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Nov. 21, 2016 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
22:15
Re-Branding Libertarianism: The Silver Lining of the 2016 Election

Mises Institute President Jeff Deist joins the Liberty Report to discuss advantages for libertarianism and liberty emerging from the recent US presidential election. Good for liberty? Join us and find out... Mises Institute President Jeff Deist joins the Liberty Report to discuss advantages for libertarianism and liberty emerging from the recent US presidential election. Good for liberty? Join us and find out...

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Libertarianism's Future Accelerates 00:04:46
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Good.
We'd like to talk a little bit today about libertarianism and the future of libertarianism.
And our special guest today is good friend Jeff Dice, president of the Mises Institute, doing a great job over there.
And Jeff, thank you for being with us today.
Thank you.
Great to talk to both of you.
And I think most people, most in the audience, know that we've worked together before.
You as the chief of staff in Washington for a good many years, off and on again.
But I imagine we've known each other for 15 years and we've worked for one cause and that is to promote the cause of liberty.
And we're still at it.
I don't know what we would do if we didn't have this, but it looks like we'll always have a job for sure.
But we appreciate you coming on.
But really what we want to do is make an assessment to at least give some opinions about what we think is going to happen to the freedom movement.
And did the campaign and did the election help us?
Did it hurt us?
Or did it do nothing whatsoever?
Or is it irrelevant?
Maybe it's only the Mises Institute that's relevant.
Maybe the elections are irrelevant.
But you've spoken out on some of the issues of the political aspects of this.
So why don't you give us a real brief summary of how you see this, because you've given speeches on this, on how you've interpreted this recent election.
I don't think it's really about Trump or what he's going to do or who he's going to appoint.
I think it's more about the voters themselves.
The fact that so many millions of Americans went off the reservation, went off the script, voted for a guy they're not supposed to vote for, and just sort of challenged this whole idea of Hillary's inevitability, progressive's inevitability, globalists' inevitability.
That's what's really important to me.
So I think it's a great thing for libertarians.
I think we ought to view it as that.
I think we ought to tell ourselves that, look, people are clearly looking for something different.
Trump represents a protest vote.
We represent a protest movement, an anti-state movement, an anti-government movement.
And we should embrace Trump voters rather than pushing them away and sort of dismissing them as racists or retrogrades.
I think that's a mistake.
I think we have to find the silver lining here.
And the silver lining is that there's millions of disaffected voters who want something different.
The question is, what is that something going to be?
Jeff, you had, from what I hear, a great conference in Dallas just a couple of weeks ago.
And the Mises Institute goes all around the country and they promote liberty.
They promote a lot of the issues that we care so much about.
And your Dallas speech was interesting.
Unfortunately, though, we weren't able to be there.
We've read the transcript of your speech.
And you do make the theme of silver linings, the silver linings of what's happened.
The first thing that caught me was very early in your speech, where you talked about how the mainstream media has become obsolete.
Now, you couldn't have predicted what happened on election night when you gave that talk, but if anything, what we saw that Tuesday night underscored your point on the mainstream media about a thousand times.
Well, yeah, they can't reach everybody the way they used to.
It's not Walter Cronkite at 7 p.m. anymore.
There's a million social media feeds.
There's a million websites.
There's a million 24-hour cable outlets.
There's a variety for everyone's taste, for everyone's ideology.
So when CNN reports something, if I don't hear it, if I don't consume that news, it's though they never reported it at all.
So clearly their importance is waning.
The digital revolution has been this huge leveler.
It used to be that bricks and mortars publishers like the New York Times had the final say, but now we have websites, we have a comment section, even on the New York Times.
People have their pushback.
Everyone is a publisher.
Everyone has their own platform.
In effect, everyone is their own media today because everyone's got a camera, everyone's got a phone, and everyone's got a Twitter feed, so they're out there reporting the news.
And I've noticed lately that things appear, events appear in my Twitter feed, crowdsourced in effect, faster than they even appear on the Drudge Report.
And the Drudge Report is, of course, faster than CNN and ABC and CBS, et cetera.
So everything's accelerating, and I think the mainstream media is being left behind, and they should be left behind.
They've been adverse to our interests for decades.
They've had their own agenda.
They've been condescending towards us.
And they've been promoting a very illiberal, ill-libertarian society.
So a pox on their house.
I'm all for the new media.
The new media is us.
