:49:36]  Yes, but this is not.
[00:49:38]  No, but that's possible, but I'm not making the connection between that.
[00:49:41]  I'm just asking the question: can libertarians have a position on whether or not you should hug your kids, whether or not you should love your kids?
[00:49:47]  Can I judge that even though it's just one individual might choose to not hug their kids or show them any love, and another individual might choose to do it all the time?
[00:49:56]  But can I say that I think it might be better for a libertarian society?
[00:50:00]  I think that it might, that maybe we should, if we were going to like praise one and demonize the other, I'm pretty comfortable praising people who are loving to their kids and demonizing those who are cold to their children because the people who are kind of raised in this cold, shitty environment might be more likely to not feel super sympathetic towards, say, people thrown in jail for nonviolent crimes or people, you know, like okay.
[00:50:24]  Well, well, look, look, you and I are Jewish fathers, you know.
[00:50:27]  We sure are.
[00:50:28]  We know you know the meaning of the word nachus.
[00:50:31]  Nachus, of course.
[00:50:32]  We don't.
[00:50:32]  You're a better Jew than me.
[00:50:33]  What does that mean?
[00:50:33]  Oh, my God, that's terrible.
[00:50:35]  I told, well, then you didn't hear my week with Tom Woods.
[00:50:40]  I do so many podcasts, Dave, you can't.
[00:50:43]  But I told Dave, I said, Tom, you know the meaning of the word nachus because you've got five daughters you love.
[00:50:48]  Nachus is the special Yiddish word for the pleasure you take in your children.
[00:50:54]  But my mother was like in the vocabulary.
[00:50:56]  Oh, his son is getting bar misfit.
[00:50:59]  Oh, that's Nachus, my mother would say, pleasure you're taking your children, Nachas.
[00:51:04]  And of course, obviously, you have Nachas every day with Layla.
[00:51:07]  Okay, so you and I are Jewish fathers.
[00:51:09]  Now, absolutely.
[00:51:10]  I was going to say, one of my other examples would indeed be that when it comes to parents and children, there's an interesting nuanced issue.
[00:51:20]  For example, obviously, if there are cases in which physical abuse of the child, like leaving the child naked out in the yard, I mean, crazy stuff that people do to punish their kids.
[00:51:33]  That is real, that violates the zero aggression principle against another human being, and the law should intervene.
[00:51:40]  But obviously, well, spanking, you know, obviously, I guess people think spanking, you know, it's supposed to be just a little bit of humiliation.
[00:51:48]  It's not that terrible.
[00:51:49]  So difficult issues.
[00:51:51]  But then the other issue, which is what you're touching on, which is emotional, emotional.
[00:51:57]  Well, and I used that example intentionally so it wouldn't be something that violates non-aggression.
[00:52:01]  Precisely, precisely.
[00:52:02]  And therefore, emotional abuse of children is indeed what we think libertarians should judge.
[00:52:09]  I want to hasten and to, I think, correct you on one other point, Dave.
[00:52:13]  It was really like Bastiet and Rothbard.
[00:52:16]  Rothbard put it best in a way in For a New Liberty, which I do recommend.
[00:52:21]  And I like to point out to Nick Gillespie for all his putting down Murray Rothbard.
[00:52:26]  Nick admits that For a New Liberty was a great book that really helped him.
[00:52:30]  And it is a very good book that Rothbard wrote in the 1970s.
[00:52:34]  And Rothbard just carefully said, look, we're not basing our argument for libertarianism on the basis of the goodness or badness of the culture.
[00:52:45]  We are saying, however good or bad the culture is as a given, libertarianism can make it better.
[00:52:53]  Libertarianism is the better way to go.
[00:52:55]  Because obviously those schmucks in the culture are going to be disproportionately wielding the iron fist of government.
[00:53:02]  So therefore, I'm only trying to say that you probably agree with that.
[00:53:06]  But the drift of your remarks is going to give people the impression that there's a special burden on libertarians to make people culturally good.
[00:53:13]  There isn't a special burden.
[00:53:14]  There's even a greater burden over the status to make people good because we're going to trust people in power.
[00:53:20]  So you agree with that.
[00:53:21]  I completely agree.
[00:53:22]  I just want to clear the air about that.
[00:53:23]  Yes, of course I completely.
[00:53:25]  The point is, though, that, see, what's interesting, Dave, is that what you have been doing ever since we've been discussing this is you've been bringing up related issues having to do with the emotional cruelty to children, having to do with drugs or single mothers who are irresponsible or any number of things of that sort.
[00:53:46]  I take it you backed away from the idea that it was really the CIA who drove women into the labor force.
[00:53:52]  So I should, yes, you've made some fair points about that with the dad in the 50s and the 60s.
[00:53:57]  And maybe it's unfair to say that the CIA drove women into the workforce.
[00:54:01]  I will say, however, that it is true that the CIA funded the second wave feminist movement and that the CIA and the government in general was involved in the celebration of single motherhood and in the promotion of breaking up the nuclear family.
[00:54:16]  But hold on, let me just get back to this.
[00:54:18]  Because Quayle, okay, all right, okay, all right.
[00:54:20]  Well, no, but that's, see, this isn't exactly the thing, but that's almost like if I were to say that, like, okay, well, the government was involved in large spending, and then I could point out that Reagan actually railed against the large spending.
[00:54:32]  Okay, so the fact that Dan Quayle said something against this, it's like, yes, because he's pandering.
[00:54:37]  Obama was not, you know, Obama said, my, being a father to my daughters is the most important thing in my life and all that stuff.
[00:54:45]  Yes.
[00:54:45]  So Obama stood up for fatherhood, didn't he?
[00:54:48]  I mean, so.
[00:54:48]  Well, sure.
[00:54:49]  I mean, yes, I guess you can find things that they said, but I bet you I could find some quotes on Obama about single motherhood as well.
[00:54:56]  But anyway, listen, but hold on.
[00:54:57]  Let me just...
[00:54:58]  The point I'm making, what I was trying to build toward, when I say, well, if it's okay for libertarians to say, hey, we want to, obviously, we don't want the government involved.
[00:55:06]  I completely agree with that Rothbardian point that the culture, as good or bad as it is, libertarianism can make it better.
[00:55:13]  But already, even if you're saying libertarianism can make the culture better, there's some acknowledgement that we kind of care about the culture being better or that we have some idea of what better would be and what worse would be.
[00:55:23]  But I can't judge women who go to work.
[00:55:26]  I can't.
[00:55:26]  I'm not just judging women who work.
[00:55:28]  That's never what I was saying.
[00:55:30]  What I was judging was parents who don't spend more time with their children.
[00:55:33]  That's what I was judging.
[00:55:35]  You're making it a bit different.
[00:55:36]  No, it is a bit different.
[00:55:38]  It is different because a woman could go to work part-time and the man could work part-time and they could be taking care of their kids.
[00:55:43]  Or a woman could work full-time while the man's taking care of their kids.
[00:55:46]  I'm just saying, like, look, my point is, this is that once you're conceding that we do have some idea of culture being better and some idea of culture being worse, because you just agreed that with Murray Rothbard, which I agree with, that libertarianism can make culture better.
[00:55:59]  So there is something that is better and something that is worse.
[00:56:02]  And it's okay if we condemn parents who don't treat their children nicely.
[00:56:08]  Why is it such a leap for me to say that I also might condemn parents who don't spend a lot of time with their children?
[00:56:14]  And I don't buy, and my final point, and then you can respond.
[00:56:17]  I don't buy the argument that, well, maybe the women who go and work are then nicer to their kids in the limited hours that they have.
[00:56:25]  I mean, it's possible if you want to show me some data on that, perhaps I could be persuaded.
[00:56:29]  But the truth is that it's very hard for me to believe that people who go out of their way to organize their life so they can be around their kids more are going to not be kind to their kids because they're around them more time.
[00:56:42]  Like, I'm around my daughter a lot.
[00:56:44]  I don't feel like it's like, oh, well, maybe if I would leave the house for an extra eight hours a day, I would hug her a lot more when I got home.
[00:56:51]  I just, I have a tough time buying.
[00:56:53]  The point, okay, you specifically talked about hiring the nanny.
[00:56:57]  And please, Dave, when you talk about how a man should work hard part-time and a woman should work.
[00:57:02]  Look, all kinds of arrangements are possible.
[00:57:04]  Well, that's all I'm saying.
[00:57:04]  Many women do that.
[00:57:06]  Maybe do things of that sort.
[00:57:08]  However, the reason why it might be true that the women are going to be happier with their kids is that if the kid is, to choose an easy example, the kid starts school.
[00:57:22]  And again, you conflated this with school.
[00:57:25]  If you're home all day, the kid is in that goddamn government school.
[00:57:28]  Well, we want them out, though.
[00:57:30]  Of course we do, but it's a separate issue.
[00:57:33]  Well, why is it?
[00:57:33]  It's not completely separate.
[00:57:34]  They're related.
