Jeff Deist and James Smith dissect the abandonment of political compromise in "A Strange Liberty," arguing elites now seek to vanquish opponents rather than represent constituents. They critique libertarians for ignoring the state-corporate fusion, noting progressives aggressively embrace it while figures like Warren Buffett prioritize global arbitrage over domestic issues. The hosts evaluate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy as a strategic necessity against corporate media narratives, despite cultural disagreements, and conclude that modern politics has shifted from principled debate to tribal survival where voting with one's feet matters most. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Too Big00:03:53
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Tear your host, James Smith.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm very excited for today's episode because we have returning to the show, the great Jeff Deist, one of my favorite people to talk to, just wrote an unbelievable book, A Strange Liberty, Politics Drops Its Pretenses.
How are you, Jeff?
Hey, Dave, I am doing great.
How are you?
Very good.
Very good.
I really loved the book.
Also, really love the cover art.
It's incredible.
Who did that?
Well, nowadays, you can use AI to produce cover art and basically tell it, hey, give me a backdrop that looks like the Eccles building at the Fed.
Give me some angry mob that has a faceless Orwellian vibe to it.
So Chad Parrish at the Mises Institute created that.
But it's really interesting.
You know, now you could go to some place like Flickr or Wikipedia and download four or five freely available pictures of, let's say, Barack Obama.
And then you could put those into your AI program and say, hey, you know, give me a picture of Barack Obama wearing a Hawaiian shirt that AI would produce that and it would probably look pretty good.
Then you can make a book cover with that.
And there's no owner of that photograph because it's not a photograph.
And so we're definitely entering a brave new world there.
Yeah, that is, I don't know whether to be freaked out by all of that, but I guess I just I go, well, I can't change it.
So let me just accept it and hope this figures out.
I'm holding on to the possibility that like AI at some point reads for a new liberty and is really persuaded by the ideas and decides to impose liberty on all of us top down.
Yeah, our new overlords.
It's very interesting.
I view just AI as any other software.
Software speeds certain things up and makes certain tasks easier the same way a calculator did, the same way early word processing did, the same way Wikipedia does versus going to some physical library with Encyclopedia Britannica or something.
And of course, like Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica.
I mean, who knows?
Encyclopedia Britannica was probably absolutely full of errors and people imposing their opinions in the same way that, let's say, Wikipedia is.
So yes, there's always dangers, but the idea of sentience amongst AI is the least of my concerns in life.
Yeah, well, that's good.
All right.
That reassures me to some degree.
Sometimes I hear Elon Musk talk about how dangerous it is and I'm like, oh, I get a little freaked out.
But it's not, I will say it's not something that I'm overwhelmingly concerned with.
Okay, so let's talk about the book a bit because there's a lot in it.
I wish we could talk about all of it, but it would take as much time as it takes to read the book to do that.
But you touch on a lot of things.
There's a lot of your, you know, it's an anthology.
So it's all kind of like the major themes that you've been discussing over the last few years.
What I really like about it is that it's kind of, it's something that I struggle with and I try to do on the show is when you're in the middle of the craziness of say like the last few years, it's like you're in the middle of this storm and it's very hard to not just react to every latest crazy thing, but to actually zoom out and be like, hey, okay, so what's the bigger picture here?
Politics Drops Pretenses00:09:12
What exactly does this mean?
You know, like what is really happening in the grand scheme of things.
And I think that's kind of the essence of what the book is about.
It's about like, what does this, what is this period that we've entered now?
What does it really mean?
And of course, right there in the subtitle, your major thesis throughout is kind of that politics has dropped its pretenses, that there is no longer, not that it ever actually was what politics claims to be, but that it's not even pretending anymore.
Is that accurate?
Yes, but that's a big shift.
Yeah.
The idea that they don't pretend anymore.
You could go talk to your grandparents.
I've told this to Tom Woods, and they can certainly recall when you might go into someone's home and they would have a portrait of JFK on the wall.
If you go to Turkey today, there are portraits of Ataturk everywhere.
I mean, people revere him.
He's sort of the FDR of Turkey in many ways, the modernizer.
And so the idea that we revere our politicians or that we view them as being on our side, that there's a shift today.
It was already happening before Trump.
It was already happening before Hillary Clinton.
It was already happening before Brexit, which are some of the big political shocks of the last decade.
But nonetheless, it's intensified and accelerated in a way that probably surprised me a little bit.
I mean, I'm pretty jaundiced about my politics, let's just say.
But nonetheless, when you saw that speech a few months back of Biden in front of the sort of James Bond villain-looking backdrop with all this red, and it had a very fascist or authoritarian overtone.
As a matter of fact, it had the very overtones that they were always accusing Trump of having.
Yeah.
You know, we're in a situation now where politicians, at least on the national level, are no longer pretending to represent everyone.
And they're no longer pretending that democracy gives us this compromise down the middle where the far left, the far right, neither side gets everything it wants, but we come up with something sort of down the middle that we can all live with.
That's no longer the pretense.
Now it's just like, listen, if you don't vote for me, you're part of the deplorables.
And now that I'm elected, my desire is to vanquish you.
Now, when I say vanquished, I mean in the political sense, there are worse ways of being vanquished.
But nonetheless, the rhetoric is unpleasant and alarming.
And so this idea that you don't really have to run for president for the whole country anymore.
Or if you're a senator from a state, you don't have to represent the entire state anymore.
You just represent your constituency and really not even your voting constituency, but your real constituency.
In other words, the people with power put you in office.
I think that's very different than in tone than even 10 years ago.
And look, we all know this.
I mean, everybody acknowledges this from Michael Malice on down, is that there's always going to be elite rule in any society.
That's inevitable.
What matters is whether those elites hate your guts or not, or whether they desire a society where average people, let's say middle-class people, can live a pretty decent life.
And I would argue now elites do hate our guts.
