May 27, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
52:36
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| Mark Pellegrino is an actor who's been in such films as The Big Lebowski and National Treasure, and he's been in roughly a billion TV shows like Supernatural, Quantico, Dexter, Lost, and The Closer. | ||
| He's also the co-founder of the American Capitalist Society. | ||
| Mark, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Did I pick the right shows there? | ||
| You actually did. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| You feel good about that? | ||
| Listen, you've got a long IMDB, and yet, we're not going to talk about acting. | ||
| You alright with that? | ||
| Yeah, I'm more than alright with it, thank you. | ||
| Actors talking about acting. | ||
| That's what we get from actors. | ||
| Gotta be the most boring, boring subject matter on the planet. | ||
| So I'm glad we're avoiding it. | ||
| Alright, well we're gonna go deep into politics and capitalism and free speech, a lot of the stuff that I really love. | ||
| So let's start with that. | ||
| So as an actor, I find that many actors are sort of trained not to really say what they think, really share their feelings about things, especially when it comes to politics and and opinions. And yet you're involved with the American | ||
| Capitalist Party. | ||
| Capitalism doesn't seem like the cool thing these days. We're into socialism. | ||
|
unidentified
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Had you get mixed up in capitalism? | |
| That must have just been a twist of fate. | ||
| Because I was educated in these state-run schools to believe that capitalism was probably the worst thing to hit civilization since the plague. | ||
| But I grew out of that simply by observing. | ||
| By observing the prosperity that it brought. | ||
| And I see in the political world around us a market now for free market ideas. | ||
| Because what I see in the political spectrum is basically one party with with two sorts of expressions. | ||
| They both agree on the premise of government and they disagree on degrees of that premise, | ||
| but they both agree. | ||
| Yeah, and what's interesting about that is I don't know that there's ever been a better example | ||
| of that than we have right now where, assuming that it's Clinton on the Democratic side | ||
| and we know it's gonna be Trump. | ||
| They're both basically centrist. | ||
| Sure, Trump says a lot of crazy things and a lot of people don't like things about Hillary, but they're not that different, right? | ||
| They've been to weddings together. | ||
| They've done a lot of money things together. | ||
| So that proves it more than anything else that these parties are pretty much in bed together. | ||
| They're in bed together. | ||
| I think the premise that they both agree on is that it's appropriate to use state aggression to achieve a good. They disagree on what that good is and | ||
| on how much state aggression should be applied and in what areas, but they agree that | ||
| aggression is a good thing. | ||
| Right. So, okay, so if you don't want the state to be growing, basically, | ||
| That's one of the premises. | ||
| We'll talk about some of the principles in the party. | ||
| Then this is a really nightmarish election, right? | ||
| Nightmarish. | ||
| Because this whole thing, even Trump on the Republican side, for someone that wants small government, this is not a small government Republican. | ||
| I don't know, there aren't many left, I suppose. | ||
| And certainly Bernie and Hillary are not small government people. | ||
| So that's kind of depressing for someone that wants the government out of your life, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't even equate small government with good government. | ||
| I equate a government that respects individual rights and holds property as viable as a good government. | ||
| Because a small government can be just as authoritarian as a large government if its premises are that aggression is appropriate. | ||
| So when did you have your sort of political awakening? | ||
| You said you went to state schools where they taught you capitalism was bad, yet it was capitalism that was funding these state schools, because this was in America I assume? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So when did your awakening sort of happen? | ||
| I think in my mid-twenties. | ||
| when a friend of mine who was in the theater company that I belonged to introduced me | ||
| to the writings of Ayn Rand. | ||
| And at the time I would consider myself a leftist, I was a registered Democrat, | ||
| and fully on the side of statism without quite understanding what that meant. | ||
| And her writings threw me into a bit of a moral and philosophical tailspin for years. | ||
| And it took about a decade for me to resolve all the issues that she kind of threw in my face | ||
| and made me think about. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of, when you just say Ayn Rand, I had Jerome Brooke, who's the president | ||
| of the Ayn Rand Foundation on just a couple weeks ago. | ||
| He's a friend of mine. | ||
| And a great guy, and I thoroughly enjoyed our back and forth. | ||
| And I have to say that probably 90% of the reaction we got to it was positive. | ||
| But the 10% that, well, even people that disagreed with the specifics of how the government should work | ||
| or capitalism or free will, whatever it was, it was all positive and on point. | ||
| But the 10% that disagreed, it wasn't, there wasn't a lot based in fact. | ||
| It was just screaming, like, Ayn Rand's a horrible, you know, all these awful words and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Why do you think that the philosophy of capitalism or objectivism, if we go that, you know, tightly with it, brings out such emotion in people? | ||
| I think because it's based on the ethics of rational self-interest. | ||
| And most people have a sort of spectrum in their minds when they're thinking of | ||
| values and ethics. | ||
| And the spectrum is you're either... | ||
| And the spectrum is informed by altruism, basically. | ||
| So that's the umbrella under which everyone sees and defines the good. | ||
