Dave Smith dismantles Ben Shapiro's critique of libertarianism, refuting claims that libertarians oppose local norms or equate family charity with communism. He argues liberty is an inherent value rooted in self-ownership, contrasting it with conservative instrumentalism and state coercion. Smith posits the U.S. resembles a fractured EU rather than a unified nation, warning that expanding loyalty beyond the family unit benefits oligarchies. Ultimately, he advocates for local governance and a creed of liberty, suggesting America risks Roman-style fragmentation without a unified commitment to rights over authoritarian control. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Responding to Alex Jones Video00:10:09
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Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
What's up?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith, and I'm rolling solo this episode.
Rob is out doing some stand-up gigs tonight.
So I'll be doing this episode all by my loan sum.
And yeah, I got a good topic for us today.
So this will be fun.
A video that I want to respond to.
I know everybody wants to hear an episode about the Martha's Vineyard stuff.
We're going to record that tomorrow night with Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
I know I had a Twitter thread that was blowing up about this stuff that went viral.
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I wanted Rob on that show because I think we'll have a lot of fun with that one.
But for today's show, we got something different.
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All right, let's start off.
So I was going to talk about the Martha's Vineyard migrant stuff today, but then, you know, I have this weakness, and it's for people who make videos trashing libertarianism.
And just like in the last episode, I had to respond to Alex Jones and Stephen Crowder, who were going at libertarianism and libertarians and the libertarian party and all this.
And today, Ben Shapiro has a video out where he's criticizing libertarianism.
And so I just felt like I got to do this video.
I got to respond to this video.
So that's what we're going to do for today's episode while I'm writing solo.
So Ben Shapiro, he's, of course, everyone knows, very popular conservative political commentator.
He did a show today.
He had, let me try to get this name right.
Vivek Ramaswe.
No, I'm sorry.
Vivek Ramaswamy on his show, who is an author and an entrepreneur.
And I apologize to him for butchering his names.
I'm sure I did.
But they were in a discussion and Ben Shapiro put out this clip where they start talking about libertarianism.
I do find it kind of interesting that all of these people have been talking about libertarianism recently and criticizing it, but I enjoy this and I appreciate them for doing it because it not only gives me something to talk about, but I just think it's great that we're at least making enough of an impact that our ideas have to be dealt with in this realm and attempted to be countered or whatever.
So let's get into the video.
Let's listen to what they said and let's try to do our best to respond to it.
I've been relying to my own ideology more and more on the idea that you can only have, that universalism essentially doesn't apply, that particularism is the way to go.
What I mean by this.
By levels of government.
Yes, exactly.
That you can do a lot of things at the local level in terms of government, in terms of community building.
All that stuff is not off the table.
Like the libertarian ideal doesn't apply at the very local level, because the fact is that you and your friends, when you have an HOA, there are tons of restrictions that you live under as an HOA.
And I live in my local Jewish community.
There are all sorts of social restrictions that we put in place with regard to one another that violate kind of libertarian prescriptions.
If we see one of our kids doing something wrong, I notify my friends.
If somebody falls short, I'm giving charity to their family.
If I know that somebody's doing something wrong, I go to them and I try them.
We have people who are not, who just are not welcome at the synagogue because they violated this.
The unitarian model works right.
So let's pause already, already here.
So this is, listen, I know that some people will say this is just like easy or it's, I don't know, it's just like libertarianism 101 or something like that.
But I don't care if there's someone who's this popular with millions of subscribers, I think it's worth addressing this stuff.
And so obviously, what I think probably everyone listening already knows is that none of this violates a libertarian principle.
The idea that like, what exactly it makes me wonder.
Now, I know on the last episode, I was responding to Alex Jones and Stephen Crowder, and there were some people who were saying, like, well, look, Dave, but you got to admit that so many of these libertarians that even you criticize all the time at Cato or Reason or some of these like kind of beltweight libertarians, they do say things like, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Twitter is a private company.
They can ban whoever they want to.
And so it's kind of like that's who they're responding to.
They're not responding to you.
And my point was just that like, well, okay, but Alex Jones has had Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and Tom Woods and all these great libertarians on his show.
So he should know better than to say that that is libertarianism or even all libertarians or even the most popular libertarians.
But this here, you're like, did you really think that the libertarian position was that if someone's doing something bad, you can't tell your friends about it?
Or did you think the libertarian position was that if you, you know, have a homeowners association, that you can't have standards or that a church can't have standards or a synagogue can't have standards for who's allowed in their club?
I mean, no one, even the even the worst beltway libertarians you could think of has ever argued anything like this.
So I just, it's very bizarre to say, well, this violates the libertarian standard.
Like, what did you think the libertarian standard was?
I mean, from what I always say is libertarianism to me is the belief in self-ownership, private property rights, and the non-aggression principle.
Did you think libertarianism meant there can be no standards that we ever believe in?
Or did you think libertarianism meant you can never tell on anyone if they're living in a bad way, or you must accept everyone into your private club or your church or your synagogue, no matter what they do?