I would argue that they have failed us on multiple fronts throughout the 20th and now 21st century, whether that's medicine, law, banking, money, diplomacy, education.
I mean, you name it.
So we shouldn't be surprised when a little populism crops up in the midst of all this.
And so it strikes me that we're in an era now where it's all just about raw power.
It's just about, I guess, turnout, although I think a lot of voting is probably fraudulent.
But it's mostly about winning.
And then the posture of politicians is that, okay, now that I won, it's time to vanquish these terrible people.
And so that strikes me as a very dangerous recipe for America, especially when, as a result of that disastrous 20th century, as a result of what I consider a terrible misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, we have centralized so much executive and judicial power in Washington.
It's just almost unbelievable.
Yeah, there's so much there that's so interesting.
And like, you know, the first thing that comes to my mind is there's this, I don't know if you've heard this before, but there's this Tucker Carlson quote that I thought was one of the best things I've ever heard anybody say.
And it really kind of changed the way I think even about libertarianism, where he said, he said, I'm not a populist.
I'm an elitist.
I just believe in impressive elites.
And I just really loved that quote.
And, you know, the idea that there will be a society without elites is just goofy.
That's, I don't know what type of like, you know, egalitarian would even view that.
But no matter how much you try to impose egalitarianism, you will always have elites.
And every society that's ever existed has had them.
And it kind of made me realize that in a sense, what libertarianism is really all about, or at least partially, is offering impressive elites.
But that's kind of at the heart of our pitch is that if you have more of a market, community, family, church-based society, then at least the elites that you're going to have aren't just going to be either these politically connected elites or the politicians themselves.
And man, I think that's one of the major themes in America today to me is just like the incredible degradation of the elite class.
Whereas in the past, this was something that was different.
It just seems like they would, you know, you talk about this a lot.
You know, you mentioned like senators and who would at least have been somewhat impressive people in the past.
And now they're like Kamala Harris, like the woman who was on, what's his name, Montel Williams Arm.
You know, it's like, who can't put a sentence together?
This is somehow supposed to be an elite in this country.
It's just, it's a very bizarre thing to say.
You know, however you feel about them, when even when I was a kid, and even a bit before that, you would have people, I mean, I think he's one of the great villains of the 20th century, but like Bill Buckley was an impressive person.
He was an impressive speaker.
You had people like this who were at least, it wasn't what we see today, for sure.
Well, Bill Buckley was, in my view, a bad guy, but he was certainly impressive intellectually.
He was certainly well read.
He was unbelievably well spoken compared to the commentariat of today, let's just say.
And as for Kamala Harris, Federman, there are certainly some on the GOP side as well.
There used to be, even 20, 30 years ago, not that long ago, senators did not come out of the U.S. House, generally speaking.
Senators were a cut above in the same way, very similar to the way federal judges used to be a cut above state and local judges.
In other words, they tended to be wealthier.
They had more Ivy League degrees.
They were smarter.
They came perhaps from more elite families.
And now a U.S. senator, there's only 100 of those on earth, by the way.
And they're charged with basically telling the rest of the world how to live, either under threat of invasion or beating them around the head with the U.S. dollar.
One of those two mechanisms for the most part.
And so U.S. senators ought to be among the top 1% of Americans in terms of intelligence, ability, temperament, achievement.
I mean, come on.
And the fact that that's not who we get is a terrible indictment in the system because if you were one of those 1%, you wouldn't want to be a U.S. Senator.
Yeah.
You would be really rich and rich elites in this country, many of whom I think on some level or to some degree actually agree with us and are concerned about what we might broadly call woke.
They are concerned about the dollar and the debt.
They're concerned about this foreign policy, which just seems to be boundless.
There are a lot of really rich people who agree with us, at least in part, but they're being very, very quiet.
And there's a reason for that, is that they don't want to lose their position in society.
And we live in such a minefield of an era that sticking your neck out could go very badly, not just for you, but for your kids, grandkids, great-grandkids.
If you're rich, you intend to have them all set up.
So why not sort of go along with trans or whatever it might be?
I mean, that's you don't want to lose elite status.
And it's a real shame because you've got all these 20-something kids out there laying it online of podcasts and getting canceled from any future when it should be the kind of people who have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars who could actually resist, who could fight in court, who could, even if they lost 90% of their wealth, still be comfortable.
Small Batch Cigars Sponsor00:02:26
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CEO Pay Trends00:10:22
All right, let's get back into the show.
There's some, I think, validity to what used to be mostly a left-wing criticism, but is now increasingly shared by the populist right, that America's been hollowed out, that American elites are just sort of parasitical people who are living off the bounty of the U.S., but they don't really have any allegiance to it.
They just live here and make money here.
But at the end of the day, they're not patriotic or future-minded with respect to the country itself.
I think there's actually some validity to that.
Yeah, I 100% think that that's true.
I mean, it does seem like you just even if for, I mean, like, I would argue they were always somewhat parasitic in nature, at least those connected to the political apparatus.
And I'm sure you'd agree with me on that.
But even like perhaps more intelligent parasites with like a lower time preference who didn't want to blow the whole thing up, there seemed to at least be some sense of like, you know, okay, we can dip into the trough a little bit and a little bit here, but let's like kind of keep this thing going.
Whereas today, it really does seem like it's like just let's let's hollow out as much of this as we can and try to hope that the, you know, music doesn't stop on our watch and, you know, kick it to the next guy or whatever.
That seems to be what we're living through.
And it's interesting the effect it's had on every different level of society.
You know, when you talk about having like a picture of JFK on the wall, it would have been a normal thing.
And if you think about today, like if you came into someone's house and saw either a picture of Biden or a picture of Donald Trump, it would almost be viewed as like a declaration of war on half of America.
That would almost be a signal that you hate the other half of this country if you took, if you had that level of like, you know, support for your president.