[00:57:35]  Well, if a woman, most people are forced to send their kids to government schools.
[00:57:42]  And therefore, if the woman is home all the time, the kid's going to go to a government school anyway.
[00:57:48]  Right.
[00:57:48]  But one of the ways that we are saying that libertarianism would improve the culture, there's probably no better example than we would get rid of these goddamn government schools.
[00:57:57]  Well, we certainly wouldn't legally force them into it.
[00:58:00]  Yes, of course.
[00:58:02]  So then who are they going to be within that time?
[00:58:04]  Probably more time with their parents.
[00:58:05]  I'm just saying that as a practical matter.
[00:58:09]  Let me get back to my point and then I'm going to look at Jujoshi, which is only that.
[00:58:13]  We're an hour in already.
[00:58:16]  If a woman is at home during the day and the kids in school and has some after-school play, the woman is basically sitting on her ass watching the machines, the washing machines and the dishwashers and all the rest.
[00:58:29]  And so basically, it's very, it's not necessarily true.
[00:58:35]  I'm only trying to explain to you why, why there may be many instances in which women who feel that they are being challenged in a workplace, they're not bored and depressed at home.
[00:58:47]  They're not going out to lunch with their girlfriends aimlessly doing nothing.
[00:58:51]  So they're not bored and depressed, but they have interesting work or they feel they're contributing to the home.
[00:58:57]  They feel valued in that sense as well.
[00:59:00]  They could be happier people and therefore be nicer to their kids because they're happier individuals.
[00:59:05]  Okay, all right, so that I understand a little bit better.
[00:59:08]  That's why we can't prejudge these things.
[00:59:10]  And that's all.
[00:59:11]  And the point is, though, that, however, emotional cruelty to children, not spending a whole lot of time with your kids, neglecting them, making them feel worthless, all that stuff for that reason.
[00:59:23]  And of course, obviously submitting your kids to public school.
[00:59:27]  That's bad.
[00:59:28]  That's unfortunate.
[00:59:29]  But the point is that that's the entrapment.
[00:59:32]  Almost all the poor people, the poor families in this country are forced to send their kids to schools where their kids are sometimes afraid to go.
[00:59:41]  So there we completely agree.
[00:59:44]  But that's the point.
[00:59:44]  The point is that, again, so what's interesting is that, again, the difficulty of you and I disagreeing is only that we are both thick libertarians.
[00:59:53]  And therefore, to use Block's awkward phrasing, we both feel that we don't want to be just amoral, because libertarianism, by the way, is not a philosophy of life.
[01:00:08]  It's simply an added, it's simply the zero aggression principle.
[01:00:11]  Right.
[01:00:12]  And of course, which relates to property rights.
[01:00:15]  It's almost like a starting point.
[01:00:16]  Exactly.
[01:00:17]  It's a starting point.
[01:00:17]  I mean, it's a legal philosophy and a philosophy on the proper use of violence, I suppose.
[01:00:25]  But I do want to go back to the framing that I began with, that even though, again, Pendillette and P.J. O'Rourke, again, I cringe when they say certain things about economics or the titans of libertarian philosophy.
[01:00:42]  Those two.
[01:00:42]  Well, excuse me.
[01:00:43]  They both have, but they both have rather lovely sensibilities.
[01:00:47]  They're both entertaining guys.
[01:00:50]  And the idea that for them, what matters to them about libertarianism is the humility of recognizing that I can't preach to others about how to live.
[01:01:02]  Or Henry Davidson Rose saying that somebody wants to do me good, I'm going to run for my life.
[01:01:07]  That's the default.
[01:01:08]  I think it's the default position for libertarians.
[01:01:10]  And okay, if you say that, then you bear the burden of proof.
[01:01:14]  And I think that in the case of women in the workplace, it's a difficult burden to carry.
[01:01:19]  Okay, fair enough.
[01:01:21]  But then I would say, and I do want to, hold on, but just because we're almost an hour in and I want to get to some more of these clips.
[01:01:27]  Because we're literally just on the right.
[01:01:28]  But just to put a button in that, I would say, though, that, okay, but I didn't, I mean, you seemed okay.
[01:01:34]  Like, you could say that's the default, but you're veering away from the default when you also agreed with me in terms of people just kind of not treating their kids well.
[01:01:43]  I'm bearing the burden of proof.
[01:01:44]  I think I'm bearing the burden of proof in that case because it's defined as a negative.
[01:01:50]  It's defined as the mental cruelty that I see parents inflict on their kids is clearly, I see it, and that's clearly a bad thing.
[01:02:01]  It's clearly defined as something the state can't do anything about.
[01:02:04]  Physical cruelty or the law, let's just say the law is handcaps.
[01:02:08]  The physical cruelty, however, spanking is one thing, but there's certain kinds of infliction of physical harm on children that the law should do.
[01:02:16]  But what about just like spanking or the areas outside of the law where the law is not going to do anything about it?
[01:02:22]  That's precisely right.
[01:02:22]  Yeah, so that's where I'm saying.
[01:02:23]  I think libertarians should have, I think, have every right to speak out about it.
[01:02:28]  Oh, yes, exactly.
[01:02:28]  What I'm saying is that, indeed, the whole point that I try to make to progressives is precisely your point in a way, which is that clearly, I have an ongoing debate with this progressive about Mattis, who's convinced that unless you have the state, there's going to be bigotry.
[01:02:46]  And I said, look, we're sitting in a restaurant here.
[01:02:48]  If this restaurant didn't allow black people and you and I knew about it, then of course they would cut themselves off from good business so that capitalism would condemn them.
[01:02:58]  But you and I wouldn't patronize them.
[01:03:00]  They're disgusting people.
[01:03:01]  Well, and also the fact that it's, I mean, you will have some degree of bigotry without the state, but you will have some degree of bigotry with the state.
[01:03:08]  And according to most progressives...
[01:03:10]  Well, right.
[01:03:10]  And according to progressives, I mean, what are we, you know, what is it?
[01:03:14]  50 or 60 years since the civil rights law was passed.
[01:03:19]  And most progressives wouldn't say, oh, okay, well, bigotry is taken care of and is no longer with us.
[01:03:25]  So I think there's a pretty strong argument that a government law mandating you can't openly be bigoted is not going to eliminate bigotry.
[01:03:35]  So my point is just that the state doesn't solve the problem.
[01:03:38]  Well, I think, by the way, but I do want to say, since you, I do believe, and I imagine you would agree, that actually the state intervention is now fostering bigotry.
[01:03:48]  Oh, yeah.
[01:03:49]  It's now fostering.
[01:03:50]  Well, I think, I think right away.
[01:03:51]  I mean, I don't even, I completely agree now, but I think right away.
[01:03:54]  I mean, I think that the truth is that if you had not had any type of forced integration or forced association, I think there would be less resentment between different races.
[01:04:08]  You know, it would have happened much quicker and much better.
[01:04:12]  I mean, things like forced busing policies and things like this that the vast majority of people just didn't like were the state getting involved.

=== Betting On Blankovich (03:23) ===

[01:04:21]  It's just, if you want people to come together organically, you can't force them together.
[01:04:27]  You have to kind of allow it to happen or not happen.
[01:04:29]  Or more to my mind as well.
[01:04:32]  Look, the stigma that unfortunately attaches to black people who succeed or to women who succeed, the stigma that so many whisper behind their backs about is why did they make it?
[01:04:47]  Because they're affirmative action babies.
[01:04:49]  There's even a term for that.
[01:04:50]  So they're absolutely right.
[01:04:52]  Ugly.
[01:04:53]  And I, as a landlord, you know, with my wife, look, I know if I'm going to take on a black tenant, then I know that person is going to have a much more easy time suing me.
[01:05:03]  And so I will hesitate.
[01:05:05]  You know, that's absolutely right.
[01:05:06]  No, you're 100% right about that.
[01:05:09]  It's evil on both sides.
[01:05:11]  So it's evil, like affirmative action policies, they really screw over, say, the white guy who is more qualified for the job, who doesn't get the job.
[01:05:21]  And then they also kind of screw over in a more subtle way, the black guy who really was qualified for the job, who now people will be suspicious of whether or not they got that based on their race.
[01:05:31]  Or now that I've become an old guy, so I can sue for age discrimination.
[01:05:36]  So they might hire an incompetent like you, Dave, right?
[01:05:40]  Because you can't.
[01:05:41]  You're a white, you know, 36 or 37-year-old guy, and you can't sue them.
[01:05:46]  Well, that's right.
[01:05:47]  I can.
[01:05:48]  And so they're going to hesitate to hire me because they, and I can't tell them, oh, I won't sue you.
[01:05:54]  I can't alienate myself.
[01:05:55]  But you know, there was an interesting article about this.
[01:05:58]  I'm blanking on who wrote it.
[01:06:00]  All right, guys, let's take a second and thank our sponsor for today's show.
[01:06:04]  As you all know, one of my favorites, and that, of course, is betdsi.com, the place for online gambling.