Okay, so this is already starting off with such a ridiculous straw man caricature.
Let's bring it back a few seconds and go back to the video.
They violated that.
The communitarian model works at the level, like if the family is the fundamental unit, and that it's sort of like.
Families are communist.
You have a joint bank account with your wife.
To communitarian, to that's an interesting point.
And then as you abstract up, then on a practical level, because there is no brotherhood of man, because Americans hold less in common than Floridians and Floridians hold less in common than people who live in my area, you know, that as you abstract up the chain, if you wish to live together in a common polity, you're going to have to have fewer rules.
You can't have as many rules.
Let's pause it here.
So, okay.
So, families are communist, is what Ben Shapiro says, because you have a joint checking account with your wife.
And, well, I certainly have a joint checking account with my wife.
Everything I have is in like has both me and my wife's name on it.
And my wife owns everything that I own.
And she, you know, yes, okay, that's true.
But do you think the definition of communism is voluntarily agreeing, two people voluntarily agreeing to share things?
Is that what, like, are we reduced, Mr. Conservative?
Are we reduced to saying that communism is sharing?
And that what was that, that was the evil of Stalin or something like that?
Was that people were sharing with each other?
Like, do we, which do we go to a local preschool and tell two kids who are sharing a toy that they're a bunch of dirty communists?
I don't, I don't think so.
The communism, at least as Karl Marx would describe it, was a stateless, classless society with public ownership of the means of production.
I don't know what that has to do with two people coming together and starting a family and then producing offspring and sharing all of their things together.
Sharing is something that happens throughout, you know, small and large groups of people throughout all of society.
Libertarian Views on Liberty and Slavery00:16:13
And I just, again, if you're going to start, if this is your starting point of trying to criticize libertarianism, man, are you missing the mark?
Like, yes, obviously, obviously there are going to be people and there's going to be people in communities who, if someone's falling behind, you voluntarily go and help them out.
The whole point of libertarianism is that we're saying that it should be voluntary.
And share as much as you want or not share as much as you want, but it should be your choice whether you share or don't share.
That's, you know, we all agree that, yeah, there are going to be people who need help at certain points.
In fact, I would argue that I think it's the right thing to do to help people who need help.
And I certainly think it's the right thing to do to share what you have with your wife.
But that ain't communism, man.
And it is kind of shocking to see Ben Shapiro, who's way smarter than this, to conflate those concepts.
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Okay, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
You're going to have to have fewer rules.
You can't have as many rules because there's just less for us to agree on.
And ironically, what's happened is that we've actually reversed it.
So, what's happened is that we've gotten very libertarian about sort of our local communities and very nationalistic about the top level of government.
It's like, okay, well, our local community, we've got to defund the police.
On our local community, I don't want anybody telling me what I can do in the privacy of my own home.
But on the federal level, man, I want the federal government subsidizing every single thing I do, regulating every single thing that I do in my house.
Well, that's the area where we disagree on everything.
So, why are we granting extraordinary powers to a government that's distant from us and governs 330 million people?
So, here's what I love about that.
So, I want to, this is a new idea.
It's also a bit of a different take on liberty.
It's an affirmative vision, though.
And I love it.
So, is that the one I'm like 100% behind?
I don't know.
I did process it.
There's a lot.
Yes, I mean, I think that what that comes down to also is a fundamental difference in how conservatives think about liberty.
So, conservatives tend to think of liberty as you can think of it as either inherent or instrumental in terms of its value.
Either liberty is good for its own sake or it's good in order to achieve something.
And so, I think that for too long, a lot of conservatives have fallen into the classical liberal argument that liberty in and of itself is an ideal.
And the reality is that conservatism doesn't argue that.
It argues that liberty within certain boundaries, right?
Ordered liberty is a good thing.
So, how do you order that liberty?
You order it more on the local level.
As you abstract up, you're going to have to allow for the possibility of more liberty because people in San Francisco don't live like living in Alabama.
But the very core idea of how conservatives argue has been predicated on the wrong thing.
They've been arguing instead of balancing liberty within particular roles and communities, instead of arguing liberty is its own inherent good.
And so, the left has done is they've taken that and they've turned it in on itself.
Liberty discusses another context for a second here.
So, um, all right.
So, so, first of all, the first thing that I think uh Ben Shapiro is uh completely out to lunch on in this uh conversation here is the idea that conservatives have been oriented around liberty, like that they have been.
The problem with conservatives is that they've just been arguing that liberty is a good, uh, like in and of itself.
Forget what it leads to, it's just liberty is good.
Like, what conservatives exactly are we talking about who were advocating for this?
I mean, I don't think he's talking about Donald Trump, who certainly wasn't advocating for liberty.
He was advocating for, I don't know, national greatness or something like that, or America first, or, you know, whatever.
Not even saying I disagree with all of that, but it's certainly, I don't ever remember Donald Trump just advocating for liberty as being some inherent good.