Mainstream Media Left Behind 00:09:50
You know, one of the things, Jeff, that I see is that in terms of economic policies and our policies that we've been following here, that several years back, and I've been talking about this really almost 10 years, that we're entering a stage of end of an era, the era of banished economies, Keynesian economics, central banking.
We saw the end of communism.
We saw the end of Nazism.
And now I think we're strategically going through this period of ending something very, very significant.
And it's rough and tumble.
And people don't quite understand it.
I don't think the people really did.
I don't think one candidate said, you know, this is it.
Too much intervention.
We've got to go to something else.
But if that is the case, don't you think this is, you know, probably a wonderful opportunity for us to promote Austrian economics and alternatives if truly this is a failure.
But right now, people are sort of hopeful.
They're keeping their fingers crossed and, well, maybe Trump's going to pull this out and they won't have so much need to listen to us about free market economics.
Well, it is an opportunity because this mania, what I would call this demand-side mania, is finally coming to an end.
It's something that's been promoted by conservatives as well as Democrats.
This idea that the role of the federal government through fiscal policy, the role of the Fed through monetary policy, is to stimulate demand, to create demand.
That an economy is built on consumption and demand.
And of course, it's one of the big lies of the 20th and now 21st century.
We know from history that in fact real economies, real prosperity is built on productivity and capital and production, not consumption.
So this mania that we need to stimulate demand is finally coming to an end because no matter what governments do, no matter what central banks do, there's no more demand for them to stimulate.
Even at zero or negative interest rates, borrowing is stagnant.
Banks still don't have enough creditworthy borrowers.
Economic growth, even if you believe GDP numbers, which I don't, is anemic.
We've come to the end of this idea that we can resuscitate the patient with more of the same, more credit, more debt, more money.
What we need is more productivity, more actual production, more actual goods and services in the economy, not more demand for goods and services.
So I think it's wonderful.
I think it is the end of Keynesianism.
Let's hope it comes not through some cataclysmic economic collapse, but rather through this awakening that we can hope that the Trump election means.
Yeah, Jeff, it does seem like there's a tremendous opportunity because people are listening to different viewpoints now, and there is a lot of interference probably with the Trump people who are not exactly on our page, but it does give us an opportunity.
The one thing I enjoyed in your talk, Jeff, was that you really laid it out on both the left and the right where they've been completely wrong.
And you point out, you know, the left preaches this love for democracy, except, of course, when the outcomes don't go their way.
And again, you said that before the protests that we've seen over this election and all the tears that were cried.
But you also point out that today's conservatives don't conserve anything, dot, dot, dot, except political jobs.
So both parties, both sides are hypocrites in their own way.
And that's the beauty of Trump's election is that the Conservatism Inc. is scrambling to try to find jobs in this new administration after spending the last eight months decrying anyone associated with it as a racist and a bigot and a homophobe, et cetera.
So you have to kind of enjoy that.
But you also have to stand back and worry, just because Donald Trump has an R next to his name, all these same old hangers-on, these supply-siders, these neoconservatives, these tax cutters without spending cuts, the interventionists, the people who just want to be a little less progressive than progressives.
All these hangers-on are still in Washington.
They still need jobs.
They still need to lobby.
They still need to have contracts with their companies.
The defense contractors still need to get paid.
So nothing structurally has changed.
It remains to be seen whether Trump can upset any of this.
But if there's a silver lining to this election, it is that the American people have finally really seen the two political parties for what they are, which are very malevolent forces in our society and something that we need to get beyond.
You know, and that is right.
I think we can see that, but the general public still see things as Republican and Democrat and that they are so dramatically different.
And you talk about the undermining of the progressives as well as the right self-destructing.
And you've even toyed with the idea of, well, maybe libertarian isn't the best word, which is sort of unfortunate because at one time liberal was good and liberalism was good, but we can't do that anymore.
Over the years, I've sort of changed my tune on that in that, although I use the word libertarian because I don't want to duck it, but I like to use the word authoritarian.
People basically, right or left, they don't like authoritarianism.
And they're very embarrassed.
If I just throw that out, if I'm competing with somebody verbally, I don't like the authoritarian approach.
I like a more voluntary approach, which sort of neutralizes them.
Another word that I've used a lot that I think is worth thinking about is interventionism.
Why do they have to intervene in the economy around the world?
Why do they intervene in your personal life?
And I think that's when people think all of a sudden, well, if you're lefty, you might be able to, well, think that's reasonable.
And that, of course, is the reason that I'm so enthusiastic about the non-aggression principle, the libertarian message, because that truly does bring people together.