And this is somewhat for me, I mean, I'm 40.
I'm not like a kid, but I'm not old.
And I know I hear the young people listening to my show.
Okay, to you, I'm old, but to adults, I'm not.
But I remember, so I was talking about this one with Joe Rogan when I was on his show a couple weeks ago, and I closed on this with him that I thought it was to me the funniest professional wrestling angle that I've ever seen in my entire life was in 1991, Sergeant Slaughter, who was the American hero military guy wrestler, he defected to Iraq because we lost a lot of good men.
They sided with Saddam Hussein in that first Desert Storm war there.
And so he defected and he joined up with Saddam Hussein.
And like in 1991, this would be, it was so easy to just get a crowd full of people just boo, like, boo, you're enough.
And all you had to do was like hold up an American flag and the entire arena would go nuts for that guy.
This was me.
When I was a little kid, this is what America was like, that there was still kind of this leftover thing from previous generations.
Yeah, there he is.
Joined the Iraqis.
So ridiculous.
But that thing is gone.
That kind of sense of like patriotism or support for one's country.
And I know libertarians could very easily have critiques of patriotism and nationalism and things like that, and some of them very justified.
But there's also what it's been replaced with seems to be worse.
It seems to be worse than the problems associated with that stuff.
I don't know what you think about that.
Well, we certainly have transnational elites.
Someone like a George Soros.
Now, he chooses to be involved politically in countries around the world, including the United States.
So that makes him a higher profile transnational person.
But you could even look at someone like a Warren Buffett, who's quite elderly now and will never expatriate or leave.
He'll never go live in Singapore like Jimmy Rogers did.
But nonetheless, if you look at the way he invests, he's currently investing in Japan.
And I think in part because he likes the spread between interest rates between Japan and the U.S.
And so he's not focusing his investments.
And he has a responsibility to Berkshire Hathaway investors.
I get that.
But nonetheless, a guy as old and as rich as he is is not focused on the U.S.
I mean, he's not focused on shoring up bridge overpasses in the U.S. highway system or something like that.
He's not focused on increasing literacy among children in the U.S. He's not focused on obesity or criminality or any of the huge dysfunction we have in this country.
The fact that so many people are alienated and isolated and fat and sick and the fact that COVID lockdowns accelerated that.
I mean, he's looking at all this from a 50,000 foot perspective of geopolitical global markets and saying, hey, where is there an arbitrage opportunity?
You know, that's not what perhaps even though they certainly had their issues, but a car of the year Rockefeller was building museums and parks and other things with philanthropic dollars.
And I don't know offhand, but I'm sure Buffett does lots of good things with his money too.
I'm sure he's a charitable guy.
But nonetheless, it just seems like his perspective is not that of an American per se.
He sort of transcended that.
And that strikes me as, again, late stage for America.
Yeah, it does.
Right.
It seems that way.
And it seems to me that there was, you know, like if you look at the ratios, and I don't have the numbers offhand, but the ratio of like CEO pay to worker pay.
And this is something that progressives at least used to bring up a lot.
I remember like around the time of Occupy Wall Street, this would come up a lot, that it used to be that the CEO's pay to the average workers' pay was something.
It was maybe like seven to one or something.
And it rose up to be like 60 something to one.
Like it's a crazy growth in the disparity of how much people were paying the people at the top of these firms were paying themselves versus paying their workers.
And one of the things, you know, of course, progressives would have the reaction that, oh, this is, you know, income inequality and this is a terrible thing.
But I always thought from the libertarian perspective, there was something kind of interesting to that too, because it's not as if there was a regulation in the past that said you can only pay yourself so much more than your average worker.
It's not like they were bound by law to do that and then were allowed to get away with not doing it.
Yet at some point there was a decision to be made, or even if not a conscious decision, at some point this trend started.
And it does kind of make you wonder like, oh, okay, so what force was it that kept that more in check in the past?
And in the same sense of what force was it that, you know, made Henry Ford want to pay his workers a high enough wage they could get the cars.
And this is kind of what I was getting at.
We're saying just maybe they were wiser parasites at least.
I'm not accusing Henry Ford of being a parasite, by the way, but I'm just making the point that it does seem like there was at least some type of cultural force that convinced some of these elites that like, yeah, that that might be a problem for you if you did that.
That might be seen poorly and you're doing pretty good.
So maybe don't break this game by trying to get away with too much.
But that seems to be gone now.
There's no more forces like that.
that you would say to someone like George Soros, like, maybe it's not, it won't be viewed positively if you are fomenting revolutions around the world.
Like, maybe you shouldn't do this because this could end up being bad for you.
There doesn't seem to be any restraints in that area.
Well, I think this issue of CEO pay has a lot to do with the Fed.
Yeah.
CEOs respond to incentives.
I think by diluting money's value rapidly, you create high time preference.
In other words, you create a society where corporate America cares about the next quarter or the next year as opposed to the next five years or 10 years.
You skew capital investment away from what we call capex, capital expenditures, towards things that sort of juice the income statement or juice the balance sheet under accounting rules to make things look better for the next quarter for the CEO.
So it's not this kind of long time horizon.
You know, the Sony Corporation in Japan, which has really fallen, but back in the 1990s, they were very dominant in electronics.
Sony used to have these hundred-year plans famously.
Like Sony was almost something beyond a corporation.
It was like a way of life or a cult or something.
And that's, you know, we don't really have that in America.
So what we'd like our economists to do is help us understand the unseen.
How do you prove or trace that the Fed has created a bunch of financial engineering?
In other words, financialize the economy in a way that distorts things like corporate activities and CEO pay.
It's not so, you know, we can say that, but to prove that requires economists to show us the unseen, all the things that could have happened if we hadn't had the Fed being so aggressive as it has been.
And what's interesting, when you bring up the left and populism, I mean, it was really, I guess starting with Alan Greenspan, we can even go back that far, but certainly in our Bernaki, where the left started to love the Fed.