Um, who are we talking about?
The conservatives before him, Mitt Romney or Mark Rubio, or, you know, John McCain, George W. Bush.
I don't know.
Anyway, this seems kind of divorced from reality.
Ben Shapiro says that you can either believe that liberty is inherently good, or you can believe that it leads to positive consequences, that it that it produces good things.
I would argue that you can believe both.
You know, you can believe that it is that the right thing to do is to give adults liberty, or that adults ought to be able to make their own decisions about how they want to live their life.
And then you can also, you can believe that and believe that having a free society leads to positive outcomes.
So in other words, there could be the way I live my life, the way my family, the way we I raise my family with my wife is very different than, say, in an Amish family, right?
It's just a very different way to live.
I guess the fact that I'm doing a podcast right now would be evidence of that.
If I were to force them to live the way I live, or if they were to force me to live the way they live, I think we could agree that there's something wrong about that.
Just so in a sense, you can argue that liberty is in itself the moral thing to do, that they ought to be able to live the way they live, and I ought to be able to live the way I live.
And then you can also argue that liberty leads to a healthier, better society.
And there's lots of reasons to believe that, that it creates more peace, more prosperity.
I mean, like in the example of peace, if the Amish are trying to enforce their will on me, or if I'm trying to enforce my will on them, we're already in a state of conflict.
But if we both agree that we can live how we want to, then it's more likely that we're in a state of peace.
And by the way, the Amish and my family are not going to war anytime soon.
We don't really even think about each other because neither of us are trying to enforce our will on the other one.
So that you could argue is it's a moral solution to the problem.
And also that the consequences of that solution lead to peace, which is better than war.
And obviously, you could argue that freedom leads to more prosperity and that freedom leads to, you know what I mean?
So like it's the idea that you have to believe either one of these things is complete bullshit.
You can believe both of them.
And in fact, I think that's the correct answer.
So just a response to that, let's keep playing.
Discussing another context.
So everything I have said so far, I am high conviction in.
I'm now going to say some things that I'm going to tell you.
My level of conviction in the things I'm about to say goes down, but I think it's a conversation we need to be having to move the ball forward in the movement.
Okay.
So my concern, what I love about that is actually a coherent affirmative vision.
It also, another thing I love about it, actually, before I get to my concern about it, another thing I love about it is another reason I don't call myself a libertarian anymore, which is a totally different reason than the failures of the individual standard bearers of the movement, which is what I discussed before, is that libertarianism has nothing to say about what it is we do in that world that's unshackled from government restraint.
Great.
Let's say we snap our fingers and we got there.
Right.
Okay, what do we do as human beings now?
Right.
That's right.
Maybe, maybe the Torah has something to say about that.
Maybe the Bhagavad Gita has something to say about that.
Okay, maybe the Bible has something to say about that.
But libertarianism has nothing to say about that.
That's right.
And as a human being, as a citizen, as an agent in the world, as a thinking person, as a person who aspires to be a mortal person, I care about the answers to those questions in a way that a libertarian is not necessarily saying the wrong answer, the right answer.
There's just silence on that right.
Let's pause it right there.
So the idea that a libertarian has silence on that answer.
So I think essentially what's being said here is that he's saying libertarianism has nothing to say other than you should be free, but free to do what?
You know, free to live your life in a positive way or in a negative way.
Freedom to have a virtuous life or just like kind of like shitty, degenerate life or whatever.
And he says libertarianism has nothing to say about that.
And then he actually says the libertarian has nothing to say about that.
And this is, and I know, look, I understand this is libertarianism 101.
So I guess I'm taking like kind of a simple task here by responding to this.
But again, I think it's worth it when people of this, like, who have influence like this are talking about it.
But this is really, really stupid.
And this is someone who's never actually thought through these arguments before.
So the obvious example, what this is on the level of saying is that let's say you were an abolitionist who opposes slavery.
Well, what does it mean to be an abolitionist?
It means that you are for abolishing slavery, right?
That's what the term means.
Okay.
And if someone were to ever say to you, well, you know, the problem with abolitionism, the problem with being an abolitionist is that you have nothing to say about what this slave should do after they're freed.
I mean, sure, you're against slavery, but what should they do with their freedom?
You know, should they live a good life or a bad life or any of this?
Well, what's the flaw with that argument?
It's that that's not true.
It's not true that that person might have nothing to say.
The thing that makes you an abolitionist is that you are against slavery.
So you could be an abolitionist who's also a devout Christian and believes people should live in a very Christian lifestyle.
You know, it's not in conflict with believing that slavery is just wrong.
And even as to Ben Shapiro's point, you could believe slavery is wrong and then also believe that slavery leads to all of these negative consequences.
Whether you want to take the moral argument or the consequential, the consequentialist argument or both of them, that's kind of irrelevant.
It's that, you know, the idea that he says, even if we could snap our fingers and get to libertarianism, the libertarian has nothing to say about what you should do with that freedom.
