Keith Knight and James Smith dissect the "unavoidable contradiction" in progressivism, where state monopolies on healthcare and education violate the non-aggression principle while claiming to oppose private ones. They critique coercive taxation, regulatory capture, and specific failures like the Kansas City health department's bleach incident, contrasting voluntary charity with forced welfare. The conversation shifts to the 2024 New Hampshire primary, where Knight supports Trump over Nikki Haley as a break from neoconservatism despite his war record, advocating for peace with regimes like Maoist China. Ultimately, referencing Churchill's warning on statism, they argue that true compassion requires dismantling the domestic empire rather than expanding state power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Funding the Ku Klux Klan00:13:32
Fill her up.
You are listening to the gas human.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm very excited for today's episode.
We have joining the podcast once again, one of the brightest young minds in the liberty movement, Keith Knight.
You guys know him, of course, from his work at the Libertarian Institute.
He is the author of the Voluntarist Handbook and most recently, the author of Domestic Imperialism, Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism.
What's up, Keith?
How are you, sir?
I am doing very well.
I got news today that Jank Uger actually changed his mind from the interview that I had with him some time ago.
I said, all right, you concede that, you know, the state is provoking war with Russia, China, Iran.
You still think people should be forced to fund that coercively?
And he goes, yeah, that's how democracy works.
And just today, I saw a video.
He goes, if they try pushing the Palestinians into Egypt, I'm just not going to pay taxes.
So that is great news.
Everything's going well here.
What's happening with you?
That is, that is really something though, right?
So it's, I guess if it's just, I mean, look, God, I guess I should just celebrate that, but my, my libertarian autistic instincts are to go, so that's where you drew the line, huh?
Like it was fine.
Everything else was fine, but this was the one.
But hey, you know what?
You take progress where you can get it, I suppose.
Always, brother, always.
And we got Javier Millay, too.
There's so much to be optimistic about.
So, okay, so I just recorded earlier today an episode where I responded to Crystal Ball, who had a long monologue criticizing Javier Malay's speech at the WEF in Davos there.
And I'll tell you, I had just read your book this week, and there was something about just having read your book and talking about this progressive leftist Crystal Ball, who I actually do like.
Like not somebody I hate, like somebody who look, she's had in on her show in the last month, she's had Scott Horton and Daryl Cooper and Norman Finkelstein, and she's been really good on this conflict in Israel.
So it's not like I, but she was talking about his economics and it's just like so frustrating.
And it just brings me back.
I don't know why I've just been thinking about this since reading your book and getting ready to do this episode and doing that episode, where it does bring me back because much like you, I kind of came from the left.
And there is something that I think a lot of libertarians experience where you start off as kind of a left-wing person and then you come in contact with Messesian, Rothbardian economics and, you know, theoretical arguments.
And you're like, oh, this is so great.
I can go back and share this with all these left-wingers.
And then there's something just very frustrating about the ones who just won't accept this that you're like, but wait, you're wrong.
You're wrong and you know it.
And so anyway, I will say, I don't want to rant too long before I let you talk about this, but I get asked all the time.
Like I constantly get people asking me, hey, if someone's interested in libertarianism, what's a book they could read?
What's like your introductory, your introductory book or something like that?
And I'll, I'll, you know, I always have like several answers, like anatomy of the state, war, peace, and the state, but I will tell you that this, this is the book you just wrote is really great, particularly if you're coming at it from the left side of things.
It's a great primer on why you should start considering libertarianism.
And so I put this right up there, domestic imperialism.
If some, if you're coming at it from the progressive point of view, if you have a progressive or a left-wing friend or family member or something like that who's at least willing to like read something, it's not a very daunting read.
You made it a very easy kind of digestible thing.
And it really hits on just a few key issues that I think are going to, for people who read it, are going to be a thorn in their side that will gnaw at them for a while.
And they'll go, yeah, that was a good point.
Well, and if even if they're not willing to spend the money, Libertarian Institute has a free PDF right on the website.
So anyone can get this.
The premise is that the relationship between governments and their domestic population, the domestic population is technically the group that the government is at war with, but has fully surrendered and waved the white flag.
So if you look at all of the wars that are going on, really, they're just waiting for the domestic population of those areas to surrender so they could usher in peace, stability, and install a very friendly regime.
So if anyone is against the concept of imperialism, whether it's coming from Washington, D.C. or Phoenix or Britain or Australia, there's no reason that they should advocate anything like a government the size we have now, let alone any state in general.
But it really gets to the core when the progressive is advocating the criminalization of capitalist acts between consenting adults because their whole thing is empowering the individual and we need to empower the masses.
So their vision of how this looks is once every four years, the person gets a one in like 10 million votes.
Allegedly, the votes are counted.
And it necessarily criminalizes tons of jobs through occupational licensing.
Often has a state which requires you to fund it coercively through taxation.
A lot of states, even ones they like, whether it's Zelensky or Benjamin Netanyahu in some cases, will have military conscription.
So things that actually make a difference in your life, they want to put tons of barriers in from actually empowering individuals.
Whereas something is totally abstract, which no one has any incentive to get informed in.
You could spend thousands of hours just trying to understand agricultural subsidies.
And at the end of the day, you get a one in 10 million vote.
And by the time like 3% of the votes are counted, they're already calling it a victory for one side.
So that's my message to Crystal Ball, who I love just as much as you do, that if you really want to empower people, decriminalize all economic activity between consenting adults.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And then on top of that, I mean, it's not even just that like they'll, you know, whatever say you have in these elections, but even if you vote for the guy and let's say democracy works perfectly and you vote for the guy who says the thing that you want, they could just lie.