| And to the degree that you are selfish and acting for your own interests is the degree that you're parting from the concept of altruism, which is a sacrificial ethics, which says the other should be the beneficiary of values, not you. | ||
| Rational self-interest is that you should be the beneficiary of the values that you go for. | ||
| So, okay, so there's so much there because that's where people start going crazy. | ||
| It seems obvious to me that if you were to do what is good for you, that doesn't mean you're going to screw everyone else over. | ||
| If you were gonna do what's good for you in your house, well, then what you do what's good in your house is probably good for your community. | ||
| It's probably good for the wider community. | ||
| Yes, you could do all kinds of awful things at the expense of people, but I think this is the disconnect. | ||
| People don't understand that by doing good for yourself, In a way, you're actually doing good for many other people, right? | ||
| Is that sort of the crux of it? | ||
| I think even though that isn't the primary focus, that is the consequence for sure. | ||
| I think amongst rational people there is no conflict of interest and there is no clash of rights. | ||
| Uh, in a statist kind of world that we live in, then a person going for what they want using state aggression will clearly do it by gaining at the expense of somebody else. | ||
| And that's sort of the... | ||
| Right. | ||
| alternatives that the altruistic mindset gives us. | ||
| You're either sacrificing yourself to somebody else or sacrificing somebody else to yourself and rights | ||
| sort of by nature are meant to clash and I don't think that's true in a rational world. | ||
| >>>ANDREW BROTMAN, PHD, PANELIST, "THE CURRENT CURRENT": Right. So we live in this time where | ||
| everyone's virtue signaling all the time and we know what's going on on college campuses where they're | ||
| playing this oppression Olympics thing. So in a way this is really the, this is either the antidote or | ||
| at least the total reverse of all of that right? | ||
| >>>JAMES T. ZIRIN, PANELIST, "THE CURRENT": Right. | ||
| >>>ANDREW BROTMAN, PANELIST, "THE CURRENT": Agreed. | ||
| >>>JAMES T. ZIRIN, PANELIST, "THE CURRENT": As opposed to just pretending that you're for all these groups | ||
| and then what gets lost in these groups is the It all comes down to the individual. | ||
| The individual is the one who thinks. | ||
| The individual is the one who pursues values. | ||
| Groups don't. | ||
| Society doesn't. | ||
| Society and these groups are just composed of individuals pursuing their own ends, and hopefully their rational ends, so they don't come at the expense of somebody else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so you started, or co-founded, the American Capitalist Party. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What made you say, all right, I'm going to put my name out there and I'm going to go for something that's bigger than me and try to change things for the better? | ||
| Well, just not seeing the alternatives out there, you know, and seeing that the parties agreed on an ethical premise and so that people were not really seeing that there is an other side, another argument. | ||
| That needs to be brought to the fore. | ||
| For me, the fundamental question is, as I said, do you want state aggression as a means of achieving the good, or do you think individuals pursuing their own happiness as a moral ideal? | ||
| When you say state aggression, I think some people probably think you mean, you're just talking about war, or coercion through a gun. | ||
| But it's not necessarily just that, right? | ||
| It's initiated force against an individual who's committed no crime. | ||
| So it covers the spectrum from war, unjust wars, all the way to the regulatory state, which in my mind is an act of aggression against producers to Redistribute capital in the name of justice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I feel like the actual alternatives, the real alternatives that exist in the political spectrum is statism or liberty. | ||
| And if you believe that the state is an appropriate means to achieve the good, then you are to that degree a statist. | ||
| And if you believe that individuals pursuing their own happiness is a moral ideal and in no way creates conflict, then you go for something like capitalism. | ||
| Yeah, isn't the sad part of this that, so I'm obviously on board most of this, and I wanna get into classical liberalism in a minute with you, but just as you were saying that, I was thinking, you know, when we had the primaries, it's like we had those, what, I think it started at 17 Republicans. | ||
| The only guy who touched on anything that you just said at all was Rand Paul, who dropped out after, it was either the straw poll or the first primary. | ||
| I mean, that really tells you how sad our politics are, right? | ||
| It's distressing. | ||
| It is distressing. | ||
| And I think that's a result of a couple of things. | ||
| Look, this Trump phenomenon is sort of an expression of something healthy, on the one hand, in that people are upset. | ||
| They understand that the PC movement is a sort of tyranny and authoritarianism and irrational and they're tired of being under its thumb and they see how it leads to kind of a systemic dishonesty and they're tired of political elitism and they want their notions to be reflected in government. | ||
| They don't want to be ignored and I think I think those are very powerful and true assessments of the problem out there. | ||
| The issue, though, with Trump, I never thought he'd get this far, to be honest with you. | ||
| I thought the American people would be mad, they'd express that anger, but at some point latch onto a principle and somebody like a Rand Paul. | ||
| Or even a Cruz, you know, who's sort of a constitutional conservative, would rise to the top. | ||
| Your reaction right there when you said Cruz, that's sort of how everybody felt about Cruz. | ||
| Even the people that liked him on the constitutional stuff, I think everybody was kind of like, just not this guy, could there be somebody else? | ||