Well, that's not true.
That's not true at all.
That's not even true for the worst of the libertarians.
They have a whole bunch of shit to say about what you should do with your freedom.
They might be wrong about all of it, but they still have a whole bunch of shit to say about it.
You know, like I am, I'm somebody who I certainly promote like families and peaceful parenting and being good to your wife, being good to your children, being good to your friends.
I promote a lot of things that are outside of the scope of libertarianism.
That's like it's it's like saying that someone who was an abolitionist can't promote the idea of uh you should be nice to people, you know, like, well, you're against slavery, but that that says nothing about whether people should be nice to people or not.
Well, okay, yes, that's true.
That view alone, no one, no libertarian has ever argued that libertarianism is the end all be all of existence.
It's really more like a prerequisite.
It's really more like just like the base standard.
Yes, that's the first thing.
The first thing is that we shouldn't have slavery.
And then after that, there's lots of other things.
There's lots of other comments to be made.
I think that you as a person should be decent to other people who are decent to you.
I also believe that you should stand up to other people who are shitty to you.
I also believe in taking care of your family.
I also believe that, you know, having being able to laugh at yourself, being able to laugh at other people, being like, I believe in lots of things.
It's not like because I'm a libertarian, I can't have any of those views.
They're just outside of the scope of libertarianism.
And so that's, that's, it's reasonable to say that libertarianism is not a fully like adequate assessment of everything that it is to exist.
But none of that is an argument against people being free.
So that's, this is all just silly.
And in fact, if I go even a step further than that, I could say that from the conservative point of view, that the government intervention into our lives does nothing but undermine a more virtuous society.
You can, there's endless examples of this.
But, you know, there's, you could look at, say, something like Social Security, where, you know, the now you kind of pay, the government forces you to pay into your own retirement fund and then will pay you back that money when you retire.
Forget the fact, even leaving aside the fact that it's the big Ponzi scheme.
What was the old Social Security?
Well, it was that you would have kids and you would take good care of your kids.
And then when you got older, your kids would take care of you.
Now the government comes and gets in the middle of that.
So in a way, that's undermining the family.
Certainly the welfare state is undermining the family, right?
For years in this country, we've subsidized people having kids out of wedlock.
So, you know, like I could make a consequentialist argument about how the government like kind of gets in the way of a more virtuous moral society.
Investing in Crypto and Precious Metals00:04:14
But the idea that if you are opposed to, if you're opposed to violations of people's liberty, that, well, that's all you can say then, if you're opposed to that.
This is silly.
And it's like, it's, it's silly.
Like there's no political label.
There's no, like, whether it's liberal, conservative, populist, libertarian, communist, socialist, whatever it may be that answers all of the questions about everything.
Like you would never say, well, the problem with the socialism and the socialists is it doesn't tell you what type of music you should like.
Okay.
But that doesn't mean that a socialist can't say, I like classical music.
This is just like, it's always interesting when people want to criticize libertarianism, but they can't actually criticize libertarianism because it's very difficult to.
So that's what we're left with here.
All right, let's keep playing.
Arian is not necessarily saying the wrong answer, the right answer.
There's just silence on that right.
And so, so the idea of what you might call there's not, there's not silence.
We don't have silence.
If there's one thing that you can't criticize libertarians for, it's being silent.
We have lots of shit to say.
I never shut up.
All I do is talk for a living.
And I'm doing okay at it.
Maybe not as good as Ben Shapiro and these guys, but I'm doing all right at it.
It's just not true.
Libertarians don't have silence on any issues.
Even the worst libertarians you could think of, libertarians who I'm not a big fan of, they're not silent about these issues.
Sometimes I think they talk too much about these issues, but they're not silent.
So it's not true.
It's not true that libertarians are silent about any issues beyond that people should be free.
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Let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
iTrust Capital Promo Code Offer00:13:53
Virtue.
Okay.
Right.
That becomes that one's pretty important for the full scope of the way a human being is to live his life.
But it's even more important, even in the capitalist worldview and extracting the virtue of capitalism itself, where one of the things that I've frequently argued to sort of, I would say, confused conservative responses and confused for good reasons is that virtue is not a product of capitalism.
So there are the true pro-capitalists who make the argument that that is the virtue, right?
Right.
And there's a, it's a powerful case, and there's aspects of it that I'm deeply sympathetic to, but I'm not there.
I believe that virtue is a precondition for capitalism.
That's a maximally absolutely sense.
And people forget that about that.
A theory of moral sentiments comes before wealth.
Before wealth of nations.
Yeah.
And not just in temporal sequence, but in principle.
Primary thought.
Primary thought.
And so the question for me is: actually, even if you think about the modern, it's interesting about that point.
I mean, modern social media, I think, calls that bluff.
What modern social media, the algorithmized version of it, manages to do is to take those human insecurities and to picket them and to picket them so repetitively and so artfully with algorithmic force behind it that it is able to take advantage of psychic insecurities that exist in the real world, but are able to be amplified in the digital world that give us a window into your soul to know more about you than you know about yourself as a vehicle to sell you lots of stuff, right?