They could just lie and then just not do it, which we say they could end up not closing Guantanamo Bay.
Imagine, imagine that.
Yeah, unbelievable.
I have a citation in here from, I want to say the Washington Times research along with the intercept that Barack Obama's drone program in a five-month period where they got access to the documents killed nine out of every 10 people killed were not the intended target.
And of course, to be the intended target, they do something like place six degrees from Osama bin Laden.
So even intended target usually just means military age male, 16 or older.
Now, anyone who advocates anything that relates to giving this state more money and more power is kind of akin to saying, well, you know, the Ku Klux Klan does some bad things, but overall, if we give them more money and more power, they will do good things.
And the Klan has like 5,000 deaths in its history.
The government does that constantly.
And it's absolutely far worse.
So thank you for being against forced cotton picking 150 years ago.
Very brave.
But when it comes to the mass murdering psychopaths today, the Lindsey Grahams of the world, who end up taking the power that the progressives proudly give the state, it unfortunately just runs completely dry when they're so passionate against Jim Crow, but want this mass murdering government to have more money and more regulatory powers.
Yeah, 100%.
By the way, I just want to say that as we're recording this ad, it is, it's 8 p.m. on Tuesday, the 23rd.
And so we're just getting results from the New Hampshire primary in.
As of right now, Donald Trump is doing very well.
And so anyway, we'll talk about this.
Oh, you know what?
Here, listen, I want to talk about your book a whole bunch more, but it was just announced Donald Trump was called the winner with 18% reporting.
He's up by about 10% on Nikki Haley right now, 54.3 for Donald Trump, 44.7 for Nikki Haley, nothing for anybody else, basically.
So anyway, I want to get right back into this book, but it does.
And I will say, I was talking to Brian about this before.
I've been a political junkie for many years now.
I never exactly understand the science of when they call these things versus how like sometimes it gets called at 3%, sometimes it's 78%.
And one guy's got a big lead, but they still don't call it.
But it does look like Donald Trump has been called the victor.
Anyway, let's talk about the book a little bit more.
And then me and you will talk about politics a little bit in this presidential election, because I do think I always value your opinion on that.
But anyway, back to what you were saying.
It is, this is one of the, you know, most kind of important insights into the, what you can really only describe as the religion of statism.
Whereas, as you said, if it was the Ku Klux Klan or if it was any private business, like if you just found out that there was a private business that was like shoemakers and you were like, yeah, they make really good shoes and people need shoes.
And I love that.
And you found out that they had like kidnapped three women and were holding them in, you know, the attic and they had killed two people who were coming looking for these women.
And but you were like, you know, they've been in business 15 years.
It's only three women they've killed.
I still think I should go and buy shoes from them because they're so good at making shoes.
Like everybody else would just be like, that's insane.
Like you found out they killed a few people and they were running this racket and they have women tied up upstairs.
How could you ever do business with them again?
Yet when it's the government, leftists can sit here and say no war for oil, but they should give everybody health care.
Like they can say the same organization that you're telling me is fighting a war for oil.
I'm not even saying that's exactly why we fight the wars.
I'm saying that's what leftists say.
They'll say they lie us into a war just for these resources, but also we should raise taxes on rich people.
It really is like an unbelievable thing that you could hold both of these views together.
And there is sort of what I guess you could call, I don't know, the healthcare to destruction of Yemen pipeline, where they can justify giving the state all this money and all this power for all these great things.
Yet it's the same state that claims a right to coercively fund operations, which you are opposed to.
The right to print money.
This makes all these wars and mass murder campaigns more likely to happen.
The right to conscript.
They have compulsory education laws, which more or less indoctrinate the civilian population into justifying the state's atrocities.
And then the legal double standard.
I cite Lori Calhoun in the book where she mentions the August 29th of 2021 murder of seven children and 10 civilians by Joe Biden in Kabul, Afghanistan.
There was never a discussion about, oh, I think Biden might go to jail for this one.
Anytime there is a shortcoming that occurs in the private sector, might have to completely abolish capitalism.
State constantly commits atrocities.
Well, there's an election coming up and, oh, Nikki Haley's running.
I guess she's allowed to run.
Yeah, this woman who didn't even know what the civil war was.
I remember talking about that strike in Afghanistan when it happened.
And it's like, it's not even like there's not a discussion over Joe Biden going to jail.
There's not even a discussion over like an operator being docked a week of pay.
Like there's just nothing.
And no one's even talking about that.
Like, does anybody get any, I mean, literally.
And I know, obviously, this is from a different time that my kids would never be involved in this, but I remember, you know, I talked to my mother-in-law and my father-in-law.
They both went to Catholic school when they were kids and they would get like hit over the wrist with rulers for like not writing cursive perfectly.
And yet when these people just murder babies, there's nothing.
There's not even a discussion of anything.
Ending the Fed's Grip00:02:26
Like not, there's not any, you don't get suspended without pay.
You don't get a pay decrease.
You don't appear in front of like a hearing.
Nothing.
It's just a, they go, whoopsie.
And that's that.
Yes.
And that's, and that's why having any free market approach is so vitally important because you're always going to have bad people who do evil things.
At least in the voluntary sector, you can voluntarily disassociate with people who commit these atrocities.
Not the case under statism.
And that's why it's far worse when the state is involved in any industry or any aspect of life.
Yeah.
No, that's exactly right.