| No, it's that social agenda of conservatism that they have to play to during every election that sort of bugs me. | ||
| And I'm sorry, that's their version of the appropriateness of using force against people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wait, let's just unpack that a little bit. | ||
| So basically, they would be for all the things that you've talked about. | ||
| They're for capitalism and supposed smaller government and states' rights and things like that, and yet there's this social component that I think you would be completely against, right? | ||
| So when they're getting the government involved in who you marry and what you smoke in your bedroom | ||
| and things of that nature, that actually is completely against what their ideology is, | ||
| but they've coupled that somehow with religion, which a libertarian or a classic liberal | ||
| or a true capitalist, I suppose, would be completely against. | ||
| Sure, and I don't even think they're true representatives of capitalism as well. | ||
| They're just as, They've been just as much a party to the fall of the United States into statism as the political left has been, and have never really been very strong moral advocates of capitalism. | ||
| Any pundit I've heard on the right Uh, at best can say there's no shame in the profit motive, but I've never heard them just say it's positively good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If business works, it's actually good because you can hire people and people can buy things and things of that nature. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So I know a certain amount of people watching, we're only 10 minutes in or so, are going to say this guy's a conservative. | ||
| He's a, everything he said is a conservative. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| I never email my guests with questions in advance or anything beforehand. | ||
| I did say to you something about, just a quick one-liner saying something about, it's nice to have an actor with some conservative leanings or something, because actors don't talk about this stuff. | ||
| And you immediately wrote back and said, well, I'm not a conservative. | ||
| I'm a classic liberal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now this is a phrase that I've been talking a lot about. | ||
| Nobody really understands what it is. | ||
| It's very close to libertarianism. | ||
| But why don't you give me your definition of what a classic liberal is? | ||
| I'm not testing you. | ||
| We'll link people to things. | ||
| I think a classic liberal is one that believes that government is a monopoly of force, and that force has only one moral expression in society, and that is in retaliatory. | ||
| A classical liberal, I think, believes that you should ban the initiation of force from all interpersonal relationships and that that is the way that individual rights are preserved and the inviolability of property is preserved. | ||
| So that's my take on liberalism. | ||
| Well, close. | ||
| I would add I read a great quote by Bertrand Russell, who was saying that the classic liberal also will change their opinions as evidence changes. | ||
| Not necessarily that you're changing your moral compass, but you're willing to change as you learn new information. | ||
| And we live in a time where people just don't do that. | ||
| People are afraid to change their opinions because they're called flip-floppers, or they just get so stuck in something that they only, you know, it's like on Twitter, if you only follow people that reinforce your opinion, Well, then you never change. | ||
| You're in the echo chamber. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, I think there needs to be a distinction that's made between principle and dogma, you know? | ||
| And principles sort of hold for all time. | ||
| They're like laws of nature. | ||
| They just are. | ||
| And yes, I think a liberal, especially a classic liberal, is intellectually flexible, for sure. | ||
| But that just speaks to the fact that liberals are rational, and they hold reason as a primary, as opposed to any other means of knowledge. | ||
| But let's not push away the concept of principle and believe that that's easily divorceable, because I think those hold for all time. | ||
| And the pragmatists that we see today in politics who shift and constantly... Donald Trump is a perfect example of an unprincipled pragmatist. | ||
| That's sort of the opposite. | ||
| That's an anti-intellectual kind of flexibility. | ||
| So I think we want that, you know, that love of reality and love of reason and that understanding that a principle is an accumulation of facts. | ||
| It's, you know, it's a sort of a mental shorthand for a lot of information and that it holds true for all time. | ||
| Yeah, so that's really the catch-22 with Trump, right? | ||
| Like, we've all been waiting, desperately, for someone to break through the nonsense. | ||
| Someone to not only be on prompter, someone to actually speak like we speak, someone to not be afraid to share every opinion even if it's going to upset some people, and yet you just hit on it. | ||
| The sort of underpinnings of what he's saying really make no sense. | ||
| He's saying everything. | ||
| And yet, I've had, Milo Yiannopoulos, who I had on, who's a big Trump supporter, said that this election just simply isn't about policy. | ||
| It's just about this social, it's about that. | ||
| It's just about this social component. | ||
| People are so sick of that, that that's purely all they're voting on. | ||
| But that's a kind of scary place to be, isn't it? | ||
| It's a scary place to be. | ||
| It is a scary place to be in, but understandable. | ||
| As I said, political correctness is a tyranny, and we are seeing it in the colleges today, how language is being taken over by this movement, and people just don't want that anymore. | ||
| I wish there were an intellectual alternative to a guy like Trump, to be honest. | ||
| I just wish there was. | ||
| Yeah, I wish, but we'll have to continue to wish, at least for now. | ||
| But I'm a firm believer that because of all this, by 2020 I think we're probably going to have a viable third party. | ||