This preaching, now we've got to work together.
We've got to bring these factions together.
We need bipartisanship with these Republicans and Democrats.
I think that's all pretty much of a farce.
Well, it's true.
And we need to brand our message.
We need to do a better job of that.
You know, when you say authoritarian, people don't like that.
People reflexively say, well, that's a bad thing.
And when we say interventionism, people reflexively say that's a bad thing.
So language matters, how we talk about liberty matters.
Here's what we know.
We know from both theory and history that liberty works.
It works better than any other system ever devised.
In fact, it's not a system.
It's the absence of a system.
It's the absence of hubris and saying, because we can't know what's best for anyone else, we can't possibly centrally plan that for 320 million people in a capital 3,000 miles away from most of us.
So really, what we're talking about is depoliticizing society.
What we're talking about is creating a world where the great political and economic and social and cultural questions of the day are less and less decided by a central government.
That's what we're really talking about.
We're talking about devolving power away from central agencies and bodies closer to the individual.
So that means we should be for states' rights.
We should be for secession movements.
We should be for localism.
We should encourage progressives when they want to do things on their own.
There's no reason why millions of progressives in cities like San Francisco or in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Manhattan or in Austin, Texas, can't get together voluntarily and have some sort of single-payer health care scheme.
Now, we might say that's not going to work very well because it's got the wrong incentives, and economically, you're going to have the free rider problem.
But if that's what they want to try, they should be allowed to try it.
We shouldn't be afraid to allow different people to organize their affairs differently.
But here's the key thing that I like to tell people: in Ron Paul's America, any kind of voluntary agreement, even single-payer health care, is permissible.
In Barack Obama's America, a libertarian society is not permissible.
We're not allowed to opt out of Social Security or Medicare or taxes or regulations.
So that's really the difference.
Well, I want to create a world where things are decided less and less by politics, more and more by individuals and markets and civil society.
Jeff, here's a quote from your speech that I really liked.
Liberty is simply the negation of state power in society.
It is not a political third way between left and right, and it's not a hybrid ideology.
It sounded to me when I read that that you were thinking a little bit maybe of the Johnson campaign.
Am I wrong?
Well, it's true.
Unfortunately, we know that liberty is completely in accordance with human nature.
But we've allowed it to be packaged and sold as this kind of strange combination, this mix of parts of left and right, when really it isn't.
Libertarianism is an ideology for everyone, regardless of their religion.
It's for soccer moms.
It's for churches and parishes.
It's for neighborhoods and schools.
It's not something where you have to agree with other people's lifestyle.
And I'm afraid we've packaged libertarian as this ideology for these really atomized individuals who are hyper-capitalist and hyper-individual and will move to Singapore tomorrow at the drop of a hat if the gig economy offers them $10,000 more there in income.
And it's an ideology for people who are devoid of any sort of cultural or familiar or geographic attachments to their lives.
And I think that's wrong.
I think we need to package it as an everyman philosophy, just a philosophy where we don't go at each other politically, where we solve our differences through the market and civilly.
Concept Of Liberty 00:06:25
You know, there are times, Jeff, that I have to reassure myself because I remain an optimist, and I think a lot of us in the libertarian movement, an understanding of what's happening philosophically, there's room for optimism.
But if I look at it in the grand scale of things over 4,000 years, I think the concept of liberty has been developed.
And certainly it has improved, even though we may have our ups and downs.
And the last hundred years hasn't been the best 100 years.
But there's still, you know, this concept.
And I think the concept of liberty is doing quite well, the philosophic underpinnings of it.
But when you look at the demonstrations going on now, you know, they show pictures of these young college kids speaking for America.
A lot of them is just not 10 or 15.
And then you go and you look at the crowds that were real crowds and they were supporting Bernie Sanders.
Oh, they're all socialists.
And I think, well, you know, I have to think about this for a minute.
I do reassure myself that numbers aren't the whole story.
Sometimes the numbers are fudged, and sometimes the people who are really doing the hard work aren't well noticed.
Now, for instance, I look at Young Americans for Liberty, and this is a young youth group, college-oriented, and they came out of the 2008 presidential campaign.
They have 800 chapters, and they're serious people, and I go to their convictions, and they're the most delightful people that I can meet, and they're understanding, and they're studying, and they go to the Mises website and all these things, and then all of a sudden, you know, I don't worry about those large numbers that are out there because ultimately, you know, it's the issue of what's happening in the educational forum and not exactly the result of last week's election.