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Corporate Interests Over Workers00:15:22
All right, let's get back into the show.
So let me ask you about the book.
When did you, obviously, I know you put out the voluntarist handbook, and that was a couple years ago.
And we had you on the podcast when you first did that.
And obviously, like your inspiration for that was like Michael Malice put out his book and the anarchist handbook.
And you were like, hey, I'd like to do a book like that, but just none of the lefties, like just the good, hardcore, like people who understand private property and stuff.
What was like, why did you decide to write this book or like, what was the inspiration behind it?
Well, it was just rage.
I actually remember the exact moment it was.
And I put it in the book.
So let me just read this short section.
This is a story out of Kansas City from 2018.
It says, the health department is speaking out after it poured bleach on food intended to be given to the homeless.
Nellie McCool, who helps run Free Hot Soup Kansas City, has been helping the homeless for years until Sunday.
Officers and health inspectors demanded we destroy our food and we were violating the health code violations by sharing meals with our friends, said McCool.
The department said the group wasn't following the law about serving the homeless.
Dr. Rex Archer, director of health for Kansas City, said they were notified back in a meeting in September that they needed to get a permit and they just outright said they refused to do that.
Rex Archer goes on to say, standard procedure in public health is to go ahead and pour bleach on the food so that people won't consume something that is dangerous.
So this is really separating the idea of, you know, tech, the state is an entity which violates the non-aggression principle and it's illegitimate.
When you actually see the most vulnerable people in society getting hurt under the justification of helping them and protecting them because the state has the justified right to regulate economic exchanges between consenting adults, once you really see the travesty that happens, I said, well, I got to make a speech or write a book about something on this because I was a progressive for so long.
And I just wish whenever, you know, I'll read 300 pages and find one little nugget of something that's interesting.
I go, God, I wish someone would have said that to me, you know, 50 Facebook posts ago.
I wouldn't have looked so stupid.
So that was my reason for writing it.
So any progressive, even conservatives, I think can learn a lot from the book can go to libertarianinstitute.org and check out the free PDF.
The second section is just a major collection of quotes that I've come across from probably 70 or 80 different books that I just think are really important for people to get an idea of.
Yeah, 100%.
And by the way, when I said before, it was a primer for people who like kind of come from the left who are interested in this.
I will also, that's true, but it's great for any libertarian should go read this book.
And even if you come from the right, read the book.
It's just a great way.
It's very concise and it's a great way to kind of sharpen what you already know, even if you're already a perfect libertarian.
Let me ask you this.
Why?
Because I don't think I've ever asked you this before and I've known you for quite a while now.
Why were you a progressive before you were a libertarian?
So probably one on the economic grounds that it's better to distribute things for free than to have people bear a cost in order to obtain them.
And second, it treats people equally.
So I thought, all right, I understand you know better now, but I'm saying at the time, this was your mindset.
On the first account, things are better when they're free.
The progressive immediately sees that if you say, don't complain about military spending, it's free.
The government pays for it.
Of course, they say, well, that's scary.
Those are scarce resources allocated, both dollars and amounts of steel, copper, aluminum, allocated away from peaceful activities to much more violent activities.
So immediately we see that the military is not free.
And for something like healthcare or schooling to be free, that would necessarily mean all the nurses, all the doctors, all the teachers don't get any pay.
All the construction workers who construct those buildings are just doing it out of the kindness of their heart, which is totally fine, but that's never what they're advocating.
What they mean by free is first the state gets to confiscate 30% of your income, threaten to cage you if you don't chip in, and then they'll provide a very, very low quality service and then never thank you for ever paying taxes.
That's another thing.
It makes people so ungrateful.
As I mentioned in the book, I've never been thanked by a cop or a soldier or a politician for all the taxes I've paid for for all these years.
Every single day in the voluntary sector, I'm thanked by people at Starbucks, IT companies, every single place I go.
So the state is constantly provoking poor will among good people.
Dude, there was, those were two.
This is why I love talking to you, Keith, because, and, and this is why everybody should go like follow Keith and follow all of his stuff, because you are so good.
You're so sound with the libertarian philosophy that even though I live in this world and I've been doing this forever and I'm one of the guys who's like known for being great at this, you literally just hit two things that were so great that I literally, I don't think I've thought of exactly the way you put them.
But first of all, it's like, yeah, well, how the, how are the cops in the military always asking us to thank them for their service?
And yet none of them ever say, hey, thanks for paying my salary.
Hey, thanks.
Thanks, boss.
Thanks for paying my salary.
None of them even think of it like that.
It's like, you don't even have a choice.
They just assume it's theirs.
Like it's not, hey, thanks for paying my salary and thanks for giving me better benefits and pension than any of you guys in the working class ever have.
That never comes up, right?
Like it's just the other way around.
You're expected to go, oh, thank you so much for your service.
Thanks for fighting in that war that we all agree was a stupid war to fight in.
By the way, I'm not like even trashing the guys there.
I think a lot of them were duped or bribed or whatever, but still, that's such a great point.
And the other point you made, that that's really excellent.
I don't think I've ever thought of it just like that.
That if you were to go to any progressive or left-leaning person and you were to say, hey, you know, we have all of the defense budget is just so great for creating jobs or something like that.
They'd immediately go, that's the military industrial complex.
And that's not, that doesn't make any sense.
But at the same time, I literally was just when Crystal Ball was criticizing Javier Malay, one of the things she said was, he's laying off workers.
He's laying off workers in Argentina.
And you're like, yeah, but what workers?
Like he's laying off government workers.