Multi-trillion dollar industries built on the back of that principle.
So when people say things like, you know, and Republicans are kind of confused about this issue at times too, but we'll say things like, well, Facebook knew that teen girls were suffering worse body image insecurity issues as a consequence of using Instagram or whatever and anger management issues on their platform and they didn't do something about it.
I think that we actually risk falling into the same trap of the other side where to me, I don't want it to be a capitalist's job or Facebook's job to manage female body image insecurity issues.
That's the role of the family or religion or whatever.
That is the role of institutions that exist outside of the capitalist sphere of our lives.
I think there's actually something interesting that he's getting at here.
And certainly there's it's something that's like a major problem in our society today.
Believe me, I know that, you know, I got young kids, like I got little, little kids.
But this is something I think about because I know they're going to be growing up in the not so distant near future.
And yeah, it's, there's a lot of these things with social media that are just not good, you know, and go look on Instagram for those of you guys who don't have kids and more specifically for those of you guys who do have kids.
But like if you have a daughter and you know, like, oh man, Instagram's out there.
That's not great.
You don't like that.
You don't like that she's going to be seeing like all of these like, you know, I don't know, just images of girls kind of like flaunting their body and in a very distorted way, kind of creating this very unrealistic perception of what other girls look like, making them more aware of their own insecurities, all these things.
It's not good.
I agree with that.
Yeah.
And it's not real.
You know, it's not even like real pictures of girls.
It's like completely manufactured, photoshopped versions of it.
But then the question becomes: so what do you do about that?
And even he gets into this.
He goes, well, there are these institutions outside of capitalism.
And like what?
What's he talking about?
He gives the examples.
The churches, the families, all of this.
You go, now that might be outside of capitalism, if you want to use that term, but is it outside of libertarianism?
No, not at all.
And in fact, it's the thing that governments undermine the most.
And so what, like, what are you advocating for here?
Like, what's the solution to it?
Because I know what the solution to it in my family is.
You know what the solution to it is?
Me.
I'm the solution.
My wife, she's the solution.
That's what we got to do.
It's our job to make sure that we don't let our kids just live in their phones and on Instagram and that stuff, at least until they're old enough that we're confident that we've instilled enough, you know, self-assurance and self-esteem.
And they've already been kind of molded into being strong people to be able to deal with that.
And look, I don't know.
What's the government going to do?
The government is already intervening heavily in these industries and they're not trying to do anything to make sure that doesn't happen.
In fact, the government has been making sure that these social media companies ban stuff off of their sites.
But what are they banning?
Are they banning chicks shaking their ass who can be viewed by 12-year-olds?
No, they don't care about that.
But the Hunter Biden story, they'll make sure to ban that.
So the question isn't, is this perfect or is it not perfect?
The question is, who's better at dealing with this problem?
Is it going to be Joe Biden or is it going to be your local church?
So if you agree with your local church, then you'd want to do what you can to empower them, not Joe Biden, right?
That's kind of the point here.
So yeah, some of these things are problems, no question.
As technology expands, yeah, we're dealing with a whole new world and a whole new social landscape.
And I think it's completely reasonable to bring up all of this stuff, but none of this is an attack on libertarianism or capitalism.
This is just, you know, the world we're living in now.
Like, like, what is your solution?
Are you going to ban cell phones?
Are you going to ban Instagram?
I mean, like, like, tell it to me, give me your solution, and then let's see what we think, you know, how we think it would work.
But all of these things, like what you'd really want to me, at least when I see this, I go, man, well, what would guard against this?
Well, I'd say what I think would guard against this would be a culture of really strong families, strong churches and synagogues and mosques or whatever, but probably in America, churches.
But that to me seems like what would guard against this.
And what leads to a community of like strong, you know, family values and religious values and all of these things.
Well, it's definitely not statism.
That's the enemy of all of these values.
And we could go through point by point.
I mean, down to even just what you've seen over the last couple of years, where, you know, I mean, like what, you know, during, say, the lockdowns or something like that, where people would typically depend on their, their, you know, the breadwinner in their family, or maybe the multiple breadwinners in their family.
And now we just have to depend on what, Trump bucks or something like that.
And this is true for the last 150 years, that all what the government does is just undermine the family, undermine the community, undermine the church.
So it, again, it's not that none of this is a problem.
It's just none of this is actually a critique on libertarianism or capitalism.
All right, let's keep playing.
Sphere of our lives, you know, a crude definition of virtue is, I mean, look, I think capitalism, I often say, delivers on its promise for society most completely when our wants actually match our needs.
And to the extent that our wants diverge from our needs, that can probably explain most of what you would complain about when it comes to the promise of modern American capitalism.
And that delta, that daylight, might be a crude proxy for this world we call it.
No, that's right.
That's right.
I mean, I think that capitalism, the one thing that the one virtue that it creates is through repeat iterations, honesty.