I think there's more to it, and that's where I get some reassurance.
That, of course, is one of the reasons I'm such a strong supporter of the Mises Institute, because I think it's absolutely necessary that there's many institutions like the Mises Institute, and there are.
When I think back in the 1970s, or no, even further back, in the 50s and 60s, I couldn't find information, and you've already mentioned what's available on the internet.
So I think this is the reason people have to look in these areas, and for that reason, I sort of, you know, I really am highly critical of being involved in politics.
Yet I was involved for 30 years, and I think it's important, but you've got to know why you're in there if you want to try to change things in a serious manner and in a positive way.
Well, we're so lucky because education is so cheap now.
You know, with the click of a button, you can send out a blast email from Ron Paul, for instance, that reaches far more people than you could have reached in your 88 campaign traveling through 10 states.
Economies of scale are very much in our favor, and I think the digital era has been the great leveler.
All the great books are now available for free online.
You don't have to go to the bookstore and try to find a Milton Friedman book.
And when you talk about numbers, I think we have to remember that it's really a 5% or 10% vanguard in every society that makes things happen.
You know, if you just read the Drudge Report all day, you'll think there's nothing but trouble in the world.
But it's an awfully big world, and what you don't see is all the positive things happening below the surface.
And I think young kids going to YAL is an example of that.
There was nothing like YAL when I was 20.
I was lucky to have heard of Ayn Rand or, as I mentioned, Milton Friedman.
So I think we should never allow the news of the day to set us off our course.
I think we have to stay strong, and we have to know that in the long run, however imperceptibly, things are moving our way because I think liberty is the natural state for humans.
Well, Jeff, you know, we've tried to be cautiously optimistic about the next administration.
And, you know, there are certainly there were things to cheer in the campaign rhetoric on Trump's side, and there were certainly a lot of things to be concerned about and jeer really about.
Some of the early indications on the foreign policy front have not been super encouraging to us.
We hear Giuliani's name bandied about.
We all remember the Giuliani moment in 2008.
We heard this morning that James Woolsey is going to play a role, at least in the transition team.
A lot of people will say, you know, don't worry about this.
This is just people promoting themselves.
If someone had a gun to your head and said, tell us what you think this is going to look like, are we going to have something to cheer six months down the road?
What would you say?
Well, if it's John Bolton, all bets are off.
You know, I saw an interesting phrase the other day, and I'm sorry I don't recall who coined it.
They called it blowback deniers, like climate change deniers.
And it all harkens back to Ron's tete-tet-tete with Rudy Giuliatti in 2008, where Ron was trying very patiently to explain what blowback really means.
And Giuliotti was trying to have none of it.
And all the conservative types watching that debate thought, oh my gosh, Giuliotti won this big point.
And then, as it turns out, the next day, and for all these years since, the world completely understood what Ron was saying.
And I think we can talk about blowback in areas other than just foreign policy.
Unintended consequences flow from everything government does at all levels.
So I think we're going to find out in the next month or so just how much of an outsider Donald Trump really is.
And let's be fair to the guy.
You know, he's moving someplace where he's going to be assimilated by these powers that have been using the D.C. gravy train for decade after decade after decade.
And those entrenched interests don't just go away so easily because a few thousand more voters, excuse me, a few million more voters went one way or another in election.
It's a very tough place.
And seeing what he's going through, Ron, it probably makes you almost glad you're not the president.
We're going to have to close, Jeff, here in a minute, even though this is a lot of fun.
But I want to close with one suggestion about where the Republican Party is.
You know, some thought that the most important thing we do is destroy the Republican Party.
The GOP's Resilience 00:01:01
And the Republican Party was irrelevant to me.
But I would say that some people who thought they were going to destroy the Republican Party right now, it looks like it is well and healthy.
You know, we have the Republicans controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency, and they don't look like they're the Libertarian Party.
So really?
Has the Republican Party been undermined with this election?
I think the Republican Party, despite appearances, is dead.
And it's dead because it lacks any ideas.
It exists solely to resist progressivism.
Progressives, as bad as they are, actually have some ideas.
They're called collectivism.
So I do think the GOP is dead.
I think this is a hiccup.
And I think the future of the GOP, if it wants to survive, is going to be populist, not beltway.
Very good.
Good to finish on that.
And Jeff, once again, thank you very much for being with us today.
And to the viewers, I want to thank you for being with us today.
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