And I know she wouldn't say that if somebody was cutting down on workers at, you know, like whatever, if you were not paying for, if you were cutting all funding to, you know, Lockheed Martin or something like that, or if you were laying people off in the Pentagon, I know she wouldn't say that, but it's only, it is this weird disconnect for them where you totally get the argument.
Cause I've thought this a lot where there's this weird disconnect with progressives where like, if you say, it's like they do understand economics when it suits their interests.
So if you say, hey, we're going to tax cigarettes because we want less people to smoke cigarettes and we're going to subsidize green energy because we want more green energy.
It does seem like they kind of get like, okay, these kind of fundamentals of economics.
If you tax something, you get less of it.
If you subsidize something, you get more of it.
Okay.
But then at the same time, you go, hey, you know, we're taxing work.
and subsidizing unemployment.
Might these economic laws still follow, you know, to these things.
And then it's like, there's just this mental block.
Like, no, that can't possibly be right.
But obviously, if you accept it in one area, you have to accept it in another.
Yeah, I think Adam Smith's insight into the universal application of self-interest is important because the progressive will easily see this company is in it for themselves.
And it's probably true the company is just thinking about their interests.
So are the employees.
So are the workers.
And when those people, if any of them, get a job at the NSA, the CIA, or the Federal Reserve, they don't totally switch and start thinking about the masses who they couldn't even comprehend the wants of millions of masses, even if they were the nicest people on the planet.
So when the libertarian comes in with this understanding that humans are self-interested, then you move to which sort of social system do we want to harmonize individual self-interest with the greater good?
And the only answer that you could come up with is a free market economy, which allows consumers, employees, and producers to engage in these things and disengage when their benefits are not being received.
But the other thing about making things free is just even if you control the cost, that doesn't determine the quality.
So if we gave the Catholic Church or the Koch brothers or Gas Digital Network a blank check to provide people an education, well, the progressives would not exactly like what is going to be taught once all that funding is allocated to those organizations.
So whether it's going to people who are going to determine what healthcare is, there are people in the healthcare world who think the food pyramid represents a healthy diet.
So even when it comes to something like that, where grains are the primary thing you eat and all this wheat and stuff.
So even there, even in the pro-science, you know, objective measurements of things, you could say, well, education, yeah, people have their biases.
Well, healthcare, the same exact thing occurs as I'm sure you read Tom Woods' new book.
There was no correlation between states that severely locked down and states which didn't have lockdowns.
So anytime you're allocating funds toward a group, you're making them much more powerful and giving them a bigger say in society than you otherwise would.
You could clearly see this if we said we should give the Catholic Church a trillion dollars and then forgive all Catholic student loans.
You'd say, well, that's just an easy psychotic power grab from the Catholic Church so they could make people think the way they want to.
The same exact thing applies with the state.
So free is a lie.
Yeah, no, exactly.
And you know what's so funny about it is that if you imagined, so our point often will be that the difference between, say, the state and a corporation is what libertarians care about.
We'd say, well, the difference is that one initiates violence and the other doesn't, right?
So now we might say if a corporation is in bed with the state, that they're in bed with an organization, an organization that's initiating violence, but leave that aside.
Let's just say there's a corporation, you know, whatever, Nike or AT ⁇ T or some big company like that, Walmart, whatever.
And there are feel however you feel about them.
I'm sure both of us would have some things that we don't love about them.
I was just bitching the other day about how insane it is that like AT ⁇ T will do these things that like rip you off.
Like I just got a new phone, which I hate to do.
And they make the new phone a slightly different size than your old phone.
So you have to get a new case too.
You know, they do these things where it's like, ah, you got, you guys just got me for $1,200.
You got to get me for another 40 bucks.
Really?
You got to do this?
Okay, fine.
But okay, so there's lots of things we could complain about.
But if the government, let's say, was a corporation, meaning like they didn't, you weren't forced to pay your taxes or whatever.
And you weren't, you know, they didn't have the power of a government, but they were just a company the size of the government.
So this is a company now that spends over $6 trillion a year and has, you know, educates, like, has the vast majority of education and all these other things.
Leftists would hate them.
Like if they, it's almost like if you took away the worst part of them, which is that they force you to be a part of it, that you, no leftist could ever defend them possibly.
Where you go, hey, do you support the biggest corporation ever that educates more kids, you know, is in control of more education, is in control of more healthcare?
If it was just a private company doing the same thing they do, but minus the worst part of what they are, there'd be no leftist who could defend them.
Yet somehow, because they have this power to initiate violence, they do.
It's really wild.
And even so, if you have major corporations, the last thing you'd want is a state that has the power to tax and a central bank, which those corporations have every incentive to co-opt.
It's generally referred to as regulatory capture.
But even in the voluntary sector, we see major companies like Kodak, Blockbuster, Sears.
MySpace was the biggest thing in the world when I was in middle school.
They go out of business because consumers, you know, find value in other things.
So it's not like, well, the rich just stay richer.
I see.
The examples, by the way, I know you're a little bit younger than me, but so like Blockbuster being your example or whatever, but dude, like you mentioned, Kodak.
Dude, when I was a kid, Kodak was the name in film and they were the biggest thing in cameras.
And they made a decision when the digital cameras came out.
They were like, we're not going to go to digital.
Our thing is film.
And that's our area.
And we're not moving into this new thing.
We're going to stick with where we're.
And they went from being the biggest player to being irrelevant.
And there were, that was, I mean, I remember living through Tower Records, you know, like these record stores.