Because if you jack somebody, then they're not going to do that.
Yeah, that's true.
It cultivates a lot of virtues.
So responsibility.
Because there's a lot of individual lowercase V virtues.
But I think of an uppercase V virtue, the cultivation of a human, you know, of a soul.
Yeah, that's right.
Let's pause this for a second.
So he says that capitalism is best when our wants don't exceed our needs.
The problem with this is that it's very tough.
And I know this might seem like I'm being pedantic, but what exactly are our needs?
What do needs mean?
Like, what do we need?
Because I think you could definitely argue that for at least the last hundred years in first world countries, we've had all of our needs met.
Like our needs.
You know, what you would have thought of as a need 400 years ago compared to today, all of your needs are met.
You're not starving.
You got, you know, you got clothes.
You know, back then, maybe, I don't know what your needs would have been a warm fire.
Now you don't even think about that because you got heat, you got AC, you got a lot of things.
Like you really have kind of all of your needs met.
So we're way beyond our needs.
And then to say that what we want, you know, okay.
So if we, if we accept that we're beyond our needs, because I think the standard of needs continues to change as you know time progresses, but that's that's kind of fuzzy.
But what do we want?
Well, it's, you know, it's not clear exactly what people want.
And certainly some people want some really bad things on top of their needs.
But, you know, the kind of nature of government is that it's not giving people what they actually want.
And if it was what they want, then we wouldn't need the government and we could figure out real quickly what people really want.
I was, I did a panel with Jimmy Dore a couple weeks ago, who's a leftist, but a leftist I really respect a lot.
Very anti-war, very anti-corporate, very, you know, like one of the last great leftists in America today.
And he said at one point that, you know, he made the very typical leftist argument that he said Medicare is a very popular program.
And I responded with the obvious libertarian response, which is I said, okay, well, if it's so popular, let's make the taxes for Medicare voluntary and let's find out how popular it is real quick.
You know, people who work a job, anyone who works like a regular corporate job, you know, when you see your paycheck and it's got like the amount you made, and then it's got the taxes taken out, and then it'll have Social Security and Medicare taxes that are taken out.
So let's just give all those workers the option: do you want to pay into Medicare or no?
Let's see what that would be.
You know, if you want to say it's so popular, okay, fine.
Yeah, it's the people who receive it appreciate receiving the check.
Okay, fine.
But how about the people paying it?
Because that's really the question.
So again, when you say what people want, I don't know.
I mean, there's certainly some people who want things that I don't agree with.
But I see like so many, like even Ben Shapiro's, like your channel, Ben Shapiro's got millions of subscribers.
A lot of people seem to want what you're selling.
And a lot of people seem to want what Jordan Peterson's selling and what like a lot of these guys are selling.
So I don't know what we actually want.
But the whole libertarian point is that the only way you can figure out what people actually want is to is to give them the choice to decide that.
And I agree that there's like capitalism to once you start like moving from libertarianism to capitalism.
It depends on how people define these terms or whatever.
Who cares?
But when you're saying like, well, do people, you know, does this really like lead to virtue?
I got to say, I think you basically have two scenarios where either people really do care about virtue or they don't.
I personally tend to lean with the prior that I think people really do.
I think virtue actually does sell.
I think people really care about being virtuous.
But if they don't care, if the truth is that they don't, well, then that's kind of your answer right there.
Supporting Kratom Delivery Services00:02:48
Then what are you really advocating that we do to make them more virtuous according to you?
But I actually think the truth, my feeling is that if we just removed all of these impediments, if we just removed all of this kind of nonsense, all of this, like everything like about like the degradation of current culture, all this woke nonsense, it's all a government program.
It's all coming from, you know, universities and public schools and politicians, even like Hollywood and like all of this mass media that's like kind of jammed down people's throats, these giant corporations who are all in bed with government.
I think that this, the natural order, would be far more virtuous than this kind of forced order that you get when you embrace statism.
That's my feeling.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
Lowercase V virtues, right?
But I think of an uppercase V virtue, the cultivation of a human, you know, of a soul.
Yeah, that's right.
That's exactly that.
That pre-exists.
No, capitalism is good at the things that it's good at.
And this is why, you know, I've never been a fan of these sort of two cheers for capitalism mentality, only because I think that you're asking of capitalism something that it never said it was going to deliver.
That it never said it was going to deliver.
When you ask that bad things, actually, all kinds of unexpected bad things happen.
So, so we're there.
So, now the issue that I have, and I just want to think through this stuff, but the issue that I have with your sort of worldview of communist family, communitarian community, onward up with state and the nation, it's actually an elegant view.
It's an alluring view.
There's a lot to like about it.
Limits of Capitalism and Virtue00:06:54
But I think that there's something unique to the level of identity of being a citizen of a nation that is a part and beyond the identity that comes from being a member of a citizen or a constituent in a state.