| So you started this party. | ||
| So how is this different? | ||
| How is the American Capitalist Party different than the Libertarian Party? | ||
| Because I was reading the platform and the principles and all that. | ||
| Did you talk? | ||
| What? | ||
| Did you like it? | ||
| I did like it a lot. | ||
| I mean, it's yeah, I mean, it's exactly the stuff that I've that I've been talking about. | ||
| And without, you know, you're not staking out crazy positions. | ||
| These all seem very it seemed based in the reason and logic that I try to apply to things. | ||
| So I like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But how is that different than the Libertarian Party? | ||
| Well, speaking of reason and logic, I think libertarianism in the end is about whim worship, sort of the thing that's animating the Trump phenomenon. | ||
| Libertarianism As far as I can see, the most consistent practitioners of libertarianism don't think that government has an appropriate place in society at all. | ||
| They consider it a coercive monopoly that will always be a coercive monopoly, irrespective of whether or not it's constrained by a contract like a constitution. | ||
| And so they just want to eliminate it entirely and put force on the marketplace, the way other goods and services are traded. | ||
| And the Capitalist Party understands that to be a very bad idea, that force isn't a marketable commodity, and that it needs to be deposited in an organization that That is governed by objective laws and whose sole purpose is to protect the individual from criminals and from the initiation of force, basically. | ||
| So when people give capitalism shit, when they basically are like, it's just not working and look what's happening in America or all the Bernie rallies and he talks about the 1% and even though it's really the 0.1% I think that he's really talking about because they talk about the 1% and It sounds like if you make around 400 grand, you're in the 1%. | ||
| At 400 grand, you're not pulling the strings of politicians, you're living a nice life. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But so the real problem that people are having with capitalism now, I think, is the crony capitalism that we have, right? | ||
| Just the way that bad actors have used the capitalist system. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, and I wouldn't call it crony capitalism. | ||
| I think cronyism is a form of statism. | ||
| It's fascism, and linking it with capitalism sort of puts capitalism in a spectrum that it doesn't deserve to be put in. | ||
| I mean, what we have now and have had For over a century is a mixed economy where there is elements of freedom and elements of controls and the elements of freedom, of course, lead to the prosperity that we like and the elements of control dislocate the market from the measuring tools that it needs in order to, you know, give us what we want. | ||
| It dislocates the market from the prices and from the profit and from the things that enable the resources and capital to be allocated properly | ||
| and causes these kinds of massive economic problems that we've had over the last century or so | ||
| since the coming of the Federal Reserve. | ||
| So I don't like linking businessmen who have political pull with free market people who produce a value that other | ||
| people want. | ||
| Right. So you see that more as a political problem than a problem of capitalism itself. | ||
| But that shows you how this stuff is all so intertwined, right? | ||
| Because if you make a lot of money, then you have access to politicians who can then change laws to then help you rig the system. | ||
| So we're in like a real... | ||
| A real mess here, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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We are. | |
| So how do we, at this point, understanding that, I mean, how do we unpin some of that without burning the system down? | ||
| Because that's what it, to me right now, it seems to me that the Bernie people and the Trump people, that they have one thing in common, which is, let's burn down the system. | ||
| And I would say, the system, as screwy as it is, and unfair as it is, and it needs to get better, but burning it down, I don't think is the way to go. | ||
| Well, I think eventually that is the solution. | ||
| I think there is no compromise between statism and liberty. | ||
| It's one or the other. | ||
| And you see over the last 120 some odd years how the one is slowly taking over the other. | ||
| Because of the fact that the political right, who's supposed to stand for the free market, hasn't. | ||
| Because they can't. | ||
| Because they've been compromising the entire time. | ||
| With statism. | ||
| So in the end the system does have to go in favor of either one that protects individual rights or one that fully endorses the state's rights to direct the life of the individual. | ||
| But I think it has to be dismantled not in one fell swoop. | ||
| There's too much dependence on it. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, that's what I mean. | ||
| They like the idea of burning it down, but I just think when you come out on the other side, we don't know what will happen. | ||
| So you think there's a way of sort of incrementally getting rid of some of this stuff, some of this regulation? | ||
| It incrementally came upon us. | ||
| I think that's the way you have to ease our way out of it. | ||
| But I think it's up to the intelligentsia and the artistic community to embrace a different value set | ||
| in order to make this palatable to the American people. | ||
| I mean, if you continue thinking that altruism is the appropriate moral code, | ||
| then statism is simply going to be the political extension of that. | ||
| And if you believe that you have a right to your own life and that the pursuit of your happiness is a moral good, | ||
| then a different system is what you would be for, and that's gonna take some time | ||
| to saturate the culture with that notion. | ||
| Yeah, we've got a lot of work in front of us, I guess is the answer. | ||
| So you believe that those moral concepts, that those really come from man, right? | ||