I, you know, I, I remember so many of these things.
And by the way, do you know just a note on Blockbuster that Netflix offered to sell to Blockbuster multiple times and Blockbuster turned them down every time they went, dude, what you're sending CD, you're sending DVDs in the mail.
People can come get their DVDs right here from us at the store.
We don't need to buy you.
It was even when you're the most powerful in the market, if you don't anticipate the next thing that's going to serve customers better, you can go from being the most powerful to being out of business.
Can you, how amazing would that be if there was any force like that within the government where you go, oh, if you're John McCain and you're wrong about everything constantly, you will be fired.
The Skincare Transformation00:03:15
Nope.
Just doesn't exist in the public sector.
Not only that, he's loved by members of both parties now.
In 2008, he was the terrible racist who wouldn't give us our first black president.
And now he's loved by both sides, of course.
And notice how in order the incentive structure within getting rich in government versus getting rich in the voluntary sector in the free market.
Well, we have tons of examples.
Kodak is one.
George Eastman didn't invent the phone, but he made the phone.
Not the phone, the camera.
Well, he didn't invent this, but he made this much more efficient in the production process, which lowered the cost and gave access to millions of people who never would have ever had access to a camera.
John D. Rockefeller did this with access to oil.
Cornelius Vanderbilt did this with steamships.
Sam Walton did this with a number of consumer products that people can buy at Walmart.
Jeff Bezos did this with books.
People's ability to access knowledge that has been written down drastically increased.
It's tough not seeing, you know, Barnes ⁇ Noble's is everywhere and all these nice bookstores, but people get tons of access to things they never could have imagined.
That's how you can primarily get wealthy in the voluntary sector, as opposed to government, which is the biggest crook and the biggest propagandist.
Yeah, 100%.
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Unavoidable Market Monopolies00:14:46
All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
So let me ask you.
So in the book, it's obviously domestic imperialism, nine reasons I left progressivism.
What I want to ask you this.
I'm not going to go through every one of them because I want people to go read this book.
What was your favorite of the nine?
Probably the unavoidable contradiction.
This is.
I swear to God, I was going to see what yours was and what mine was, and that was mine as well.
The unavoidable contradiction.
I think it's the best chapter in this book.
So tell me about this.
So this is the claim that, well, we need sort of progressive policies because if we don't have, you know, sort of regulations on the economy, you could have some companies get so big that they turn into these monopolies.
And with the monopolies, you get higher costs, higher prices.
And I don't mean to cut you off.
I just want to show everybody that the page is folded down on the unavoidable contradictions.
This was also my pick.
This was my pick to start.
I was hoping you'd pick something else, but I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to cut you off.
Go ahead.
I didn't believe you until I saw it.
Without the government, the people they would get bogged down under monopolies.
Yes.
And monopolies are very bad according to progressivism.
You get higher prices and lower quality than you otherwise would under competition.
Therefore, one of the major things government needs to do is implement antitrust legislation, which limits the size that firms can grow to.
So the issue is they advocate the state monopolizing guns, compulsory education, the ability to tax, the ability to print money, the ability to declare war.
They advocate the state monopolize all these things.
However, the very criticism that they have of potentially voluntary monopolies applies many times over to the state because you still won't get alternatives.
Even if Henry Ford was able to get a monopoly in cars, which he gained market share as he drastically lowered the price of automobiles so more people could afford them.
Even if he managed to, you would still have alternatives in things like bicycles, walking trains or railroads that people like Cornelius Vanderbilt helped give to us.
So this contradiction, monopolies are bad, only the state should do X, Y, and Z is the unavoidable contradiction.
And then a subsection of this idea is the contradiction in using the term contract.
They'll say, well, human beings have a social contract with the state.
Therefore, you do have a moral obligation to pay them money.
So it is kind of like a contract.
They protect you and you give them money.
The problem is, is that if you don't pay, well, they get to put you in a cage because you didn't hold up your end of the contract.
The question is, the word contract implies they too have an obligation.
So if government doesn't keep you safe, if they encourage rioters all throughout 2020 and then criticize a few rioters who went inside the Capitol building for a few hours, they don't say, hey, I'm so sorry that all of that happened.
Here's a refund because we didn't hold up our end of the social contract.
To the contrary, after attacks like Pearl Harbor and after 9-11, the state drastically grows in its power and influence.
That's the ultimate contradiction.
Basically, every single progressive believes in.
Yeah.
And there really is something where if you, because they'll talk so much, by the way, and okay, in the last episode with Crystal Ball, this was one of her things that she was making the point that, oh, oh my God, you know, Javier Malay, Javier Malay believes in the free market.
And what about monopolies?
And what happens?
And you're like, okay, so just take me through this.
If in the free market there was a monopoly, like what would that even look like?
Because I know you can't actually think of any examples that were pure free market monopolies.
If there are any, they never last.
But even if there was one theoretically, okay.
So if you're saying there was one producer of a good or service that all of the customers flocked to and everyone else went out of business because they, and they're the sole provider of that, like that, that's bad.
That's bad somehow that they're the ones who everyone wants to vote.
It's almost like if you went, well, Joe Biden won the election with 100% of the vote.
And that's bad because he's, you know, he has a monopoly now.
And you're like, I don't know.
It seems like he's doing such a good job that everyone supported him.
But there are certain situations where I could think of that would be a true free market monopoly.
And the first one that comes to mind is if you invent something new and bring it to market.
If you invent something new and bring it to market, I'd say by definition, you're the only one providing that good or service and you're a monopoly.