So, I liked where you were in the local community level, but I think one of the things that I think is missing, so my new book, a kind of play on David Hume, had this thought experiment called The Missing Shade of Blue.
I call this the missing shade of red for our conservative movement, is the revival of civic duty as a means, but a civic duty that I think has to apply at its most powerful level at the level of the nation, not just at the level of the community, but the level of the nation.
I think this is one of the questions about kind of where we're going as a country.
Meaning, I think it was easier to make the case at the level of the nation when you didn't have 330 million people with a wide variety of perspectives on what the nation actually constituted.
When there was an actual creed, for example.
That's right.
Isn't that a case?
Is that not a case for reviving that creed?
For sure, for sure.
But I think that the question is going to be: if we can't, right?
If this goes back to what time it is, if there's half the nation that fundamentally believes that creed is mistaken, which I think is probably the case, right?
I mean, 30%.
Right.
If you believe the Christopher Caldwell argument that basically the second constitution is a war with the First Constitution, and many, many Americans believe in the Second Constitution and actually don't like the First Constitution, then you have to start looking at the United States more in terms of is it like the EU?
Are we really actually a bunch of separate nations that are under the auspices of a broader federal government?
I mean, that's how we sort of started, right?
I mean, it makes me.
So let's pause it right there.
So I think that even what Ben Shapiro said there is correct.
That, I mean, it's not even like whether you want to look at it like that or not.
It's just that's what it is.
That's where we are.
Whether you like, however you feel about it, whether we should all feel like we're really citizens of a nation or we should all feel like we have this duty to a nation, or whether you look at it like it's more like the EU where there's all these different nations.
However, you feel about it, what's the reality?
Like, is rural Alabama and Portland?
Do they all have the same views about what the nation is?
You tell me, isn't it so obvious at this point that, you know, of course, there's drastically different cultures throughout this country.
And I think Ben Shapiro actually is completely right on this, where he goes, yeah, it's a lot easier if there's not 330 million people.
But even the idea of, okay, well, should we all, is it preferable if rather than just feeling like you're a member of a state or a member of a community or a member of a family or something like that,
if you feel like, well, I'm really a member of this nation and I have some type of devotion to this nation, I guess that would really depend on what you're devoted to.
Like, I don't think there's too many people in Ben Shapiro's audience who would argue that if the, you know, the average person in the Soviet Union felt a strong devotion to Joseph Stalin, that that would be preferable to them feeling a, you know, a strong devotion to whatever Estonia or Ukraine or something like that, right?
Like, I don't, I don't think they would think it was better to just be a part of this bigger conglomerate.
The question is what the nation stands for.
And so I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that like, yeah, if we all felt like we were a part of the nation because we believed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights or something like that, then okay, that would be great.
But that's just not the reality.
That's not the reality of the world that we live in.
So what are we better off in given the circumstances that we're faced with?
What are we better off believing in?
And Ben Shapiro talked earlier in this conversation about, you know, kind of like the levels of liberty.
And he goes, well, liberty doesn't really apply to the family.
I would disagree with that because I think that liberty ought to apply to the family like 100%.
And I think that it's actually, I think the family in many ways is like the microcosm of liberty, and especially when it's working at its best.
So like, I think that my family, like my family, my immediate family at least is me, my wife, my little girl, and my baby boy.
That's that's my family.
And my immediate family, we have, you know, a bit of an extended family.
But so I think that my job as the head of our family is to give my wife such a good life and treat her well and, you know, like do everything I can to the point that I always make her happy that she chose to marry me and have a family with me.
That's my, like my greatest duty in life.
And then my job with my children, obviously children, you know, they didn't choose to be my kids.
We chose to have kids.
And this is like a whole peaceful parenting thing.
I might do a podcast on peaceful parenting coming up real soon.
I got to do a big one on that.
But basically, from my perspective, the job of being a parent is that since they didn't voluntarily choose this relationship, that you work every single day to make sure that if they could voluntarily choose, as they will be able to later in life, that they would choose of all the parents in the world, that they're happy that you were their parents.
So I think that's like the to me, the family is like the epicenter of voluntarism, not communism, as Ben Shapiro would put it.
And I think that the more local the government around you, the more local the group or community and all of this, the more that you have an effective say in what's going on.
And the further and further out that gets, the less you have a say.
Local Communities vs Global Citizenship00:08:40
And once you get up to the nation state, your vote is one in 150 million or whatever it is.
And you have basically no say, even if you vote.
And so that's nothing.
And that's why it becomes more and more of a disaster the more it gets extrapolated out.
But, You know, you might kind of emotionally, which is all this argument seems to boil down to, is you might emotionally feel like, well, it's there's something nice about being a part of a nation, but all of these things are artificial constructs.
Why should the nation be 330 people?
As Ben Shapiro pointed out, look at Europe.
Should Italy go, you know, now we don't want to just be Italy.
We have to be European citizens and make it bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then you might ask yourself the question: well, if it is preferable to be a citizen of the nation rather than a citizen of your state or your town or all of this, why do we stop at the nation?