| There isn't a... This has nothing to do with religion or with... I don't know what your personal feelings on religion are. | ||
| I'm an atheist. | ||
| Okay, you're an atheist. | ||
| So that's also interesting because I talk a lot about the political side and I talk a lot about atheism. | ||
| There's some connection there. | ||
| What is that connection? | ||
| I mean, I didn't know if you were going to tell me you're Christian or you're a believer or whatever. | ||
| That would be irrelevant. | ||
| I think it's been a disastrous thing that capitalism has been linked with Judeo-Christian values and capitalism has been linked And the concept of rights have been linked to an unprovable and knowable God. | ||
| I mean, to me the concept of right just means a freedom of action and it's observable. | ||
| You can see in reality why a human being needs to be free from force. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You can't think with a gun pointed to your head and you can't act in your own interests or pursue values or create values with a gun pointed to your head. | ||
| So the concept... Look, rights wouldn't matter if you were on a desert island. | ||
| Property wouldn't matter if you were on a desert island by yourself. | ||
| It's a social moral concept and it comes from our nature. | ||
| It's founded in... | ||
| And it comes from our nature as rational beings. | ||
| And I think linking it to God makes it unjustifiable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the eyes of any rational human being out there. | ||
| Right, and that's where they've also used government. | ||
| They've been able to link it to God and then made government bigger. | ||
| So if you're on the right, like I give so much crap to my friends on the left who are controlling language, doing all the things that you just laid out, right? | ||
| So I'm trying to bring the left back a little center, I think. | ||
| But it's the people on the right who've used God in this equation that have expanded government because, as we said before, they are the ones that want to control who you marry and what you smoke and all that, and that is the reverse of everything else they're supposed to believe in. | ||
| Agreed, but the left does the same thing. | ||
| I remember reading a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, who started this disaster of progressivism, that he cared about people, not property. | ||
| And I've had discussions with people on the left who simply do not understand that property and life The pursuit of your happiness, your body and property, are intimately intertwined and you can't have one without the other. | ||
| So that's why the left, I think, thinks it's okay to take and redistribute what you've earned to other people in the name of the good, because your property is something communal, it goes for something greater than you. | ||
| Your body, on the other hand, is yours. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I also think a lot of it's just nonsense. | ||
| I think a lot of them don't practice what they preach. | ||
| They live for themselves. | ||
| They try to maximize their own profits. | ||
| I think a lot of them that own businesses would be happy not to have unions or do every other which way to not give their employees $15 an hour. | ||
| I mean, I see this with people I know, how they treat people that are huge lefties that don't really live up to any of these principles. | ||
| So that's that virtue signaling thing, like, I'm so good. | ||
| I'm so good. | ||
| Look how good I am. | ||
| But it's unlivable. | ||
| It's not really a moral premise that can sustain itself, or sustain life. | ||
| And I don't think it's an appropriate moral code to have a standard of value that's outside your ability to achieve, and to define the good in such a way that it's impossible to achieve it, or impossible to have a good life while achieving it, or impossible to have any life while achieving it. | ||
| So how do we get the younger people on board this? | ||
| Because that's the part we've touched on it slightly. | ||
| I mean the college stuff right now we know is completely out of control every day. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We see protests. | ||
| You can protest, but if you're silencing people, now we have a free speech problem. | ||
| And I keep saying I'm not that concerned at the moment. | ||
| that the government is coming for my free speech, but I am concerned that our social contract | ||
| of letting each other speak, that's being shredded right now. | ||
| So what do we do in terms of getting some young people on board this? | ||
| Well, I think these ideas have to start entering the culture, you know, | ||
| and have to start finding some acceptance in the universities themselves, | ||
| and that's going to take a couple of generations, I think. | ||
| In the meantime, I think political movements can sort of be the initiator to cultural movements. | ||
| You know, I think progressivism, even though it was an intellectual movement, | ||
| It was a very, very hard decision. | ||
| It was sort of foisted on the American people first. | ||
| I don't think they necessarily were behind the idea that the state should control every aspect of your life, you know, in the early 1900s, sort of at the height of the capitalist movement. | ||
| So for me, progressivism came as a political movement that sort of saturated the culture, and I'm hoping that bringing these capitalist ideas to the fore | ||
| and presenting them in a way that any rational human being could look at them and say, | ||
| what problem do I have with this? | ||
| This makes complete sense. | ||
| It's a way of initiating some cultural change. | ||
| Right, so that really though is the real damage that these trigger warnings and safe spaces | ||
| and all that does, right? | ||
| That these kids are just simply, they won't even get to hear what you've just laid out | ||
| or what some other person might lay out because they could be offended by it | ||
| or it somehow seems racist because you're not putting everyone on this chart of oppression Olympics. | ||
| So we have to crack that and I don't know that we have generations to do it. | ||