But that would suggest that if you invent something new that people really want, you shouldn't start selling it because, you know, you don't want to be a monopoly.
Yet the government will take things that are never new, that are never, you know, that are never like a new thing that isn't being offered by anyone else and totally monopolize that.
And that's somehow supposed to be good.
It's very bizarre.
It makes no logical, coherent sense.
So that is the moral and then the just the logical case of the claim that you have a business whose plan is to constantly lose money for a long time until there aren't any competitors, buy up all the competitors.
So after all this money you lost, you're spending a bunch of money to buy the competitors.
Then you're going to shoot the prices all the way back up and keep other competitors from entering the market, assuming whatever product we're talking about is still relevant at this time.
So the empirical example I use on page 60, I cite Tom DeLorenzo in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics.
He goes, this is kind of a wild theory.
It's like, okay, if we have a free market in music, everyone listens to Eminem.
Is that really going to happen?
We have a free market in comedy.
Everyone only listens to Chris Rock.
That sounds unrealistic.
So what Tom DeLorenzo did is the very annoying thing of actually looking at the empirical examples of the 17 industries that were charged with violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
In 15 of the 17, he found in every case, production of the products and services increased at a higher volume than they previously were when these companies entered into these industries.
And the prices fell because not necessarily because the corporations are full of such kind-hearted people, but because they want to make a lot of money and they want to sell a lot of products to a lot of consumers.
So even if you say, well, human beings are evil, careless, stupid, and malicious.
Well, then the only thing you could justify is a free market where they can't get a penny out of your pocket or a second out of your time unless you voluntarily give it to them.
So yeah, the case for monopoly is just completely unjustifiable.
Yes.
So I remember reading, and obviously you cited some of this in the book, but I remember reading years ago, Tom DeLorenzo going through this, like as a historian, just going through like, here's the historical record of this.
And what's interesting about it is that there were people.
So this is where the progressives have a kernel of truth is that there were people like John D. Rockefeller who did plan, like they did want to create a monopoly.
And he even wrote about how he basically he had this plan, which was like the progressive view of the world, which is that he would undercut all of his competition, put them out of business.
And then once he had a monopoly, he'd jack prices up.
And therefore, you just have to pay those prices because he has a monopoly now.
And this was on oil refinery, oil refineries with standard oil was his big first monopoly that he was attempting to gain.
But when he put it into practice, and this is what Tom DeLorenzo really gets to, is when he put it into practice, he would undercut the prices and then he would put other people out of business because his prices were so good.
And then he'd try to jack up his prices.
But when he jacked up his prices, everyone else would come in because there was a market opportunity to come in.
Like, well, look, we can come in here and make a good profit by not charging as much as this guy.
And then he'd have to bring his prices back down.
And this is true across all of it, like the American Tobacco Company and all of that.
They all the ones who were charged with, oh, you were a monopoly.
They would come in and they never were able to maintain their monopoly.
And I was just talking about this on the last episode, but when the Sherman Antitrust Act came in, they were, if you just look at the market share that all of the companies that they went after had when they first sued them verse when the case finally went to court.
They were all losing market share by that point already.
And this happens over and over again.
By the way, there's, well, I think it was in the 70s that IBM, they went after them on monopoly laws.
And while the government was going after IBM for having a monopoly on computers, there was this hippie in a college dorm room somewhere named Bill Gates who was working on Windows.
And the government's going after him with all this shit and they ended up failing.
But this Bill Gates guy took the whole thing away.
And then around the year 2000, the government was going after Bill Gates and going after Microsoft for having a monopoly.
And then this Steve Jobs guy was having his like resurgence and he came and took them out.
And you just realize that it's like, first of all, the biggest monopoly in the world is the goddamn government.
And second of all, the thing that actually deals with monopolies is competition and having somebody else come in who can compete and deliver a better product.
Exactly.
That's just the way it is in every case.
Okay.
So we both agree that that is the primary attraction to leaving progressivism is that unavoidable contradiction.
I'll give you my second one.
All right.
I was just about to ask.
I actually start the book in the introduction saying, you know, thinking progressivism is, you know, very much about caring for others and not being greedy and not being selfish.
So I asked people to compare and contrast two organizations, both of which produce food.
One produces food voluntarily and they risk going out of business if they don't, you know, provide enough food for enough people at a price they're willing to pay and a quality that they care about.
Whereas the other company says that we produce food, which is necessary for life.
So I'm trying not to strawman the status opposition.
If anything should, you know, is a necessity.
Well, food would certainly be up there.
So of all things that should be coercive.
You have to chip in for food or else we'll all starve.
Well, you need food much more than you will need healthcare, education, or national defense or, you know, anything that you might eventually come across.
Food's right there in the center.
So my question is, of the two food producing organizations, one can't get a dollar out of your pocket unless you voluntarily give it to them.
The other, under the guise of helping you, threatens to cage everyone if they don't chip into this supermarket.
Which one is more compassionate?
And when that dichotomy was shown to me, I said, well, look at this.
It's not that I have to say I'm a progressive.
I've been wrong about everything.
It's I can still be the person that, you know, I want to be proud to be, where I really care about other people.
So I took something I already believed, caring about others.
And I said, actually, the free market is far more compassionate.
Not that everything that happens is just perfect or hunky-dory or everything.
But if I'm comparing these two situations, if I want to maintain the position that I'm a compassionate, caring person, well, I can't be advocating anything that the state does.
So that was the second reason when I really tried to get to the nature without straw manning of libertarianism versus progressivism.