All of a sudden, the left thinks the Fed is great.
And then Janet Yellen comes along and they're cheering the Fed that, you know, the Congressional Black Caucus is saying, oh, the Fed is helping less affluent blacks get mortgages easier.
And of course, then a lot of them lost their houses in the 08 crash.
But, you know, so it's really interesting how the left came to love the Fed.
Now, there are certainly good people on the left who understand its distortive effects.
People like Jimmy Doerr, Noby Prince.
Moink Family Farms00:02:23
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David Stockman did such a great job of writing about how the financialization of Paulson and others coming out of that 08 crisis really just benefited Wall Street under the guise of this contagion would have spread to Main Street.
And David Stockman says, no, it would not have.
So that's, it's all really fascinating to me how the Fed is viewed by people.
And it's one of the, I'm convinced it's one of the biggest untold stories of our lifetimes is how the Fed distorts not only the U.S. economy, but U.S. culture, U.S. society, even down to individual actions, you know, when borrowing is easier than it otherwise would have been.
How does that spread out through society like throwing a pebble in a pond?
I would argue it's enormous.
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Libertarian Self-Worship00:14:50
All right, let's get back on the show.
And you touch on both of these in the book, but there's like these two great tragedies of the 21st century, being 9-11 and the financial crisis of 2008, in both of which, I mean, you mentioned this specifically in the chapter on 9-11, where you say that like this should have been a great moment of humiliation for this entire national defense apparatus.
Like you all failed.
You know what I mean?
Like everybody, what a huge failure you had here that you allowed this to happen for all the tens of billions of dollars that we spend on intelligence every year.
We still didn't see this coming and you allowed all these innocent people in New York to be killed.
And yet quite the opposite happens.
Instead, it's a time for chest thumping and braggadocia and they and now they get a blank check to do whatever they want.
And it's a very similar dynamic in 2008.
It's like the people who screwed up the entire economy are now given even more power and are actually, you know, the people like, you know, Rachel Maddow in this, and they're all saying, oh, we wouldn't have even had an economy if it wasn't for these wise people who figured out how to like stop this contagion.
And then they're bragging about the Obama recovery for the next, you know, eight years or whatever.
And so it's just while they fail upward, you know, it's like the biggest failure.
And then as a result of that, instead of having the much needed correcting of course of going like, oh my God, this whole system is a disaster.
Instead, as a country, we doubled down on it.
Dave, Ben Bernatti wrote a self-congratulatory book talking about his courage during the crisis.
I mean, this is, you know, hubris is not the word here.
Yeah, it's more like a religious conviction, but in this religion, you are the God, like your own self-worship of some type, which I do think is actually a kind of common thread amongst insane progressivism these days.
There's when you look back at all that's kind of happened, really, you know, in the last decade, but certainly in the last few years, it does, you know, what do you think?
Do you think like libertarians, like, what did we get wrong?
Do you think about understanding this, say, say a decade ago, what libertarians would have thought compared to where we are now?
Boy, that's a great question.
You know, the last 10 years dovetails exactly with my time at the Mises Institute.
Right.
It's very, very strange to leave.
It's very, it's a very strange feeling, but nonetheless, it gives me a different perspective, perhaps.
And so looking back, I mean, clearly people like me were wrong about the degree to which big corporations were actually private.
Michael Rechtenwald, I think he explains this better than anyone.
He calls them governmentalities.
And we found through the Alex Berenson lawsuit, for example, through Elon Musk's disclosures after buying Twitter, we found the degree to which state officials were literally sending emails to tech companies demanding that they silence person A or person B.
So we always sort of knew this, but even 10 years ago, I think I was a bit naive to thinking about like, well, traffic cop has more power over me than Google or Amazon or something like that.
So the idea of the melding of state and corporate power has just, it's accelerated so quickly that maybe that caught us all off guard.
I mean, if you go back to the early 2000s, we were worried and rightfully so about George W. Bush.
We were worried about Department of Homeland Security and TSA and the Patriot Act.
We were worried about Wolfowitz and Rumsfield and Cheney and their insane desire to go crush and blow up a cobbled together country called Iraq.
We were worried about the John Yu and the unitary executive doctrine, which is quite frightening.
We were worried about renditions and black sites and waterboarding.
And we were right to be worried about all those things.
That was a very evil period in the United States.
And so that it's not long after that, maybe during the peak of the W. Bush years, Lou Rockwell came out with this book, Red State Fascism.
And that was sort of the libertarian focus at the time.
And it makes sense.
Libertarians generally are opposed to whoever's in power politically.
So that, but you fast forward to today, and I don't think we would ever have maybe thought that progressives would so quickly embrace the melding of corporate and state power, so quickly jettison things like free speech, free association, health freedom, all kinds of things.
So, you know, the change has just been very, very rapid.
And so libertarians, if you look at, I think libertarians in general, Libertarian Party, boy, sometimes you just read these tweets and it sounds like 1985 boomer constitutionalism or something.
I mean, it's just horrible, just absolutely horrible.
And then you think how a single individual like Joe Rogan, who's basically, yeah, I mean, Joe Rogan has money and a Spotify deal.
And so he has a nice studio, but it's basically a dude in front of a mic.
I mean, that's basically Joe Rogan with some guess.
It could be very in a modest basement or it could be in his studio, Texas, but it's the same thing qualitatively.
I mean, Joe Rogan has far more effect on what's happening in the United States and people's attitudes than, let's say, the entire Brookings institution, which probably has an $80 to $100 million annual budget, 100 or 200 PhDs sitting around, you know, 140 IQs or 150 IQs writing crazy papers or something.
I mean, you know, look, folks, this is guerrilla warfare.
And it's, you know, let's hope it doesn't become something where it's increasingly in the streets.
Let's hope it, you know, it's hearts and minds persuasion.