[01:06:11]  Bet DSI is, if you're going to gamble, this is where you need to go.
[01:06:14]  It's been around for over 20 years.
[01:06:16]  They're top rated on business review sites, super easy to use.
[01:06:19]  They have live in-game wagering, great customer service available 24-7, 365.
[01:06:25]  And most importantly, they've built a reputation on fast payments of winnings.
[01:06:29]  I've been on fire, on fire with my UFC picks.
[01:06:34]  Now I know what a lot of you guys are going to say.
[01:06:37]  I picked John Jones to win the last fight, and I think Rey has actually won that fight.
[01:06:42]  But it doesn't matter.
[01:06:42]  I picked John Jones to win, and John Jones won.
[01:06:45]  What I'm picking is what the judges are going to end up saying happened.
[01:06:49]  So that's one in my book, okay?
[01:06:51]  It doesn't matter.
[01:06:52]  I'm on a roll here.
[01:06:53]  2020, I don't think I've missed one yet.
[01:06:55]  I've only maybe made two, but still, I'm on fire.
[01:06:59]  And this week, Corey Anderson is fighting Jan Blankovich.
[01:07:03]  A big fight in the UFC light heavyweight division.
[01:07:06]  I am picking Jan Blankovich to come out with this one, okay?
[01:07:10]  Put your money on Blankovich.
[01:07:12]  You're not going to regret it.
[01:07:13]  And go do it at betdsi.com.
[01:07:16]  Use the promo code P-O-T-P120 when you sign up.
[01:07:19]  That way they know we sent you.
[01:07:20]  And also, you can get some bonus cash if you want to.
[01:07:23]  They'll give you up to 60% up to $1,000.
[01:07:25]  If you put $1,000 in, you have $1,600 to play with.
[01:07:28]  Just make sure you note that if you take the bonus money, there are rollover requirements.
[01:07:31]  You have to gamble a certain amount before you can pull it out.
[01:07:33]  But either way, it's free cash.
[01:07:35]  If you just want to play and pull out, don't take the bonus money.
[01:07:39]  Either way, go to betdsi.com, use promo code P-O-T-P120 so they know we sent you.

=== Normalizing Gender Roles (15:11) ===

[01:07:44]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[01:07:46]  There was an article that came out right after the whole Me Too moment happened where women were talking about sexual harassment in the workplace and reporting people and getting people fired.
[01:07:57]  And they said that now it's like there are these higher up men and companies who just won't apprentice women anymore.
[01:08:03]  Like because they're just like, well, I'm not going to like have lunches alone and stay late at the office with some woman alone because it's literally just opening me up for she could just say I did something inappropriate.
[01:08:14]  And then that's so that's a non-legal kind of example, but it happens in that realm too, where once you, there's this weird dynamic where it can be very counterproductive when you start advocating on behalf of a group and then taking punitive measures against someone who wronged that group that it then makes people nervous about that group because they go, well, I don't know.
[01:08:34]  I don't want to be accused of doing something wrong.
[01:08:36]  So maybe I'll just kind of stay away entirely.
[01:08:38]  Anyway, I do.
[01:08:39]  That's an excellent point.
[01:08:40]  But I do want to.
[01:08:41]  Let's move on to the next clip.
[01:08:42]  Finish what you want to say and then let's move on.
[01:08:44]  Okay, well, let's move on to the next Dave episode because then I'm beginning to realize it reveals you as a first-time dad.
[01:08:52]  Is this a different episode?
[01:08:54]  No, no, no, no.
[01:08:55]  The next clip.
[01:08:55]  I'm sorry.
[01:08:56]  Okay, very good.
[01:08:57]  I saw Brian look a little bit.
[01:08:59]  It's not an episode.
[01:08:59]  It's a clip.
[01:09:00]  The next clip.
[01:09:01]  Very good.
[01:09:01]  All good.
[01:09:03]  In many cases, perhaps the majority of cases, the person who is or the group who is raising the children is the state.
[01:09:13]  I mean, that's like, like, it straight up is not public.
[01:09:17]  Well, is that right?
[01:09:19]  Well, let's go into the next.
[01:09:20]  Let's go to the next one because this is still on the same topic.
[01:09:22]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:23]  Let's go into the next one.
[01:09:24]  I thought we were going to talk economics here.
[01:09:25]  I thought that's what I got.
[01:09:26]  You talk some economics.
[01:09:27]  All right.
[01:09:27]  There was some economics in there.
[01:09:29]  That's true.
[01:09:30]  But yeah, so I surprised you.
[01:09:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:32]  Okay.
[01:09:33]  No, it's okay.
[01:09:33]  I kind of wanted to be surprised.
[01:09:35]  I blindsided Dave again.
[01:09:36]  And he's a good sport about it.
[01:09:39]  Go ahead.
[01:09:39]  Yes.
[01:09:40]  Like, you're a libertarian.
[01:09:41]  And I go, well, how do you feel about, you know, drag queen story time hour for eight-year-olds?
[01:09:49]  And you go, well, libertarians don't have an opinion on that where, you know, people should be free to do whatever they want to or something like that.
[01:09:54]  It's like, okay, now you just don't sound like a human being.
[01:10:00]  And also, it's a losing strategy.
[01:10:01]  It's a really, really bad strategy.
[01:10:03]  Because let me tell you something.
[01:10:05]  That whole, you can do whatever you want there.
[01:10:07]  It's not going to win you any favor with the pro-drag queen story time people because they are, you got to be lockstep with them if you want to be in their club.
[01:10:17]  As soon as you go, well, people are free to do that, but people are also free to kick the tranny out if they want to do that.
[01:10:23]  That's too far for them.
[01:10:24]  Me just saying tranny right now, that's too far for them.
[01:10:26]  It doesn't matter.
[01:10:27]  You're done.
[01:10:27]  You're basically a Nazi.
[01:10:28]  You're either on board with the program or you're a Nazi.
[01:10:31]  That's how they look at things.
[01:10:33]  Okay.
[01:10:34]  And then The people who are appalled rightfully, like any normal human being should be, fucking appalled by Drag Queen Story Hour.
[01:10:45]  They're like, well, you're not willing to fight this fight.
[01:10:48]  And I got to say, I think a whole lot of libertarians just aren't willing to fight this fight.
[01:10:52]  Now, there's a personal tale.
[01:10:54]  When I heard this about Drag Queen's Story Hour, I thought, my God, he must be making this up.
[01:10:59]  It's a real thing.
[01:11:00]  Is it really happening?
[01:11:01]  So then I happened to be speaking to my son, Jim.
[01:11:06]  And amazingly, you said an eight-year-old, I've got an eight-year-old grandson named Harry, Jim's younger son, who actually sat through Drag Queen's Story Hour at the public school.
[01:11:18]  Now, Jim said that, among other things, and as I reminded my son Jim, that he used to do dress-up with wigs and dresses all the time.
[01:11:29]  He used to enjoy wiggling on.
[01:11:30]  I'm sure he appreciates you telling that to my audience.
[01:11:33]  Well, yeah, well, no, I don't think he minds.
[01:11:35]  Jim, no, no, look, look, I, for two years running, me and my friend and I, Richard Gratis and I, we dressed up as girls for Halloween.
[01:11:46]  And it was kind of silly because in fact, we had high-pitched voices.
[01:11:48]  They thought we were girls.
[01:11:50]  And then, so I asked Jim, what about, he sent me the notice about the Drag Queen Story Hour.
[01:11:55]  It happens in libraries.
[01:11:58]  At public schools.
[01:11:59]  No, well, public schools and libraries.
[01:12:01]  But now, in the particular public school at Park Slope, Jim was informed, and I saw the picture, there's a New York Times article in the Drag Queen.
[01:12:12]  Looks like a, you know, it looks like a clown show.
[01:12:14]  Jim said, oh, don't say that on the air about the drag queen looking like a clown.
[01:12:17]  Well, you violated that rule.
[01:12:20]  She's got makeup and it just looks like a funny story anyway.
[01:12:24]  And the drag queens are obviously pretty flamboyant.
[01:12:26]  And the fact is that Jim said that if he didn't want Harry to attend the Drag Queen Story Hour, he would have had that option.
[01:12:36]  And so that's important to me.
[01:12:37]  But the fact of the matter is, it seems like such an innocuous joke.
[01:12:42]  I mean, the idea that that's teaching my eight-year-old to be more liberal about drag queens, I think it's probably a little silly to say that it's such a learning experience.
[01:12:53]  But obviously, drag queens are flamboyant and entertaining.
[01:12:56]  And who the hell cares?
[01:12:58]  I mean, what the heck?
[01:12:59]  You know, and in libraries where they go as well, it's strictly optional.
[01:13:03]  And apparently it's kind of popular with the kids.
[01:13:05]  Who cares, Dave?
[01:13:07]  Well, I mean, okay, so it's...
[01:13:08]  It's not first time, Father, you're afraid of what it will do to your little Layla.
[01:13:12]  That's well, I am.