Yeah, I just think that's absolutely right.
And I don't even know how anyone can agree with that.
This is what I was talking about on the last episode again, is that when I first became a libertarian, I was like, man, this is going to, I'm going to convince every left winger I know to be a libertarian because you can tell them it's like, look, if we all just get on the same page of trying to reduce the size and scope of government, then we'll get rid of war and the war on drugs and all the things that you guys hate about the state.
And you can still have all of your social programs.
You just have to do it voluntarily.
So, hey, this is such a win-win.
We're all going to, you know, well, anyway, it wasn't received that well.
One more, one more thing on the show.
In the quote section, I cite Chris Freeman, who's a terrific professor of, I want to say, philosophy.
And he said, we're vulnerable to politically motivated reasoning.
The unconscious goal of our political deliberation is not to find truth, but rather to protect our identity as a loyal member of our political team.
So with that in mind, it was really important that I wasn't at a point where I said, well, I guess I've been wrong this whole time.
It was taking something I already believe and then extending it.
So Frederick Douglass famously didn't say the Constitution's a bunch of shit.
Only a retard could believe in such a thing.
He said, it is these documents, which I'm citing, which are my justification for opposing this slavery.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously had his somewhere I read speech where he does the same thing.
What you essentially do in this situation is instead of being antagonistic, you give the opposition a golden bridge to retreat across, so to speak.
So once you realize, how did I not convince all the leftists when I just gave them bulletproof arguments?
It's much more about protecting their identity.
Same with conservatives and same with us for all the things that I'm sure we're wrong about.
So when it comes to really putting forth an image that we can be proud of, I certainly think people like Tom Woods and Javier Millay are great examples that people can passionately get behind.
And it doesn't necessarily threaten previous ideas that they've held when you frame them in such a way as you usually do.
Well, yeah, thanks.
And I think you do a great job at it too.
Home Gyms vs Local Bars00:03:01
You know, I remember one of the moments where, so I've done a bunch of shows with Jimmy Dore.
And I've done, I've done his podcast and he's done my podcast, but I've done a bunch with him on the guy, Craig Pasta's show, where he'll have like a roundtable with us.
And I do feel like we'll agree completely on so many things, like on war and on corporatism and on COVID and on all this stuff.
But the one moment, because sometimes I'll start talking to him about the Federal Reserve and I just feel like he just kind of taps out and he's just kind of like, yeah, you make a good point, but I don't know.
But the one time that I felt like I really got through to him was when there was this one show.
I don't know if, guys, if you're listeners, you could probably find this better than I can, but there was one show and it was on Craig Pasta's show where he goes, so what's the compromise here?
What's the compromise between the anti-war left and you guys?
Because I think the government should provide healthcare and all this stuff.
And I was like, how about it can't be the federal government?
How about it's got to be your local states?
Because this federal government is just too goddamn corrupt.
So at least maybe like count on your local state or your, you know, your, your state or local government to provide whatever.
And he was like, okay, that's fair by me, you know, and I was like, all right, fine.
least we've reduced it down now to like this smaller level.
So you have to find a way to say the thing that will actually get through to them.
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Justifying Past Oppression00:10:29
Okay, let's get back into the show.
Okay, listen, I want to just, let's, let's switch gears a little bit.
I want everybody to go buy this book.
Everyone who listens to this show, go buy domestic imperialism.
It's a phenomenal book.
And you can buy it over at the Libertarian Institute.
And we'll plug again at the end where people can get this.
But right now, I want to talk to you about this because I'm always very interested in your opinion.
So this is the New Hampshire primary is we got some results in and they've called it for Donald Trump as of right now, about 30% reporting.
Donald Trump is up by a little less than 10 points on Nikki Haley.
What are your thoughts on the 2024 election so far?
The fact that Donald Trump won Iowa by so much and looks like he's about to win New Hampshire by a big margin.
How do you feel about this?
My personal take is like, God damn, I'm just happy Nikki Haley is losing.
Where are you on this, Keith?
Well, that is the most important thing that that's psychotic.
She looks like an MK Ultra victim when she's asked about anything outside of normal.
It's like, what do you think about Joe Biden's stumble the other day?
Has a nice prepared answer.
Hey, what do you think about the most deadly conflict in all of American history?
And she's like, what do you think about the Civil War?
I'm like, oh my God, you're getting me to support Trump.
This is just not something I can deal with.
So as far as it is such a, you know, finally getting a chance to punch the bully back in the face in 2016, it's all these people, all the Rachel Maddows who've called me a racist, sexist bigot my entire life for no justifiable reason.
I'm going to give them Donald Trump.
So that's why it was so powerful to put them in.
And then after they raid his, you know, Mar-a-Lago house, after they claim January 6th with some insurrection, where the only person that died was the unarmed white woman who got shot by the black officer.
Still never going to, you know, have that trial.
Once it was so clear that they were so terrified of someone who is just a little politically incorrect.
It's not even anything terrible.
He didn't cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, didn't abolish the Department of Education, didn't cut federal spending in half or anything.
In fact, he drastically increased it and gave Fauci a stamp of approval every day before a press conference in front of the world.
So it's shocking to see how psychotically insecure they are about this guy who isn't even that much of a threat to the system.
They consider him a threat.
So my initial idea is they're so scared of him because they are so insecure.
And that's why I want a soft landing.
If this empire falls, I'm not at all like a burn it down.
Oh, wouldn't that be so fun kind of thing?
So as far as Donald Trump winning, I don't know how optimistic I could be.