| Well, I think also redefining some political terms will help that as well. | ||
| Liberalism had a long tradition of intellectual strength, and it was taken over, you know, and it's changed now. | ||
| And I think taking back that label so that the political left Isn't able to progress further as a party that's connected to intellectual values. | ||
| But, you know, simply disconnect them from the concept of liberal and return liberalism to its rightful place, which is anyone who believes that the individual has a right to their own life and who adheres to reason and reality can be a political liberal. | ||
| And just let the left and the right kind of coalesce and find their own political. | ||
| Yeah, and most people are there. | ||
| I really believe that most people, I was watching Gary Johnson, I think this weekend on CNN, | ||
| and was saying that he thinks around 40% of the American electorate, | ||
| if they really understood this stuff, they'd realize that they pretty much | ||
| are for smaller government as a rule, that they are for social liberalism | ||
| and letting people live the way they want. | ||
| But we get so caught up in the craziness and then you throw in a Trump into this situation | ||
| and we just never have the intellectual discussion about anything. | ||
| So that's sort of where we fall, right? | ||
| Like we've gotta keep pushing. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't know if politics has always been this way. | ||
| I feel like back in the day there was some conceptual component to it. | ||
| Now it's concrete-bound, emotion-driven, and you can't really get beyond bromides and soundbites, you know. | ||
| And this is the one arena where there really should be deep discussion, because we're talking about Social ethics. | ||
| These are concepts that are just not so easily fleshed out. | ||
| Yeah, we don't have any of it. | ||
| I mean really, if you think about all the debates on both sides. | ||
| I think there were a couple debates where on the Democratic side they really had some interesting substantive stuff when they were talking about guns, for example. | ||
| I think they had some differences. | ||
| Bernie explained why. | ||
| Yeah, he's been more lax on guns than Hillary in a rural state. | ||
| But pretty much these debates and almost everything we see in the media is anti-intellectual, right? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, when you turn on cable news, do you ever feel smarter after that? | ||
| At this point, I really only watch when I'm doing cardio and I just put it on and I'm I take my earbuds in and out because I can't even watch for that long, but I always feel dumber. | ||
| I always feel I haven't learned anything. | ||
| So a lot of this is just media stuff, too. | ||
| Yeah, and that's visual media, too, and visual media is more superficial, and it goes for the bells and whistles and the headline grabbers and the thing that will immediately emotionally draw you in as opposed to the more substantive conceptual stuff that I think you and I want to see. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| When we're watching. | ||
| So part of this is just the nature of how we get news, right? | ||
| We're so used to Twitter, we're so used to Vine and Snapchat. | ||
| Everything is so short that to get people, if we were to have a real debate, | ||
| you know, every time there's a debate I say, "These aren't debates." | ||
| A debate is where you challenge someone's ideas directly. | ||
| These are precision questions that most likely they've been tipped off to beforehand and that's really infuriating to watch. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Everybody's canned. | ||
| Everybody has their rehearsed responses. | ||
| Nobody's speaking off the cuff, or at least off the cuff intelligently, you know? | ||
| And so we have this sort of canned universe that we're watching unfold before our eyes. | ||
| Where do you think capitalism's working better than it's working right here? | ||
| Is there a country that you look at and you go, or a system somewhere, or even a microcosm of it in America somewhere, that you go, this is how it's supposed to work. | ||
| And that's what we can use as a little bit of a path to get there. | ||
| Well, ironically, I don't think there's any country on the face of the earth that embraces capitalism fully. | ||
| But even more ironically, the countries that Bernie Sanders talks about are more free than America. | ||
| They have more capitalist elements to them than America. | ||
| And they certainly confiscate more of their citizens' wealth and redistribute it, but there are a lot of ways in which you can say that those countries are not Socialist paradises, but a mixed economy with more elements of freedom than even the United States. | ||
| Wait, so what's the freer part? | ||
| So when he's talking about some, I think, really more like the Scandinavian countries, I guess, where they have incredibly high tax. | ||
| Incredibly high tax, but easier to start businesses, you know, and much less certification and licensure. | ||
| Stuff like that that makes, you know, that makes Capitalism rather difficult here, or the government creates obstacles here to making new businesses, are not present there. | ||
| And so it's not really an accurate thing for him to point that out, to point to those countries as socialist meccas, since they're just embracing free markets. | ||
| And a couple of them, like Sweden, had a free market revolution in the 19th century that That carried on into the 1960s when the socialists took over, so capitalism is such a powerful thing that it can be dead for decades and decades and decades in a country, even ideologically dead, and yet still the productivity that was generated from that explosion of free markets creates wealth still, even though it's sort of an intellectual dead letter over there. | ||
| Right, so where does the pure capitalist, or where does the American capitalist party, where would you guys fall out on taxes? | ||
| Because I'm, I guess ultimately because I do believe in equality, because I believe in real equality, I'm pretty much for a flat tax. | ||
| But I would also say that you could have some level of progressive tax that would make sense. | ||