[01:13:13]  And I also, you know, it's more than just, I mean, I was kind of just, you know, citing this one example.
[01:13:20]  You're outraged.
[01:13:20]  No, no, no, I am.
[01:13:21]  But let me just say that.
[01:13:22]  Well, let me just say.
[01:13:23]  Well, you know, maybe.
[01:13:25]  But there's also a big move to push kind of normalizing of transgenderism in general.
[01:13:36]  Yes, I mean, this is a big push in public schools.
[01:13:39]  There's actually been some public schools in the country where they don't say boys and girls anymore to the students because they feel like this is discriminating against transgenders.
[01:13:49]  There's been a big push to get, and they've done this in several public schools, to get rid of boys and girls' bathrooms because they feel that this is right.
[01:13:57]  And I'm sorry, I find all of this to be incredibly creepy, incredibly creepy, that we need to, for 0.01% of the population who maybe does not identify as the sex that they were born as, we have to now confuse children and push this agenda, which is clearly in line with a left-wing social justice warrior.
[01:14:18]  My other little story is, I've told this story many times, even in front of Jim, was I used to, I had a sort of conversion experience because I had a friend who I thought was heterosexual for years, and then he came out as gay, and it sort of shocked me.
[01:14:31]  And I thought I, you know, because I think I had a little bit of a bit bigotry against gays.
[01:14:36]  So when my kids were single-digit ages, I took them to every gay pride parade.
[01:14:41]  And I pointed out to them the big mystery.
[01:14:43]  Why are there so few lesbians compared to the males?
[01:14:46]  All the data show that homosexuality against men with men is so much more common than among women.
[01:14:53]  But I said, I don't understand why, but I wanted to get them to be open to being gay and to being tolerant of gays.
[01:15:01]  And when Jim was six, he said, when I grow up and have a wife or a husband, if I'm gay, and it was a proud moment for me.
[01:15:07]  So could I make him gay?
[01:15:09]  Of course not.
[01:15:11]  Well, I'm not suggesting we're going to make kids gay.
[01:15:13]  I'm sorry.
[01:15:14]  I just want to tell that dumb story.
[01:15:16]  But I'm sorry.
[01:15:16]  It's irrelevant.
[01:15:18]  But see, here is the odd thing where you're falling into an issue where I completely agree with you.
[01:15:24]  The default position is I can't advise other people.
[01:15:29]  And so if the school or the society is suddenly saying, oh, the preferred choice is being a single mother, that's advising other people.
[01:15:39]  That's taking a position on it.
[01:15:41]  Similarly, if the school is saying heterosexuality is good, I work in a building called Regis.
[01:15:49]  I work in a building where most of it is NYU.
[01:15:52]  And when I was forced to use a bathroom on another floor, I was surprised to read this big wordy statement that I could walk into either bathroom, depending upon what kind of gender identity I want to adopt.
[01:16:03]  Although, by the way, perhaps you don't know that until the 1970s or 80s in Japan, all the public restrooms or toilets were unisex.
[01:16:17]  The men and the women, again, I don't think they revealed it, but then because they wanted to adopt to Western ways by the 90s, they started to adapt and they had men versus women.
[01:16:27]  So that's the way that you...
[01:16:28]  Maybe they'll go back to their original position.
[01:16:30]  But they just get hip with the way we are.
[01:16:32]  We're always ahead of the job.
[01:16:33]  But the point is that, obviously, I don't think it really is taken seriously by kids.
[01:16:40]  But of course, it's absurd to go in the other direction.
[01:16:44]  But that's precisely Penn and Gillette's and PGO Rook's point, that we don't know what's good for other people in these regards.
[01:16:53]  If you want to dress up like a woman, that's your thing, and most people don't seem to choose it.
[01:16:58]  If you don't want to, then don't.
[01:17:01]  So who the heck knows?
[01:17:03]  All I'm saying is that obviously what you continually sort of beating a hasty retreat to is the idea of emphasizing being trans or being a drug.
[01:17:15]  I'm not retreating to that position.
[01:17:16]  That's what's going on.
[01:17:18]  That's what's happening now.
[01:17:19]  That's what I'm outraging.
[01:17:20]  I want to say, well, you know, I believe that even outrage, I believe that if the kids are being told it's better to be gay, it's better to be a drag queen, it's better to be an...
[01:17:32]  It's not just that they're being told it's better.
[01:17:34]  It's just that they're being inundated with this kind of nonsense anti-biology view that if you all of a sudden identify as a woman, you therefore are a woman and there's really no such thing as male and female, which I think is just factually wrong and creepy and confusing and unnecessary to teach to children.
[01:17:54]  Okay, but you do understand that as far as the drag queen story is concerned, again, this is where I think that where these issues come up, I'm beginning to realize it's not just that you're a first-time dad with little Layla, but maybe more importantly, what you really have in the back of your mind is the idea that we're getting propagandized by certain choices.
[01:18:18]  Now, that's a related issue, but fundamentally, if you're only saying that drag queen story hour is bad, then I can only tell you that it's just a drag queen camping around reading a story that entertains kids.
[01:18:32]  And that's all.
[01:18:33]  And so it just, what does it show?
[01:18:35]  The drag queens are entertaining people also.
[01:18:39]  And I personally think, look, I was, the idea, again, research seems to indicate, I hate to say research, that the propaganda of the schools about how gay is better or drag queens are better, it doesn't really wash with the kids.
[01:18:54]  You know, you're basically.
[01:18:56]  Well, listen, the transgender propaganda is very new.
[01:19:00]  So we will see.
[01:19:01]  We will see what effect it has on these kids.
[01:19:03]  And if you're willing to experiment in real time with your children, all right, we'll see what effect this has on the next generation.
[01:19:11]  But I got to say, listen, it is unquestionably propaganda, and it's propaganda.
[01:19:17]  It's not just propaganda like most of the propaganda that I cover on the show, which is targeted at the American people.
[01:19:22]  It's targeted at children, which I find particularly disturbing.
[01:19:27]  Okay, well, okay.
[01:19:29]  See, there, I personally think that most of the propaganda that they push on you, certainly, if you're an active heterosexual kid, then you pretty much fall into the gender role.
[01:19:44]  And I don't think they can persuade you to act like a girl.
[01:19:47]  Although, certainly, I enjoy dressing up as a girl for Halloween.
[01:19:52]  You know, listen, I'm not saying they're going to make it's going to be very easy for them to convince heterosexuals to be gay.
[01:19:58]  But if you think that the transgender propaganda doesn't have any impact, I would challenge you to go look on a college campus these days where you will find more and more people identifying as zer and Z and all this crazy stuff.
[01:20:14]  And it is because they've made this a thing.
[01:20:17]  It was completely artificially constructed by propaganda.
[01:20:21]  These people didn't exist.
[01:20:24]  All of these terms didn't exist just a decade ago.
[01:20:27]  And I don't think it's a very good trend.
[01:20:30]  Okay, yeah, yeah, okay.
[01:20:31]  Okay, but the most important point then is this.
[01:20:35]  If I had heard you say in this episode only that, only that we are being propagandized to think that it's better to be a single mother than to have a good relationship with a man, or indeed just to be too gay.
[01:20:52]  I think it's great that gay men are raising children and showing their maternal qualities and lesbian women actually basically do have a lot of kids.
[01:21:02]  But if you're saying that kids are being propagandized to think that gay is best and transgender is best, and that society is being propagandized to think that single motherhood is the best alternative, all of this tiresome stuff, then that, and I find that offensive and stupid, and I wish people wouldn't necessarily elevate these roles.
[01:21:27]  You could say, I don't put them down as an individual choice.
[01:21:30]  I respect people's individual choices, but the idea that everybody's got to believe, and children have to believe, that's offense.
[01:21:37]  If you had said that, fine, but you said something different.
[01:21:42]  You said that just a drag queen story hour is a problem.
[01:21:47]  And I'm not aware of the fact I'd have to now do my research and ask Harry at the age of eight, Harry, are you being told that you should dress up as a dream?
[01:21:57]  But my point is not that necessarily he's being told that he should be a drag queen.
[01:22:03]  The point is just that it is normalizing that behavior in a way with a propagandistic end involved.
[01:22:13]  And what's constant throughout all of these themes, whether it's praising the worshiping of single mothers, is the bashing of men and maleness.
[01:22:24]  And this is a real problem in the school district.
[01:22:27]  And a lot of people, I'm not the only one to say this.
[01:22:29]  Jonathan Haidt has written on this.
[01:22:30]  Christina Hoff Summers has written on this.
[01:22:32]  Toxic masculinity has now been included in the American psychiatric literature.
[01:22:37]  So I think it is real propaganda, and I think it's very damaging.
[01:22:43]  But then you seem to be agreeing with me, however, that to make, to talk about how it's bad for women to go out into the workplace and hire a nanny.

=== Rising Teen Anxiety (15:15) ===

[01:22:56]  I mean, I will say, for example, my daughter-in-law, went off to work when the kids were three, and they carefully chose their nanny, carefully chose.