Let's hope we're still in the area of persuasion.
But nonetheless, I mean, so many things have changed so rapidly.
And the failure of libertarians to adapt, first of all, just to Trump was really embarrassing.
Trump had to happen.
Donald Trump had to happen.
The Bush and Clinton crime families, the inevitability, the progressive arc of Hillary, all that had to be stopped.
That was job one.
What Trump did, his policies, his personnel were a separate story.
And the fact that so many libertarians still miss that.
And the other thing that so many libertarians egregiously miss is that unlike that red state fascism of the W area, overwhelmingly today, the left is worse than the right by far, not only in terms of what they actually believe, which are insane things, but in their ability to oppose those beliefs through politics, through corporations, through media, through pop culture, through the arts, you name it.
Academia, top to bottom, run by progressive.
Hell, the Roman Catholic Church, all the mainline Protestant denominations, all the main synagogues, all run by progressives.
So this idea that, you know, there are Nazis in America or proud boys or something.
Yeah, somewhere in the woods in Mississippi, there's some knuckleheads running around.
But at your kid's junior high, there is a Birkenstock wearing a teacher with short gray, sensible haircut who is an absolute outright authoritarian talking to your kid about cutting off as you know what.
Yeah.
Okay.
So libertarians with their fetish for assisting they're neither left nor right completely missed the importance of state and corporate power.
They completely missed the sh the progressive triumph and they completely miss culture.
And so if you're Walter Block saying culture schmeltshir, I love Walter Block.
I love him to death.
He's a dear, dear man, but he's just terrible on this stuff.
Yeah, listen, man, because that's it.
To me, the biggest one is the cultural thing.
And that's why I think it's so, it's so crazy to me when people still say, they'll still say, oh, libertarians need to stay out of these culture wars.
You know, don't get caught up in these issues.
They're all distractions or something like that.
And it's like, yeah, a lot of them are distractions, but and it is true that very powerful people like culture wars because they'd rather you be fighting those than fighting against, you know, their entrenched power.
But that doesn't mean it's not important.
And like to me, this is the biggest thing that I personally had a blind spot for.
And that I think in general, libertarians had a huge blind spot in.
And, you know, Walter Block is, I love Walter Block.
I've learned a lot from him.
And every time I've met him, he's just been such a sweet, funny, like great person.
Love him.
And I think philosophically, I think he's right.
I think it is true on a theoretical level that libertarianism is kind of its own thing.
Like I do like get that point, but that's not actually, that doesn't contradict any of what you just said.
And that doesn't, that doesn't mean that therefore the left and right in 2023 must be equally bad or equally as much of a threat to me and my family.
Like that just doesn't logically follow.
And to me, one of the things that's been really eye-opening, particularly over the last few years for me personally, is that like I moved from the upper west side of Manhattan into, I mean, I'm still in a blue state in New Jersey, but I'm in a very red area.
Like I'm in a very red town.
In my town, you drive around and you see, you know, Trump won in 2020 signs.
And one, like to me, while politically speaking, I'm sure I'd have tons of disagreements with that person.
This is just one person who has that sign up, but there's, but you see Trump signs here.
But there was a thing that like We moved out early in 2020 when I kind of saw the handwriting on the wall, like this is not going to be the place to be.
And when I would go back, because my mother still lives there, so I go back all the time.
I was there yesterday.
And throughout, they're a little bit better now, but throughout the pandemic, I mean, I'm talking in late 2021 and 2022, I'd take my daughter to the playground down the block from my mother's house.
And like the other parents had their three-year-olds in masks.
And they're like looking at you like you're the jerk for not having your kid in masks.
And even moving to this red area of a blue state from the very beginning, it was like everyone was like, we're not doing this.
We're just not doing this.
And we're going to raise our kids normally.
And like that, to me is so much more important than any political difference that I might have with any of these people.
Like, really, who cares?
At the end of the day, my view is that this whole political thing shouldn't exist and it shouldn't be something we even think about.
So who really cares?
What I care about is giving my kids a normal life.
That's like very important to me.
And it also made me realize that it wasn't even really about the laws on the books because I'm here in Jersey.
We had all the crazy laws on the books.
It's just the town I was in.
It was like, yeah, we're not doing it.
No one cares.
No one cares if you wear a mask in this store or not.
So just come in without a mask.
Yes, technically there was a mask mandate by the state, but no one cared.
And it really was eye-opening for me that I was like, whoa, like the cultural component of this is like the whole game.
And there's the only one we can really affect anyway.
So how would we ever choose to not participate in that?
It just, it's, it's insanity.
Well, that's what we call Irish democracy.
Right.
Yeah.
The law is what authorities do about it.
By definition, if the, if you're on the interstate and it says the speed limit 65 and everyone's going 80, that means the speed limit's 81.
The speed limit's the speed at which you get pulled over.
So, you know, when you move to Jersey, you're Jewish-Irish, Dave.
You're Jewish-Irish now.
And, you know, look, I mean, this is, this is just, I think, I hope in part what the Mises Institute stands for, along with, of course, being Rothbardian, being willing to consider anarcho-capitalism, at least on the theoretical plane, where a lot of libertarian organizations wouldn't touch that, being willing to embrace culture, family, religion, whatever it might be as pillars of a free society, civil society.
I hope the Mises Institute stands for all that.
But maybe the important lesson here is what people, how people live is far more important than their professed political or economic beliefs.
If you have a nice, quiet, socialist family next door to you, their kids are great.
They keep up their yard.
They work hard.
They pay their taxes.
And at night, they read Lead Trotsky or something.
That's better than having some Hoppy and Rothbardians who don't keep their house up, live next door, stay up till three in the morning blasting, you know, death metal or whatever, and coming over and knocking on your door and wanting to borrow money because Dave should like them because they're hoppyans.
So what people do matters more than what they say.