A lot of times you'll just get people to justify the very things that they previously opposed, that they were criticizing Joe Biden for are now going to be okay under Donald Trump.
I don't think anything really different.
But yep, they put Nikki Haley next to him.
And I go, well, it'll be four much more funnier years than if Haley or Biden's in there.
Yeah.
I mean, I just, I kind of, yeah, I can't, I agree with you.
And I think he basically nailed it that it is, you know, it's so easy to point out how much Donald Trump got wrong and how much I don't think he should be supported.
I think there's a certain line where you, that you cross where it's just kind of unforgivable.
And there's certain things that Donald Trump did that I just think are unforgivable.
I think the war in Yemen that he kept going every day of his administration is unforgivable.
I think, you know, escalating the war in Afghanistan is unforgivable.
And people want to give him credit for not for no new wars or something, but it's like, I don't know.
He ran on talking about how stupid this war was.
And then he escalated it, sent a few thousand more troops in.
And then I'm supposed to give him credit for working out the deal to end it, which I guess I will.
But still, like you kept it going for four more years.
Why didn't you just end it immediately or end it at least within your first year?
But at the same time, you can recognize that in this Republican primary, you had a race between Donald Trump, who at least rhetorically, and to some degree, there are some substantive policy issues where he was a break from the neoconservative past of Bush and Cheney.
And he, you know, he ran on the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake.
And your brother lied and he destroyed Jeb Bush's political career by saying that right to his face.
And then he won.
And to some degree, at least, Nikki Haley represented, well, I want to return to that.
I want to return.
And this was gauging the temperature of where Republican voters were at.
And particularly after October 7th and the war in Gaza right now, it was like, okay, well, here's, you know, so we, we all know there's a bunch of Republican influencers who kind of snap back to 2002 after that.
Not naming any names, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, but whatever.
You know, there's a lot of conservative influencers who snap back to that posture.
And here was a candidate in Nikki Haley who was saying, I represent that snap back to that time.
And I just, I think her losing, this was the one state she really could have won.
And so that her losing is a better thing than her not losing, that's for sure.
And so I at least think like, man, that's goddamn positive.
I don't know, you know, I'm not supporting Donald Trump and I'm definitely not supporting Joe Biden, but I think it's better that Trump wins and we'll see what happens with the legal system than Nikki Haley winning in New Hampshire.
So thanks to all our New Hampshire people for whatever role they played.
Well, and if it's possible for someone to get into Trump's ear, much like I remember Douglas McGregor saying on Tucker Carlson's show, he said something to the extent of the Vietnam War destroyed Lyndon Johnson's administration, Iraq destroyed George Bush, and Donald Trump, if we go to war over Iran, his administration is going to be, you know, in travesty as a result of this.
And that is an actual way you could sway someone like Donald Trump.
So if we look at the case of China in 1964, Chairman Mao had Project 596, where they developed nuclear weapons and displayed to the world that China actually does have nukes.
A billion communists had nukes.
And within one decade, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon went to China to shake hands with Chairman Mao in Beijing.
Now, if we can shake hands with Mao, let alone shake hands.
We had a formal alliance with Joseph Stalin after he committed crimes in Ukraine that were far worse than anything Vladimir Putin's done.
So we can have formal alliances with Joseph Stalin, shake hands with Chairman Mao, but we can't be friends with Putin and Xi Jinping.
And we can't shake hands with anyone in Iran.
Look at all as if NATO's democracy is some justification as Zelensky's enslaving men, you know, by the hundreds of thousands as he's outlawing 11 competing political parties.
Zelensky nationalized the media and said, oh, by the way, we're still under martial law according to our constitution.
So we're actually not going to have elections.
And they're confiscating property from the Orthodox Church, calling them Russian propagandists.
So look, the democracy thing is so fake.
Trump obviously sees that.
If there's anyone who could say, you know what, because of my self-interest, I want to make peace with Xi, with Putin, and potentially with Iran, I think, well, of those, you know, three choices, Haley, Trump, or Biden, I would say Trump is definitely the best one or Michael Rechtenwald is actually the best.
I'm not saying I'm again, I'm supporting Michael Rechtenwald.
I agree with you on that.
I'm just saying out of these three and out of what happened tonight, I completely agree with you.
And again, those, you know, it's not just that Mao Setong was the most vicious fucking worst ruler in the history of the world and probably was responsible for more deaths than any other ruler in the history of the world.
But at the time, he was aligned with the commies who controlled half of Eastern Europe.
I mean, Jesus Christ, we're talking about now there's nothing, there's nothing that's even close to as big of threat to us as that was.
Anyway, Keith, you're the man.
I always enjoy talking to you guys.
Domestic imperialism.
Guys, go get the book.
I highly recommend it.
It's just totally, it's must read for everybody who listens to this show.
Where can people get the book?
Where can they find your stuff?
Let them know, Keith.
Okay, I know you're going to get hit for questioning the fact that the commies ran Europe.
It's important to know that even Winston Churchill agrees with Dave's position.
He said in the gathering storm in March of 1948, the human tragedy reaches its climax.
And after all the sacrifices and exertions of the righteous cause, we found neither peace nor security and lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.
So even after the great war that they're always bragging about, it left tens of millions dead because people still believe in the cult of statism and gave half of Europe to Stalin.
Find the book at libertarianinstitute.org.
can purchase the hardcover at Barnes ⁇ Noble on their website.
You can also get it at Amazon, but check out libertarianinstitute.org under the book section for all the purchasing options.