[01:23:06]  And she wanted to contribute to the home financially.
[01:23:10]  And by the way, while she was doing it, the nanny was so expensive that her net income was minimal.
[01:23:15]  However, you're talking a white nanny here?
[01:23:17]  Very expensive.
[01:23:18]  Yeah, my name is white nannies.
[01:23:20]  You got to pay for those.
[01:23:21]  Well, maybe so.
[01:23:22]  But the point is, though, that clearly, what I observed up close is that, is that she wanted to feel she was, and of course, obviously she wanted to have her foot on a career to express herself.
[01:23:32]  And being home, it was not.
[01:23:34]  So therefore, if you're saying, no, I don't make any blanket generalizations or judgments about the choice of women to hire nannies or not.
[01:23:44]  I certainly think, though, if the state starts investing big in child care and using the iron fist of the state to finance it, but by and large, that's not been happening.
[01:23:56]  By and large, the government's role in child care is not very great.
[01:24:01]  And so, therefore, if you're not convinced.
[01:24:03]  Is that true, though, that the government's role in child care is not that great?
[01:24:06]  Oh, yeah.
[01:24:07]  I mean, they had right in New York City, they had a huge initiative that de Blasio passed where he's got this kind of universal pre-K thing.
[01:24:14]  All of the Democrats are pushing this as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, they've all been pushing universal daycare.
[01:24:21]  So I'm not saying that it all exists already, but there's certainly proposals for it.
[01:24:25]  Okay, okay, well, okay, well, proposals for it.
[01:24:29]  But the New York City, not a proposal.
[01:24:30]  That is something that de Blasio enacted.
[01:24:32]  I will submit to you that, again, that the two-thirds of the women who are not in the home for their young kids, they're not, by and large, not getting nationwide state-run daycare.
[01:24:47]  That's all.
[01:24:47]  Sure, sure.
[01:24:48]  Okay, but the point is, though, that...
[01:24:49]  But two-thirds of women not being home with their kids.
[01:24:52]  And again, like I said, I'm not picking on the women.
[01:24:55]  I'm saying either one of the parents being home for their kids.
[01:24:59]  That's a lot.
[01:25:00]  That's a large percentage.
[01:25:01]  Yeah, it is.
[01:25:02]  One-third are home.
[01:25:03]  But the only point is that I cannot, I do know that there's an impulse for women, first of all, it may be a financial necessity.
[01:25:13]  And so how do I judge that?
[01:25:14]  Secondly, it may be grandma's taking care of the kid.
[01:25:18]  I can't.
[01:25:19]  Well, yes, but that I'm, but I am saying, is it reasonable for me to say that I think it's preferable?
[01:25:25]  I mean, again, of course, you can find, like, when I speak about broad topics like this, or you're talking about large trends.
[01:25:34]  Of course, there are exceptions to all of these rules.
[01:25:37]  I grant that completely.
[01:25:40]  But in general, a grandmother or a family or someone who is invested, who loves that kid, you know what I mean?
[01:25:46]  Is a different situation than, say, just dumping your kid in daycare.
[01:25:50]  I would say, again, put it this way, because the default position is respect other people's choices, and because we really, we know, we know that by and large, the state is not doing it.
[01:26:06]  We know that women were streaming into the workforce in the 50s and 60s.
[01:26:10]  We have a lot of reason to believe that it was by and large a decision we have to respect.
[01:26:14]  The burden of proof is on us to say that there's something really wrong about it.
[01:26:19]  I don't really believe any argument that the kids who were born 20 years ago from because their mother had a job are in any way emotionally crippled anymore than kids who were born in the 40s and 50s.
[01:26:36]  I don't see any real evidence for that.
[01:26:37]  But the point is only that because the burden of proof is on us and we know little about it, about why the choices are, we have some evidence that it was free choice and that people worked it out.
[01:26:49]  We have evidence that women wanted to express themselves in careers.
[01:26:53]  That's all.
[01:26:54]  Well, I mean, if you were...
[01:26:55]  Now, this is not a conclusive proof or anything like that.
[01:27:00]  If you were to say that, you know, there's no evidence.
[01:27:03]  Now, obviously, growing up in the 40s and 50s had their own challenges.
[01:27:06]  I'm not trying to diminish that.
[01:27:08]  But, I mean, and this is not just a result of how kids are raised, but it certainly is, I would venture to guess part of it.
[01:27:17]  I mean, there are, if you look at things like the levels of anxiety, depression, teen suicides, school shootings, there are a lot of things that do seem to be kind of suggesting that there are some problems in the way kids are raised.
[01:27:31]  I think that I honestly think that that's really ambiguous.
[01:27:35]  Well, that's why I started by saying this isn't a proof of anything.
[01:27:37]  I mean, this is speculation.
[01:27:38]  There's all this data on especially depression and anxiety.
[01:27:44]  The fact of the matter is that it appears, honestly, by and large, it's because we recognize depression and anxiety in a way that we didn't in the 50s.
[01:27:53]  So I've read some people who have kind of challenged that, particularly which I would cite, which I thought was a really great book by a psychologist named Jean Twenge or Twenge.
[01:28:04]  I'm not sure how you pronounce her last name.
[01:28:06]  But she wrote a book called The Me Generation and then one called, I believe, the Narcissist Epidemic or something.
[01:28:12]  I might be getting the second title wrong, but both the books were really fantastic.
[01:28:16]  And she basically, her argument is that it's not simply a matter of we weren't diagnosing depression and anxiety the correct way, that there would have been some type of documented evidence of these symptoms showing up and that they are in fact worse today than they've been in the past.
[01:28:30]  All right, I'd have to read the book.
[01:28:31]  I do think that it's all a bit nevis.
[01:28:34]  I'll put it another way.
[01:28:35]  The baby boomers were by and large, the baby boomers who were born between the years of 1946 and 1964.
[01:28:45]  And that was when fertility, when birth rates were very high.
[01:28:50]  They were the ones who went on to get divorced.
[01:28:52]  They were the ones who went on.
[01:28:54]  But they were raised by and large with a mother.
[01:29:00]  I agree.
[01:29:00]  No question.
[01:29:01]  Who was home with them?
[01:29:02]  Well, if we ever started with the situation where mothers were home and we got to a situation where less mothers are home, then obviously that happened, right?
[01:29:09]  One generation was raised with mothers at home and that didn't guarantee that the next generation would be.
[01:29:13]  So I agree with you on that.
[01:29:15]  I don't know what I'm trying to say, though, is that the baby boomers then went into, they had problems with divorce and depression and anxiety, and they were given that advantage.
[01:29:25]  All I'm saying is, again, I think it's very ambiguous.
[01:29:28]  And I think that basically most of the time when we've had this discussion, you bring up the sort of thing that you and I would object to.
[01:29:39]  In other words, preaching on better alternatives, which violates, again, what I believe is really a sound principle articulated by PJ and Penn, that we can't mind other people's business.
[01:29:55]  Our default position is to respect others' choices and recognize that when it comes to evaluating the human condition, we really are, we have to be skeptical.
[01:30:05]  But I don't know.
[01:30:05]  Again, just back to that original position.
[01:30:08]  I think that the libertarian position is to tolerate, is tolerance.
[01:30:14]  But respect and tolerance are a little bit different.
[01:30:17]  I mean, if you mean respect in terms of like respecting their rights to do that is one thing.
[01:30:23]  But respect to me is inherently something that is discriminatory and does have something to say about other people's decisions.
[01:30:31]  So I respect you as an economist more because you're a very good economist.
[01:30:37]  I don't respect Paul Krugman as much because he's a very bad economist.
[01:30:42]  Now, he's not.
[01:30:42]  Now, I mean, okay, you can argue in some ways that he's calling for the initiation of violence, but he himself, by just putting out his work, you know, like isn't initiating violence himself against anybody.
[01:30:54]  But I can still respect different people's choices and different people's work differently.
[01:30:58]  I don't have to treat everybody the same, right?
[01:31:01]  Like, I don't have to have the same amount of respect for everyone, or respect doesn't mean anything.
[01:31:04]  I guess I would, yes.
[01:31:06]  I guess, yes, everything you said is absolutely true.
[01:31:08]  The only thing I would harp on is that the idea that I harp on is that, is that if these women in the 40s and 50s, 60s, 70s, if they decided to not have children and go out into the workplace or to have children and go out into the workplace, then, and I see evidence that on top of that, what you and I agreed about, that being at home was no longer, no longer demanded much of your time.
[01:31:34]  It could be depressing.
[01:31:35]  That participating in a fulfilling job could make you happier.
[01:31:39]  Then I see evidence of that.
[01:31:41]  And I respect their choice because it sounds as though that's what they did.
[01:31:45]  This was their revealed preference.
[01:31:47]  And I can't argue with it.
[01:31:49]  But now it comes down to a happiness, you know, kind of like you're saying fulfillment, whatever you want to say.
[01:31:55]  Well, what if there was evidence that women were less fulfilled, less happy in careers or something like that?