You know, that's just the way it is.
But the fact that you had the freedom to move, that we have internal migration is really interesting because it allows you to vote with your feet to an extent.
And that means Dave is paying taxes to your new municipality, your county, whatever.
You're buying groceries there.
You're going to the restaurant there.
You're doing whatever.
Whatever.
I don't know what Dave Smith Inc. entails.
I have a little knowledge of what being Todd Woods entails.
I have no idea what being Dave's feels, but it looks like there's a whole web of bullshit associated with it.
Voting With Your Feet00:15:58
There sure is.
Yes.
I'll call your wife for confirmation.
And, you know, it's just, it's interesting.
People who can are going to vote with their feet.
And that is the great migration that was happening even before COVID that's accelerated.
And that's soft secession, baby.
It's a beautiful thing.
Yeah.
I mean, we were, we were having in 2022, I'd say, me and my wife were having serious talks about whether or not we'd have to like go to Texas or Florida.
Like I was at a point where I was like, man, if in a year this is still insane here, we may have to conclude at some point that there's just no raising kids here and we'd have to do that.
Now, we didn't go that far because it did seem like things got a little bit better.
And there are, there's ties, you know, or like go to New Hampshire or something.
I don't know.
My New Hampshire people will be pissed off at me if I didn't mention that as a possibility.
We were thinking about that too.
But, you know, we got my kids' grandparents are here.
My son's cardiologist is here.
Like very important things that are like, I really would like to stay close to.
But it was getting to a point there.
And yeah, I think you're absolutely right that I thank God that option is at least there, at least for those of us who, you know, have that option.
The thing to me that I've also woken up to about where libertarians really failed over the last few years.
And it really is, it's, okay, I'm, I'm going to struggle to describe this without using the word autism.
But just when I say that, I understand that's not exactly literally autism, although at times it is.
But there is this, like I, one of the things where I've really changed, and I think you kind of touched on something similar to this when you were on Tom Wood's show recently, is that I think I would have, and I guess on some level, I still do.
I'm really into the like arguments of anarcho-capitalism, how an anarchist society could work.
I would be very interested, say, 10 years ago, in debating a debate on minarchy versus anarchy.
And I've watched and listened to tons of them and I'd be fascinated by it.
I remember just recently, somebody challenged me to a minarchy versus anarchy debate.
And I remember thinking to myself, I just, it would be so embarrassing to do that debate right now.
Like, what world are you living in that you would even sit down and talk about minarchy versus anarchy?
It's like counting the number of angels dancing on a pen.
Like, what?
The world is falling apart, man.
And like, and I remember seeing this.
It was very eye-opening during COVID, like at the beginning when the lockdowns were happening.
And I'm just, you know, furiously podcasting because that's all I could do.
And so all my comedy gigs are done where I'm like, you know what?
I can support my family through my podcast.
I better be like doing a ton of them.
And it's everything was about COVID.
I mean, that was like all there was to talk about.
And then I would see other libertarians were like doing podcasts on other theoretical subjects.
And it's like, me and Tom would always joke about this, like on the phone that you'd see the Libertarian Party, the old guard before the Mises caucus guys took that thing over.
They'd be like tweeting about like civil asset forfeiture.
It was like the country's locked down.
And there is something about that that I don't know.
It just seems kind of autistic to me.
Like it's like, do you not, are you not grappling with the moment that we're living through?
Because something really big is happening here.
And we're still talking about like, well, if there was a private sidewalk and then someone else owned the other sidewalk, here's how there could be a private court that could mediate disputes between that.
Like this, this just seems crazy and so removed from reality.
And to me, in the same way of like, oh, we have nothing to say about the culture just seems so removed from reality given the current circumstances we're living through.
Yeah, and RFK Jr. is better on the single biggest domestic civil liberties issue of the last, at least since 9-11, libertarian orgs.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
I said, oh, I see the other day someone on Twitter is like, was saying something about him being bad on guns.
And they're like, this is the guy you guys are being kind to.
And it's like, guys, he's been great on COVID and Ukraine.
That's really, that's so much.
That is so much better than someone who's great on everything except COVID in Ukraine.
Like that by magnitudes of order, it is so much better for you to be good on those two things than to be good on everything else except those two things.
Yeah, it's strange times make for strange bedfellows.
And you go back to the calculus now, where we say politics has dropped its pretenses, that politicians are no longer pretending, then you have to look at candidates differently.
I think the starting point, starting analysis is, does RFK Jr. hate my guts?
And based on what I've seen of him so far, the answer is no.
I got that same vibe from Tulsi Gabbard.
People would say to him, oh, she used to be a member of the CFR.
Yeah, okay.
I mean, I hate to say it, but we have to shift our calculations for the time.
Remember, politics is not about principle.
Politics is a strategic or tactical approach.
It's not philosophical or principled almost by definition.
So for the same reason I cheered Trump over Hillary, I would cheer RFK Jr. over Biden because that's where we are.
And none of that has anything to do with, let's say, the ethics of liberty from Rothbard or whatever it might be.
We have to acknowledge where we are.
Yeah.
And if you really care about the ideas in ethics of liberty, as both of us do, then it's kind of incumbent on you to see how they can, you know, like actually inter, you know, relate with the real world.
And if you're, if you're not dealing with the real world, then it's like, how much do you really care about these ideas?
Because the ideas only matter to the extent that they can be applied.
That to me was always the appeal of libertarianism is that it wasn't this communist nonsense, that these ideas actually work in practice.
But yeah, that's right.
I mean, RFK, it's incredible that this guy's running.
Thank God he's in the race.
If it wasn't for him, it would just be Joe Biden running against that goofy Marion Williamson woman or whatever.
Now, to the extent that his voice is heard, we're going to be talking about, oh, actually, what were the negative health effects of the COVID shot that they were mandating across the entire population?
Oh, what actually is going on in this war in Ukraine?