Why do we stop at these very artificial lines that have been drawn between, say, Canada and Mexico?
Right?
I mean, if it's preferable, like we have these lines that are drawn around the states, and then we have these lines that are drawn from the nations.
But why, if it's preferable to be like a loyal citizen of the nation, why not a loyal citizen of North America, Canada, Mexico, and America?
And why stop there?
You know, like the logical conclusion of all of this is why not just be a citizen of the world.
And why is it that all the people who are pushing being a citizen of the world are the worst fucking people in the world?
Right?
Because that's the way that the oligarchy gets the most power.
That a small group of people rule over the most amount of people.
Do you support world government?
Do you support being a citizen of the world?
Well, if not, then let's go back in the other direction and make it as local as possible.
All right, let's keep playing.
Right?
I mean, it makes me, it's sad as an American.
I mean, you know, even when you talk about the fall of Rome, people talk about the fall of Rome.
Whether the Roman Empire lasted hundreds of years or whether it lasted over a thousand depends on whether you actually include the Eastern Empire of the Eastern Empire.
That's right.
Exactly.
So, in a certain sense, it made my heart cry a little bit as I wrote this part of my book, but maybe America will be the same way.
I mean, depends on, but whether the American Empire whether the American experiment lasted 250 years or whether it lasts a thousand may involve a fissure of what in the way they hold it in the way they hold the Roman Empire was different.
And it doesn't mean there's a civil war or something, but it does mean that it just may go down.
We just kind of go, you know, our own different ways.
So, so, so I acknowledge that possibility.
Maybe being a naive optimist, it is my hope, and I think our window is short for, yeah, I mean, this might be like the next eight years to determine the answer to this question.
I hope we're not there yet.
And I think that there is an opportunity to still revive a common creed.
Well, I mean, look, here's the thing about reviving a common creed.
And we'll wrap up the show on this.
Again, it's not that reviving a common creed is not good or bad.
It depends on what the creed is.
In the same way that reviving a global creed is not good or bad, it just depends on what the creed is.
What does this creed revolve around?
You know, it's like if you ask A community.
Let's say you ask a neighborhood or like two neighborhoods.
Do you guys want to be one neighborhood or two neighborhoods?
Is it inherently preferable to have them be one neighborhood or two neighborhoods?
I don't think so.
It all depends on what you're agreeing to believe in, what you're agreeing to enforce, how everyone's agreeing to live.
What is the common creed?
So I'm okay with reviving a common creed if it's a moral one or one that leads to good outcomes.
You know, I talked recently on this show about the times that our country has been the most unified in my lifetime.
And the most unified we've ever been was immediately after 9-11.
I don't think there's any time in my 39 years that this country has been more united.
What did we do with that?
Well, what we did with that was we launched the war in Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, created the Department of Homeland Security, the war in Iraq.
It's kind of a disaster.
Then the country got kind of divided toward the end of the Bush years.
And then, you know, the next most united period was when Obama first got in.
Like Bush had the highest approval ratings of any president in decades.
I think we found out on the last show since Eisenhower after 9-11.
And then Obama had the highest approval ratings right after he was elected since Bush.
And then what we get for that?
We got the Obama administration.
You know, it's like maybe the last time we were very united was right in like March of 2020, right after COVID hit.
Everyone was united.
Whatever we got to do.
The problem with being united is that you can unite around political figures who will lead you in the wrong directions.
So I'm not so sure that being united around a common creed is inherently good.
Now, if the common creed that you're united around is being skeptical of Washington, D.C., being skeptical of centralized political authoritarian control, then yeah, I would agree.
I think that would be really good.
I would much prefer that to what we have right now.
I just don't know the example of where that's ever been the case, where it's ever been the case that that's what people are united around.
So I would like what I would be wishing for is people united around the creed of liberty.
If that's a small group of people united around that, okay.
The bigger the group, the better.
But I don't want to just be united around any creed, right?
Doesn't like from whatever perspective you come from, isn't just being united around a creed not enough?
Like, don't you need to know what that creed is?
We're united around the creed of Satanism.
Like, okay, that's, that's, that doesn't seem to solve any of these problems.
That seems to make them much worse.
So, again, all right, I don't know what else to say about this.
I just think that I guess I'd leave with two things.
Number one, it's interesting that so many people are coming at libertarians right now, right?
Seems like we're kind of getting on the map almost in a bigger way than we have been since maybe 2012, 2008, when Ron Paul was running.
It seems like a lot of the same people who would have been coming at us are coming at us again, even if from different angles.
And number two, seems like all of their arguments are weak as fuck.
So I'll leave you guys on that.
Final Thoughts on Shared Creeds00:00:17
All right.
Thanks for listening.
Tomorrow night, me and Robbie will be back and we'll break down the whole Martha's Vineyard thing.
That's going to be a real fun episode.
So make sure you check that out.
All right.
Catch me at the Creek in the Cave on September 25th.