[01:32:04]  What would be the standard for what evidence you would say?
[01:32:06]  Or are you just going with the Misesian, kind of like the fact that they make that choice indicates that?
[01:32:11]  Their manifest behavior because by the way, I want to hasten to add one other point.
[01:32:16]  Did you know that the labor force participation rate of women was 574% in 1989?
[01:32:23]  And you know what it is in 2019?
[01:32:25]  57.4%.
[01:32:27]  Do you know?
[01:32:28]  When I was doing research into it in the 90s and speaking to women who had had, who had achieved high-level executive positions, many of them were saying that just from experience, the game is not worth the candle.
[01:32:42]  For a bunch of guys, working hard and achieving a position at the top is important to them.
[01:32:47]  But really, what happened, interestingly enough, was that in 1997 and 98, when the job market was still booming, women's labor force participation leveled off.
[01:32:57]  Women began to lose their appetite.
[01:33:01]  Their labor force participation is still significantly lower than men's.
[01:33:05]  Yes, I agree.
[01:33:06]  So that was their choice.
[01:33:07]  Well, right.
[01:33:08]  And because a lot of these women, it is a different situation for men and women.
[01:33:12]  We are, despite the propaganda, biologically different.
[01:33:16]  Women having children is a different experience than it is for men having children.
[01:33:20]  And of course, and it's very, listen, there's, I also, by the way, I just, to make it clear, it's not just that I'm judging that I was judging women's behavior.
[01:33:28]  I judge a whole lot of men's behavior on this too.
[01:33:30]  Now, this is my own, it is me to some degree inserting my own personal preference or my own personal sense of morality.
[01:33:40]  But I am very judgmental.
[01:33:42]  I've known several of these people in my life, these fathers who kind of like, you know, they work in finance, work on Wall Street.
[01:33:50]  They never see their kids.
[01:33:52]  They're literally just concerned with making money.
[01:33:54]  They make a few million dollars a year.
[01:33:57]  But I look at something like that.
[01:33:58]  I mean, I would any day, anytime I was given the choice, I would rather make $100,000 a year and see my daughter every day and spend time with her than make 10 times that and never spend any time with her or see her.
[01:34:12]  And I am somewhat judgmental of people who would rather work these long hours and have no interest in actually raising their children or spending time with their children.
[01:34:22]  When I say not raising their children, you understand I'm saying, you know, I may be a slight bit hyperbolic.
[01:34:27]  I just agree with you again that even if you have a nanny, you're still raising your children, but you could still be the splitting.
[01:34:32]  By the way, let me agree with you there and also point out to you that probably something you're at least somewhat aware of, that the 1950s and 1960s dad, the model of that dad was that very little was expected of him in terms of being attentive to his kids.
[01:34:50]  Just being the support of the home was sufficient.
[01:34:54]  And that obviously is something I disapprove of.
[01:34:57]  So, but you're okay with disapproving of that.
[01:34:59]  You're okay with...
[01:35:00]  But what if that made him happier or something?
[01:35:02]  Like the same logic you were using with women leaving the school.
[01:35:04]  No, no, but don't you remember?
[01:35:06]  You're violating Penn Teller's rules.
[01:35:09]  What I said was that if the woman is depressed and unhappy, having to sit at home while the washing machines and the dryers are doing all the work, she's going to be a less happy person toward her kid.
[01:35:23]  And so therefore, remember, I said that the kid could benefit if the woman feels more fulfilled as a person.
[01:35:29]  Well, the word happy, I hate to use the word happy.
[01:35:32]  Well, whatever.
[01:35:33]  Fulfilled, find meaning, find purpose in life, all of that stuff.
[01:35:36]  But I would also say, just adding to what you're saying, not only do I agree with you where I kind of like, I mean, I actually, I mean, I find, first off, I find the idea that men weren't expected to be like loving or nurturing.
[01:35:48]  I find it appalling.
[01:35:49]  And even more appalling than that was how accepted and even like just looked upon in a positive light, men being violent with their children was in the 40s, in the 50s.
[01:36:05]  I mean, taking a belt to your child, things like this were considered much more normal.
[01:36:09]  And it's horrific and might be part of the reason why the next generation ended up having so many problems.
[01:36:16]  So I'm not saying that like the model then was perfect.
[01:36:20]  In fact, I have lots of complaints about it.
[01:36:22]  I'm anti-spanking.
[01:36:23]  I mean, I don't think any type of like physical violence with your children is right, anti-humiliation, any of that stuff.
[01:36:29]  I think it's all like horrible.
[01:36:31]  But I want to emphasize as well, though, that what also made people happier was that when you're part of a two-earner family, the anxiety that men would suffer if they were the sole earner and the woman was taking care of the kid was somewhat reduced once the woman was also contributing because then at least there was one income coming in if he had some layoff periods.
[01:36:55]  So again, all I'm trying to say is that, again, you mostly seem to be agreeing with me, at least mostly modifying your view that these trends are anything to judge, or that indeed Drag Queen's story are where it's just an entertaining evening.
[01:37:11]  However, you said that what's related to that is this propagandizing about, which of course violates Penn and PJ's principle of just respecting other people's choices, because if this is the way they did it, then they have to work it out for themselves.
[01:37:28]  And so that's what you seem to be agreeing with.
[01:37:31]  However, my point specifically then is that because you and I are thick libertarians, there's so much else in the world to object to.
[01:37:39]  I want to emphasize a couple of things that are more broad, that because of the requirements that you have to send your kid to college and sometimes to professional school to give that kid a chance in life, kids become very expensive.
[01:37:57]  And if we could roll back the state in this regard so that your kid could get a job or apprentice himself or herself at the age of 13, then there might be an economic decision to have a few kids.
[01:38:10]  People might spend more time on that.

=== Nuanced Views On Sex Work (12:04) ===

[01:38:11]  Absolutely.
[01:38:12]  Charles Murray has made the point that if we didn't have the social security and government pensions and the social welfare state, especially in Europe, then there might be more of a sense of community that your parents, the grandparents, might be taken care of by the kid.
[01:38:29]  And there might be more of a lot of people.
[01:38:30]  And that incentivizes parents and grandparents to do a better job taking care of their kids because they're the ones they're going to have to be relying on rather than the state for their retirement.
[01:38:39]  And listen, and then you can keep adding things into this.
[01:38:42]  And I feel very strongly about this.
[01:38:44]  The state has done tremendous damage to the culture and the raising of kids.
[01:38:48]  Of course, we mentioned before the public schools.
[01:38:50]  It's an excellent point you just mentioned in the driving up of the price of college and then also creating this environment where a college degree becomes more and more necessary.
[01:38:59]  Look at the cost of housing.
[01:39:00]  Look at the cost of health care.
[01:39:02]  I mean, all of these things.
[01:39:03]  Can you imagine if all of this was reduced or eliminated, how many more people might be having kids and doing a really great job raising them?
[01:39:11]  So in that case, certainly the state is affecting behavior.
[01:39:14]  And then also, I think also more broadly, that in a libertarian society, I think there would be a real diversity.
[01:39:23]  There would be people, religious people, who might want to have communities that would be organized by entrepreneurs where they would not allow drugs, alcohol, or sex workers on the street.
[01:39:37]  They would have pure communities.
[01:39:39]  There would be people like me who like diverse cities.
[01:39:42]  They might be a little bit bigoted, but there would be people like me who like diverse cities and who don't mind sex workers.
[01:39:50]  I mean, obviously, you don't want, I didn't want my son to be a sex worker.
[01:39:54]  I'm glad he became a magazine.
[01:39:56]  But although he could have made...
[01:39:57]  He works for Reason Magazine.
[01:39:58]  It's close.
[01:39:59]  That's good.
[01:40:01]  He could have done very well if he was gay because gay guys were constantly hitting on him when he was growing up.
[01:40:07]  I could see that.
[01:40:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:40:08]  And so he could have done well as a sex worker, made a lot more money.
[01:40:11]  Would I respect his choice if he became a sex worker?
[01:40:15]  And would I feel a little bit bad, but would I feel it's respectable?
[01:40:18]  I would have.
[01:40:19]  So you would respect just as much, equally, his choice if he became a prostitute as if he was writing great pieces on Venezuela and producing videos for Reason Magazine.
[01:40:30]  You would be like, either way, I respect those two choices equal.
[01:40:34]  One is no better than the other.
[01:40:37]  I would be happier about his doing something that's similar to what I really like to do and what I really think makes a difference in the world.
[01:40:45]  But the point is that, again, what is your attitude towards sex workers?
[01:40:49]  In your particular case, obviously you don't want your daughter to be a sex worker.
[01:40:53]  I would go a little bit further than say I don't want my daughter to be a sex worker.
[01:40:57]  I would fucking die before my daughter will be a sex worker.
[01:41:02]  Like I would fucking die a painful death.
[01:41:05]  I would be tortured for weeks on end, given a blood transfusion to keep me alive, and tortured for weeks more before I would allow my daughter to be a sex worker.