It's not at all what the corporate press is selling it as.
Those are the things I want to be discussed.
So like, why would I not root for that?
Why would I not like, you know, think that this is wonderful that maybe somebody can really upset the order right now, which is very, very dangerous.
And in a much more like a much more personal way than ever before.
Like that you're actually looking at this and you're like, I'm thinking, and I'm sure you are too, you're like, what the hell type of society are my kids going to be living in when they're, you know, in their 20s, 30s, 40s?
Like, what is that going to look like?
Yeah, I'll take what we have and, you know, be happy if something a little bit better comes along.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Well, I've heard commentators on both the left and the right speak very dismissively of RFK Jr.'s chances over the last couple of days, comparing him to Marianne Williamson or Jill Stein or someone like that.
Look, he's way ahead of where Trump was when Trump came down that elevator that day.
I think RFK is 19 or 20% in a purely Democratic poll.
So this idea that he can't win, well, he probably can't, but you certainly would have said that of Trump.
I mean, people underestimate this.
So what will happen is his campaign will emerge through social media, and it's already happening.
I've already seen him on a bunch of podcasts because he knows that the mainstream media is not going to cover him and the Democratic Party is not going to allow him to debate.
So either he or some people around him already know the way he's got to go.
And let's not forget, Trump had no infrastructure.
Trump didn't have precinct chairs.
He didn't have get out the vote stuff.
He didn't have that county-by-county infrastructure that Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or somebody would have absolutely needed to beat Hillary Clinton.
He just went out there and was Trump all day long.
And that reverberated through social media.
Social media is a lot more advanced than it was in 2016.
But nonetheless, boy, oh boy, everything now has changed.
The whole political calculus has changed.
And I wouldn't be dismissing anybody.
I also think that Biden would beat Trump if that's the race.
I mean, he beat him last time.
I don't see why he wouldn't beat him again, perhaps by more.
I mean, we've seen that this is not about the quality of the candidates.
Everybody knows what Joe Biden is.
This is an existential tribal thing now.
And what Trump evokes in people who dislike him is very powerful and very visceral.
And as much as I like my buddy Thoe Bishop, I'm not sure I'm 100% sold that DeSantis plays well outside of Florida.
He's not charismatic, not the greatest orator.
And the fact that he can point to sort of nuts and bolts legislative accomplishments in Florida, yeah, I mean, that might have worked 30 years ago, but I don't think that works anymore now.
People are looking for their team.
And it's going to be, it's going to be a tremendous harm ritual for the United States to go through another presidential election over the next 18 months.
I mean, in a country this divided, this fraught, with the economy this shaky, all sorts of bank failures, the last thing we need, we got to suspend this stupid election.
My God, I mean, these rituals that we go through.
And think of what COVID and Trump did to families, to marriages.
People broke up over this stuff.
Brothers and sisters not talking to each other over the vax.
Spouses divorced.
I mean, it's pretty incredible.
People not speaking to their parents because, you know, grandpa watched this Fox News and voted for Trump.
I mean, that's, again, politics has dropped its pretenses.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And it's something to see that kind of that happen, to live through it, go get so accelerated, you know, has been really wild to watch.
I also think that there's something, and this kind of ties into the libertarians being kind of goofy on these cultural issues, is that, you know, what is very, you know, intertwined with all of this is the fact that there has been this, this like kind of concerted effort over the last decade to politicize everything.
And this, this push is only happening from one of the sides.
Like it's not like the left and the right are both trying to politicize everything.
It's like that for the most part, I mean, don't get me wrong, there are some like the pushing of like military stuff in like football.
That's been going on for a while.
And I think they actually had some like defense contracts with the NFL and stuff like that.
But in general, it's like if you just turn on your television, which I rarely do these days, I'm like all on the internet.
But if you, on the rare occasion that you just watch something like on television and watch like the network commercials, it's everything is like politicized every inch of your life.
And for most people, I mean, it's like if they work at a big corporation, their job is completely politicized.
Their sporting events are completely politicized.
They're everything, everything.
There's like a gay pride flag on their cereal box in the morning, you know?
And for libertarians to not think, to not oppose that, when really so much of libertarianism is about that, if you believe in a state at all, you believe it should be incredibly tiny and really not play any role.
It should just be some like night watchman state or something like that, or you're more of the anarchist type and you don't think it should exist at all.
But the idea of politicizing everything is always the game plan of like really totalitarian states.
So why would we not oppose that?
And it's been, it's been something to see that happen to where like, you know, I don't know, having, you know, calling your five-year-old son a boy seems to be a political statement today.
Well, getting between parents and children has always been a political goal of progressives.
And so when they politicize everything, then they turn around and claim that they're not being political.
They're just being nice or inclusive.
So you say, well, we're going to have, you know, whatever LGBT discussion, reading, Drag Queen Story or whatever at a public school.
Okay, well, you say, I don't want that.
That's political.
They say, oh, no, no, that's not political.
That's just being a good person.
That's just being inclusive.
So they politicized sex, sexuality, sexual preference.
And then when someone objects to that on political grounds, they say it's not political.
So it's really a neat trick.
It's sort of a, it's a real Joseph Heller.
It's just an absolute catch-22 for conservatives.
When it comes to culture wars, you have to ask who's imposing and across government, media, academia, pop culture.
Again, if trans and drag have existed as subcultures in basically all human societies, okay?
Trans and drag have always been a thing.
So why is there now this culture war this battle?
Well, it's because they became politicized and activists said, well, trans and drag have to be brought up out of being a subculture and mainstreamed.
And everybody has to be beaten over the head with this until they not only acquiesce to it, but basically are willing to praise it and say it's great.
And so when someone pushes back on that, they say, well, stop fighting a culture war.
Let's focus on marginal tax rates or something.
Trans Culture War00:07:57
You know, I think that's disingenuous, to put it mildly.