| So that if somebody, I'm not talking about if you make a million dollars, you should be taxed more necessarily, but at some level, maybe over 20 million, we can figure out little percentages. | ||
| I think there's some fairness in there. | ||
| And I know that probably a lot of libertarians would say, no, that's not fair at all. | ||
| But I could do some of that. | ||
| Do you follow that line of thinking at all? | ||
| What's your general feeling on taxes? | ||
| Well, first of all, I think that the graduated tax is not really just, for the most part, a person who is earning that kind of money has also created exponentially more wealth than they're actually taking home. | ||
| But a lot of people say they're just hiding that money. | ||
| They're hiding it, but you would argue that they're buying a big house | ||
| and they have to have a gardener and a-- | ||
| Well, I would say that if Bill Gates takes home $50 billion, he's created a trillion, | ||
| $2 trillion of wealth. | ||
| So the fairness of taxing him more because he has $50 billion sort of loses its moral luster | ||
| when you consider that he's created exponentially more wealth that benefits everybody. | ||
| As you can tell, I wasn't totally sold on what I was saying. I think there's an argument to be had | ||
| there and I haven't quite... | ||
| Well, I just think people forget that a person has that kind of wealth because they've created exponentially more wealth. | ||
| So they forget that. | ||
| They have a misperception that, you know, oh, these people are just sitting there. | ||
| They're shuffling papers around, or they're making transactions that are really not benefiting anybody. | ||
| So it's just money accumulating on money, and nobody benefits from that, which is sort of impossible, I think, in the way the economy works today. | ||
| Even if you just set your money in a savings account somewhere, I mean, it's going to be benefiting other people. | ||
| in innumerable ways, but as far as taxation goes, I support a flat tax as a sort of intermediary stage | ||
| to what I think is ideal, and what I think is ideal is a completely voluntary tax system where you pay a very, very, | ||
| very small amount of your income to support the legitimate functions of government. | ||
| So if you think about it, you know, if the government now functions at, what is it, what does it function, what does it function at every year now? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a lot. | |
| It's a trillion, five trillion. | ||
| It's something nutty, yeah. | ||
| It's huge, but the actual, the actual proper functioning of a, of a, of a night watchman type government that just protects your rights is Really, really, really infinitesimally small in comparison. | ||
| So it would be a very, very, very small fractional amount of your income in comparison to what we have to give today. | ||
| But did you say voluntary? | ||
| Yeah, voluntary. | ||
| So most people are going to hear that. | ||
| What is he talking about? | ||
| Who's going to volunteer to give the government money? | ||
| Well, right now we have an adversarial system where people sense the injustice of having the fruits of your labor stolen from you and your values subverted and your dreams subverted for the sake of other people. | ||
| Even if they don't want to admit it, they sense that that's sort of an unjust thing. | ||
| But if you're paying the police and the courts and the army to protect you from bad guys, it's something that I think most people can wrap their heads around. | ||
| So what would be those core things? | ||
| So it's police, it's firemen, it's roads... No, no, I don't even know the roads. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Alright, well this goes to... Firemen... We've got a little atlas shrugged here, right? | ||
| Well, I mean, look, of course there was a time when, you know, the people were responsible for that themselves, or when the burden fell to the states. | ||
| You know, in a more federalist system. | ||
| But I definitely think that a civilized society delegates the use of force to a body that is governed by objective law. | ||
| And so that is the purpose of government, is simply to protect you from bad guys, from fraud and force and invasions and stuff like that. | ||
| And the infrastructure of the country is That's more or less the responsibility of you and I, and I think it is in our interest to build these things, or to have somebody build them, and to pay them for that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So that goes to where I started, which is that people think that being self-interested is selfish, but usually, by being self-interested, you actually are interested in the greater good, because you understand that that helps you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, isn't that the piece of that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| You're going to go, I'm self-interested, but I want roads, so I'm going to help roads be made. | ||
| Well, you know, I think, yeah, I mean, when I hear greater good, it's a little scary to me because pretty much every authoritarian government On the planet that's murdered millions upon millions. | ||
| They've done it in the name of the greater good. | ||
| And you have to reduce that greater good to the individual. | ||
| And there is no greater good than the individual. | ||
| And certainly a person pursuing their own values and exchanging with somebody else has to have a reputation if they want to continue to exchange with another person. | ||
| Which means they have to produce and be a benevolent reputable member of their community. | ||
| I think there's no more benevolent community than one that says, I don't expect the unearned. | ||
| And hopefully you don't as well. | ||
| We can exchange as equals with each other, we can trade to mutual benefit, but that's how, that's, that is... | ||
| That's how we maintain a non-violent, non-aggressive society. | ||
| That's how we avoid conflict with each other. | ||
| I respect you as an individual and your property, your life, as inviolable as mine. | ||