[01:41:14]  I would respect that, and that's personal to you.
[01:41:17]  And absolutely.
[01:41:19]  And oddly enough, I would accept my son being a sex worker much more readily.
[01:41:23]  And I have a daughter too, as you know.
[01:41:25]  I know.
[01:41:26]  Somehow, it would go down better if my son had become the sex worker.
[01:41:30]  You're violating Pendlet's rule of respecting everybody else.
[01:41:34]  No, no, obviously what you and I are doing is talking about what's very personal to ourselves.
[01:41:40]  Of course.
[01:41:40]  On the other hand, obviously, when I have mixed feelings about Thaddeus Russell, just as you do.
[01:41:48]  Well, I love Thaddeus, the person.
[01:41:49]  Thaddeus is a great human being and a very, very smart, interesting guy.
[01:41:53]  But I do, I have mixed feelings about his view on these type of issues.
[01:41:58]  Well, actually, I was about to say that.
[01:42:01]  Clearly, he interviewed a woman who was a sex worker.
[01:42:06]  And again, I have to say that while I have a personal weakness in the sense that I would not be happy if either of my kids became sex workers, you would be suicidal, apparently, if your daughter became a sex worker.
[01:42:20]  Maybe homicidal.
[01:42:21]  Homicidal.
[01:42:23]  Okay.
[01:42:24]  But you obviously are not going to opine about the fact that there are sex workers.
[01:42:32]  They own their own bodies and they have a right to do it and nobody should violently interfere with that.
[01:42:37]  But I don't have to.
[01:42:38]  But this is just where I get tripped up on the word respect.
[01:42:41]  It's like, I don't really respect it.
[01:42:44]  What's your word for it then?
[01:42:45]  Well, I'm just saying that me describing selling your, like being a prostitute.
[01:42:49]  No, I don't have a lot of respect for that.
[01:42:51]  I don't really respect heroin addicts who say, if there's, if there's some, let's say, some guy who develops a heroin problem and he's like deadbeats.
[01:43:00]  Like I, and this is just why maybe I'm just being like too particular about the word, but I think it's important that I know, so I know this guy who's like, he's like a friend of my wife's family, but he's like 50 and still dependent on his mother, who's like an old lady.
[01:43:19]  He's been a burden on her his entire life.
[01:43:21]  He's never held a steady job.
[01:43:23]  He's had drug problems, all of these, these like things.
[01:43:26]  The mother is a friend of my wife's family.
[01:43:28]  Anyway, so I have no respect for that guy.
[01:43:31]  Now, I don't think there should be laws against what he's doing.
[01:43:34]  I don't think anyone should be violent for him.
[01:43:36]  But I wouldn't say like, well, I respect his decision to do that as much as I respect some guy who gets up and works hard every day.
[01:43:42]  This habit of yours, I asked you about sex worker, and I thought you were about to say this guy's a sex worker.
[01:43:47]  Oh, no.
[01:43:47]  Well, but I'm just not invading the issue.
[01:43:49]  I'm just using an analogy.
[01:43:51]  So, no, in the same sense, I don't respect a sex worker as much as I respect a writer who writes really important things.
[01:44:00]  As much as.
[01:44:01]  The point is only that I would say that the Pendulette approach, the PJ PJ Penn approach, I didn't realize Pendulette has the same initials, PJ, but the PJ approach, which is to simply say that if you feel fulfilled being a sex worker, being, by the way, a gay sex worker, and there are many of those, or a heterosexual sex worker, then I'm not going to judge it.
[01:44:29]  And you didn't, I don't think you would say, well, I've read statistics that shows that sex work is on the rise, and I think that's deplorable.
[01:44:37]  But you wouldn't say that.
[01:44:39]  You would say that I guess what's happening is that many more men are buying sex than ever before.
[01:44:45]  Possibly, by the way, you know, I anticipate that sex work may be on the rise precisely because all these sexual predators are having a much more difficult time using the power of their position.
[01:44:56]  Well, I mean, that might be possible, but if I saw.
[01:45:01]  See, I actually think that like judgment and being judgmental and having different respect for different people is very important and particularly to a libertarian society.
[01:45:15]  And I think that absent of government regulating these things, we want some type of culture of human beings valuing some things and not others.
[01:45:23]  And the truth is that if I were to see statistics that showed that, say, like a lot of young women in record numbers were going into prostitution.
[01:45:32]  No, no, no, I'm saying if, hypothetically, if I were to see something like this, my initial gut feeling or my initial guess to that would be like, oh, I wonder what situation these women are in.
[01:45:45]  Like, are they going into this out of desperation?
[01:45:48]  Do they have bad childhoods?
[01:45:50]  Were they abused in the past?
[01:45:52]  That would be like where I would go.
[01:45:54]  I wouldn't just be like, well, hey, man, all these women are selling their bodies now.
[01:45:58]  That's their choice.
[01:46:00]  Now, it is their choice, and I'm not advocating laws against it.
[01:46:04]  But I certainly wouldn't think it was a positive trend.
[01:46:06]  Well, well, listen to me.
[01:46:07]  I don't, again, once again, you're saying I don't regard these trends as positive or negative.
[01:46:12]  I just don't judge them.
[01:46:13]  But the point is, though, that it's fine to ask questions of that sort, but if you found that, that they were all similar to the woman that Thaddeus interviewed, who said that she's proud of her body and she's proud of selling her body for sex, and she doesn't feel any shame in it.
[01:46:34]  And if they all said this, then you'd say, hey, well, look, I got, I mean, but indeed, if you found that they were all heroin addicts and they just were abused in their childhood or something like that.
[01:46:45]  But at least you would be open-minded.
[01:46:47]  You would say, look, my default position is to say that it's kind of puzzling that more women are going into this.
[01:46:53]  But the question is, but I'm going to find out about it.
[01:46:57]  If there's something related in it to be, but at least you're not going to condemn it, even though, as you've said, which is understandable, you would commit suicide or homicide if your daughter did it.
[01:47:09]  Because that's personal to you.
[01:47:11]  However, you're not going to judge other people.
[01:47:13]  Obviously, your daughter is your daughter and you feel an unusual attachment to her.
[01:47:16]  So that's all.
[01:47:17]  But I use the sex work thing.
[01:47:19]  But with respect to the drug addict thing, that's a perfect example of how libertarians like you and me have to be nuanced.
[01:47:26]  No, we should not have, the government has no more right to tell me what goes into my mouth as it tells, has the right to tell me what comes out of my mouth, as Milton Friedman said.
[01:47:36]  And the burden of proof is on you to think that if heroin is sold in every corner, everybody's going to shoot up.
[01:47:42]  I see alcohol sold on every street corner.
[01:47:44]  I don't see everybody vomiting in the street and drunk.
[01:47:47]  So therefore, the burden of proof is on you.
[01:47:49]  The vast majority of people, actually, it's strange that you mentioned heroin.
[01:47:54]  The vast majority of people who even shoot up with heroin are not addicted.
[01:47:58]  That's true.
[01:47:58]  And so it's recreational drugs.
[01:48:00]  And if they want to do it recreationally, that sounds like it enhances their happiness.
[01:48:05]  So I don't judge.
[01:48:06]  But you and I want to say that we're happy for the 12-step programs.
[01:48:10]  And we're happy to see people hit bottom and try because we know that there are alcohol.
[01:48:16]  And it's very sad for, I mean, you're right in that most people who have tried heroin do not become heroin addicts.
[01:48:23]  That being said, and if you throw in kind of like the opioids and fentanyl and those things that are kind of similar to heroin, it is, you know, something like close to 70,000 people a year dying off of it and probably a few hundred thousand, I'd imagine at least, who are just helplessly addicted to it every year.
[01:48:42]  And that is, you know, really sad and tragic, even though, you know, we also would probably argue against government laws, you know, prohibiting it.
[01:48:51]  But there is a sad, I'm sorry, we certainly would argue against government laws prohibiting it.
[01:48:56]  But it is still sad and tragic, those people who throw their lives away.
[01:48:59]  Well, we'd also make the point, as has been made, is that You get many of these drugs through Medicaid.
[01:49:06]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[01:49:07]  So, therefore, usually the government is.
[01:49:09]  Oh, and also, and the whole fentanyl industry was in many ways was run through the black market.
[01:49:15]  And if these things were legalized, it's quite possible that people wouldn't be getting the more deadly, dirty drugs that they get from these black markets.
[01:49:23]  So, I agree.
[01:49:24]  Listen, I agree.
[01:49:25]  And I do think the really important libertarian point that I try to make as often as possible is, you know, the stuff you were saying before, that if you don't trap kids in these public schools, if you don't artificially drive up the price of housing, if you don't create these artificially high college prices and the need for a college degree, and on top of that, I mean, throw one more in that we didn't add before, but let's just say you eliminated the income tax or at least tremendously reduced it, which is the number one financial burden for many, many families every year.