And when Budweiser had its kerfuffle with this trans person.
advertising campaign, which it turns out wasn't really an advertising campaign.
It was just they put this person on a can or, you know, see, it was something pretty minor, but nonetheless, you know, I think we should object to that.
I think people should just be able to enjoy their Budweiser in peace without being browbeaten because it feels very Soviet.
It feels like a struggle section, like we all have to look at each other and nod.
Yes, trans person on beer can is good, even if we don't think it's good.
And so freedom takes on a lot of dimensions.
It's not as simple as state versus private as we once thought, for one.
It's not as simple as consensual uber allis that conset makes everything good and healthy in society.
That's not true because sometimes things can change.
And so the idea here is what's a strange liberty?
Everybody in America claims to be for liberty.
You go talk to a left progressive, you go talk to a neocon, you go talk to libertarian.
I'm for liberty.
I'm a libertarian.
Libertarian means someone who's for liberty.
But if we drill down a little bit, we'll find that the left progressive vision says, well, liberty is a bunch of positive rights.
You have to be free from economic constraints.
You should have medicine and healthcare provided for you.
You should have housing.
You should have food.
You should have free education.
And without all these things, if you have to worry about making a living, you're not truly free.
Of course, that's very Marxist.
So the neocon right comes along and says, freedom is when you adopt or we impose Jeffersonian constitutional republicanism on your country and will bomb you, Afghanistan, if you don't.
You know, again, this idea that something has to be imposed, that there is this Francis Fukuyama end of history kind of government that ought to prevail over the entire world.
So we need to have a universal set of political doctrines for everyone, everywhere, at all times.
Okay, that's to me is a strange liberty.
And then you get to libertarians and they come along and they're channeling really, I named the book A Strange Liberty after Henry David Thoreau.
He wrote the famous essay, Walden.
And he says, you know, when I'm out in nature or when I'm out by Walden Pond, I feel a strange liberty.
And what he means is he was away from society.
He didn't have to worry about social interaction or his fellow human beings.
And the whole transcendentalist literary movement, people like Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, was that, you know, we need to sort of overcome a lot of our shackles as humans.
A lot of those are social strictures and we need to rethink our relationship not only to other people, but to ourselves.
And so we see that also in transgenderism today, this idea that we can overcome human nature or even our natural bodies.
And so libertarians have kind of adopted this.
They kind of view things the way Thoreau did, which is liberty means liberation theology.
It means we are free of all these social constraints.
And it's just sort of live and let live.
If it feels good, do it.
So to me, libertarianism took a wrong turn away from property and contract towards what we might call personal liberty.
And so, you know, the left socialists, the right neoconservatives, and even the libertarians all have a strange kind of liberty in mind that I don't think really dovetails with human nature at the end of the day.
So that was my attempt to lift something, to borrow something from Thoreau and challenge what we think of as liberty.
If liberty is nothing more and nothing less than the absence of the state or the absence of state coercion, then all kinds of things can result from that.
All kinds of things, all kinds of voluntary social structures can result for that.
When you leave human beings alone and see what they do, and some of those might not be the kind of arrangements that poor Henry David Thoreau wants to see.
In other words, some people like to do things like go to church and have 10 kids with their liberty.
And somehow we lost sight of that.
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.
And I think that there's, well, I'm really glad that you wrote the book.
I really, really enjoyed it.
I think all of these ideas are really important for particularly for people in the libertarian camp to grapple with.
Because as you said, we live in strange times.
A lot is happening at once.
And it's important that we think about these things if we're going to have any impact.
And of course, I think our impact is still sorely needed.
I think libertarians have a lot to say about a lot of very important issues, the warfare state and the Federal Reserve and the regulatory state and all of the security state, all of these things.
But if we don't grapple with some of these issues, I don't think we're going to have an impact.
And I think it's important that we do and we do.
So, all right, anything in closing that you'd like to say there, Jeff?
I should say before we wrap this up that, of course, I was very sad to hear that you were leaving the Mises Institute, but it's like everything else in life.
There's always chapters.
And when one page turns, the next chapter begins.
So thank you for everything you did there over the last decade.
I think you were the absolute best spokesman for that wonderful institution that we could have possibly had.
So I was very grateful to you for that decade.
And of course, I met you over the last few years and have gotten to know you.
And just think you're doing great stuff.
And I wish you the best of luck in your next chapter.
What's the name of the company that you're at now, the metals company?
Well, it's called monetary metals.
And so the idea is pretty simple.
The execution is difficult like so many things in life.
But so there's tens of thousands of metric tons of gold sitting around all over the world.
Some of it's in central banks.
Some of it's in private vaults.
Some of it's in people's houses.
Some of it's in people's safety deposit boxes.
It's all just sitting there.
And so the idea is, you know, gold has always worked when you let people.
It's always worked as money for thousands of years.
And of course, now we have the dollar and maybe down the road we'll have Bitcoin.
I like Bitcoin.
I've known Keith and Addison and monetary metal.
So the idea is like, well, what if we took all that gold that's sitting around and unlocked some of its use?
What if you could use that to finance production companies?
You know, either lease it or have it in a bond and pull some of that moneyness out of it.
So it's a fascinating idea.
You know, we think almost everyone everywhere in the world, if they want to finance, let's say a startup company, they have to get dollars.
I mean, there's a few countries where you use the local currency, but generally speaking, you're getting U.S. dollars to do that.
And that comes with all kinds of, as you know, comes with all kinds of risks.
Could gold finance production?
That's a pretty interesting question.
So we're working on it.
Well, that is a very interesting question, and I hope the answer is yes.
So, best of luck with all that stuff.
Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time.
Everybody, make sure, go pick up A Strange Liberty: Politics Drops Its Pretenses.
Really, really great read.
Really, really, as everything you do, Jeff, just very thoughtful, very interesting, and very thought-provoking.