[01:49:55]  I think you would be looking at a much better situation for how children were raised.
[01:50:01]  That certainly is, I think, a very educated guess.
[01:50:06]  Back to the point you made, the Rothbard point that you mentioned earlier, that whether, however good or bad the culture is, libertarianism can certainly make it better.

=== Religious Community Needs (05:50) ===

[01:50:16]  Absolutely.
[01:50:16]  And actually, it was Charles Murray's point that the very thing that socialists claim they want, which is more of a sense of community, that's what government destroys.
[01:50:26]  And that taking care of your kids, taking care of your parents, your aging parents, all of those responsibilities in life that make people feel important, that's what the government breaks up.
[01:50:38]  And so that too, I'm granting, by the way, that government influence that we miss out on, that we somehow take for granted, really is affecting our culture and our choices.
[01:50:50]  Absolutely.
[01:50:51]  But anyway, you and I agree.
[01:50:53]  I guess I think we've moved toward each other, although I did start out by saying that I am a thick libertarian.
[01:50:59]  But I don't think, just to leave it at this, that if Layla sits through Drag Queen's Story Hour, I think it'll just be, she said, it was so funny, Daddy.
[01:51:08]  That's probably what she would say.
[01:51:10]  Because Drag Queens, as you know, are usually very funny people.
[01:51:12]  Well, that is an interesting hypothesis.
[01:51:15]  We will not find out the answer to it.
[01:51:17]  But that is an interesting hypothesis you have there.
[01:51:19]  What do you mean?
[01:51:20]  You will not.
[01:51:20]  How do you know?
[01:51:21]  You might be.
[01:51:22]  They don't have Drag Queen Story Hour at home school.
[01:51:24]  By the way, is Lauren going to work next year?
[01:51:26]  Two in two years?
[01:51:28]  Yeah, we've got some plans.
[01:51:30]  We've got some plans on the table.
[01:51:32]  We're not completely sure yet.
[01:51:33]  I'm sure this business might get any very personal with you.
[01:51:35]  Well, no, but I don't mind it.
[01:51:36]  No, but I will tell you this.
[01:51:40]  What will always be the case is that my daughter will be raised by her mother and me.
[01:51:45]  When she's not with us, she's with her grandmothers.
[01:51:48]  And that's pretty much it.
[01:51:49]  She's literally never been watched by anyone else.
[01:51:51]  You're very blessed in the way.
[01:51:52]  You know, we miss the next segment we.
[01:51:54]  It's half being blessed and it's half creating your life to work in that way.
[01:52:00]  I certainly don't deny I'm very fortunate that I've have the abilities to have created the career that I have.
[01:52:08]  It definitely took work as well.
[01:52:11]  But I certainly would, you know, I'm very blessed to have a lot of the things that I have in my life.
[01:52:17]  But I also think, as you actually pointed out that one time, right, I forget who the example was.
[01:52:21]  I think it was someone you met on the Contra Cruise, but it was a woman who said, you know, me and my husband, we moved to some other area so I could stay home and take care of her.
[01:52:28]  You can name her name, Laura Blodgett.
[01:52:30]  So a lot of people make excuses.
[01:52:32]  She homeschooled seven kids.
[01:52:33]  Yeah.
[01:52:34]  And so I'm just saying it's like things can be done.
[01:52:37]  And our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, not saying any of them did perfect jobs in terms of how children were raised, but they suffered through hardships that are pretty unimaginable to people today.
[01:52:52]  And so sometimes I think it is a little bit of a cop-out when people say, well, I can't possibly organize my life this way.
[01:52:58]  That's all I'm saying.
[01:52:59]  Now, whether or not you think it's good or bad, or there's a value judgment, to just say that it's impossible to do, I think is often a cop out.
[01:53:06]  By the way, I missed the next segment, but the next segment is only when you started to talk about the importance of religious institutions, which really surprised me.
[01:53:14]  Did you know you mentioned churches as mattering a lot?
[01:53:17]  You know, I mean, I have nothing against churches, but I don't think that it's so important for us libertarians like you and me to care so much about churches.
[01:53:24]  When was the last time you saw the inside of a synagogue, Dave?
[01:53:27]  It was only a few weeks ago.
[01:53:30]  You went to a funeral.
[01:53:30]  My sister's baby, baby naming.
[01:53:33]  Oh, that's a great thing.
[01:53:35]  But that was the first time I've been in about a decade.
[01:53:36]  But still, if you had asked me that any other time, I would not have had a good answer.
[01:53:40]  But I happen to have just happened to have just...
[01:53:42]  I just had to say, Gavolt, Dave is coming out for religious institutions.
[01:53:47]  Well, he's going to be endorsing the Pope.
[01:53:50]  Oh, not this Pope.
[01:53:52]  Not this one.
[01:53:53]  I'm glad about that, Dave.
[01:53:54]  No, I won't.
[01:53:55]  No, but I do think that in the sense that, and not just religious institutions, but there were lots of communal organizations that existed before the rise of the modern welfare state, before the rise of the administrative managerial state.
[01:54:09]  Of course.
[01:54:09]  And I think those things were in large part put out of business.
[01:54:13]  And I think if we were to roll back the state, we would need organizations like that to pop up and kind of fill in the void.
[01:54:20]  I mean, there are people who are in need who need this kind of sense of community.
[01:54:23]  And there's so many, I mean, there are tens of thousands of nonprofits.
[01:54:26]  You know, this over $200 billion a year is, no, I'm sorry, it's $400, $300 or $400 billion goes to charity.
[01:54:34]  There's so much philanthropic money.
[01:54:35]  There's so much caring.
[01:54:36]  This is already.
[01:54:38]  And so, of course, the very point you make, Charles Murray made the point that in the 1890s, the amount of charity in New York City, if just taken as a share of the economy, would be bigger than the welfare state is today.
[01:54:52]  The amount of caring and compassion that comes from individuals for people unfortunate is even very strong in this economy.
[01:55:00]  So, of course, those institutions are there.
[01:55:02]  But they don't necessarily depend on synagogues and churches.
[01:55:05]  No, not necessarily.
[01:55:08]  But certainly religious organizations were a part of that and a big part of that.
[01:55:14]  And also, they just, you know, it also leads to a much healthier society because they do a much better job at discriminating in the most positive sense of the word.
[01:55:23]  So if there's some able-bodied guy who just doesn't want to work, they're much more willing to be like, well, we all know you.
[01:55:29]  We know that you can work.
[01:55:31]  You're not getting this money.
[01:55:32]  And then if there's some guy who, like, you know, like is genuinely disabled or something like that, they're much more likely to help.
[01:55:37]  What I meant was that when you mentioned, atheists like you and me, Dave, could still, even if we were all atheists, we still have an awful lot of compassion toward people, toward children, toward people who are having difficulty coping.
[01:55:49]  Well, I'm out of the atheist game, by the way.
[01:55:51]  I do believe in God now.
[01:55:52]  But I don't want to start this whole thing because we're way over time and it is Valentine's Day and I have to go home to my daughter.
[01:55:59]  Dave believes in God.
[01:56:00]  I believe in God.
[01:56:01]  I've accepted him into my life.
[01:56:03]  I could ask, has he accepted the divinity of Christ?

=== March 9th Tech Debate (01:03) ===

[01:56:06]  No, not quite.
[01:56:07]  I'm not there yet.
[01:56:08]  Give me another.
[01:56:10]  Dave has gone Islamic.
[01:56:12]  He believes in God.
[01:56:13]  That's right.
[01:56:13]  You heard it here first, everybody.
[01:56:15]  Well, Gene, I very much, we didn't get to all of the points that you had, but I appreciate this very lively conversation.
[01:56:23]  You have made me think more about a lot of these issues.
[01:56:25]  The great Gene Epstein, everybody, go to thesohoforum.org if you want to come hang out with me and Gene.
[01:56:31]  Have a great night.
[01:56:33]  I've never not enjoyed a Soho.
[01:56:35]  I'm going to do a warm-up.
[01:56:36]  We're doing the high tech.
[01:56:37]  Big tech has to be broken up.
[01:56:39]  You're going to do a warm-up at the next.
[01:56:41]  It's March 9th.
[01:56:42]  Dave is going to be there Monday, March 9th, and we're going to be debating big tech with Tim Wu, who is the guy who coined the term net neutrality.
[01:56:49]  It's going to be a major, major event.
[01:56:52]  This is going to be a big one.
[01:56:53]  This is a very hot topic.
[01:56:54]  And Dave is just going to play one role.
[01:56:56]  He's going to be warm-up act.
[01:56:57]  Maybe.
[01:56:58]  Be easy at this point.
[01:56:59]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:57:00]  Maybe he'll help a little bit of catering just to show that he's an all-around guy there so far.
[01:57:04]  I'll be tending bar and all of that stuff.
[01:57:06]  Just to show you.
[01:57:06]  All right.
[01:57:07]  Thank you guys very much for listening.
[01:57:08]  We will be back with a brand new episode on Monday.