| So I would, by virtue of that ethics alone, not treat you in a manner that would hurt you or violate you or cause you pain. | ||
| So I wasn't thinking of asking you this, but as we've come from, that this comes from man, this moral code comes from your mind, so then where in this system, something like abortion, now you're protecting the individual, this has all been about the individual, so what is in the womb, that child is an individual, and yet you want the government out, so how, do you have no regulation when it comes to abortion? | ||
| Because you want to protect the individual and yet you want There's some level of fight here. | ||
| I get a lot of crap from my point of view on abortion. | ||
| There's going to be a lot of people that hate me for this and I've had some Twitter wars with people over it. | ||
| Look, to me, rights are a social moral concept. | ||
| Like I said before, if you're on a desert island, you know, you don't have to worry about the concept of right, because the only person who can stop you from acting or thinking is another person. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So you do what you gotta do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's where rights are applicable. | ||
| So to me, the concept of abortion, the woman's already existing value, already pursuing life, her choice is Pretty much all that matters. | ||
| And until the child is born, when it's now in a social environment, when its needs have to be met amongst people, then it has rights. | ||
| So to say that rights begin at birth is a controversial thing for people because they change the equation to life. | ||
| When does life begin? | ||
| Lots of things have life and not rights and so, as far as I'm concerned, it's applicable to a separate, individuated being in a social context. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I guess this is one of the ones where... | ||
| You know, everyone wants a purity test. | ||
| You see this with every political party now. | ||
| It's like the Republicans want a purity test, which is why they'll talk about these rhinos, Republicans in name only. | ||
| And you see the Democrats doing this, fighting to be who's the most progressive, because that's the only way you can be a Democrat. | ||
| It's just silly. | ||
| And in something like this, I would say that at seven months, certainly that that fetus | ||
| is a life. | ||
| So I get what you're saying. | ||
| You're disconnecting. | ||
| A human being. | ||
| A human being. | ||
| It is an individual at that point. | ||
| Yeah, it can't exist without someone helping it and feeding it and everything else. | ||
| But at seven months, this is a livable creature. | ||
| But it's still breathing through the mother. | ||
| It's still eating through the mother. | ||
| But if you were to take it out at that moment. | ||
| Seven months, most likely, this can live. | ||
| These are arguable. | ||
| I mean, these are the gray areas that are very, very interesting to me. | ||
| I don't think that one should ban the procedure at that late stage, even though I think nature sort of compels you not to have an abortion procedure at that stage of things. | ||
| It makes it extremely difficult and risky for the mother. | ||
| So nature has the final sort of word on that. | ||
| But I think banser are are are very risky at the same time i think that | ||
| forcing people who find abortion morally abhorrent to subsidize abortion | ||
| or birth control or more or any other process that they find in morally repugnant | ||
| is morally repugnant itself so | ||
| right i think | ||
| pulling federal funding from places like that is the beginning believe it or not | ||
| I hate to align myself with folks that I disagree with on so many other levels, but I think it's the beginning of a stance on the protection of individual rights. | ||
| Right, so that's funny. | ||
| So in this case, you're aligning yourself with people that you probably have no agreement with in so many cases, like basically the Christian conservatives, right? | ||
| But that shows you how muddled our politics are, right? | ||
| That we don't really have clean lines anymore as to what anyone thinks. | ||
| So you can be, just because you're against government control of all this, suddenly you're aligning yourself with the people that want to control abortion. | ||
| It's really, it's... Well, I think in our politics today, it's the authoritarian you like is not an authoritarian. | ||
| You know, they still think that authoritarianism is good in some respects. | ||
| So unfortunately you are going to fall on weird sides of the issues as they're currently presented. | ||
| Yeah, so let's just knock down a couple of the controversial topics then. | ||
| So drug war, I'm going to assume you are completely against the drug war. | ||
| Are you absolutely for legalization of everything? | ||
| Completely legalize it and let's just see what happens. | ||
| I think there was a time when these kinds of drugs that we're probably thinking about as illicit were legal and you could buy them over the counter and there wasn't an epidemic that I know of. | ||
| You know, of opiate abuse and cocaine addiction. | ||
| There wasn't a systemic problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even beyond that, you didn't create powerful cartels that have, you know, that can actually determine the way countries are governed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that were pretty much animated by an ethics of violence, you know. | ||
| And you didn't subject people who wanted to procure these things to violence, which they | ||
| are now. | ||
| Because that's when you make something, you make a value that people want and have the | ||
| ability to purchase a black market item, you're just subjecting them to an element that is | ||
| far more dangerous. | ||
| And those people in this law enforcement part of the world that, you know, goes after drug | ||
| They could be used in far more efficient ways to keep us safe than putting people in jail and ruining their lives for just purchasing something that's outlawed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And often they're addicts, which is basically a disease. | ||
| I think it's classified as a disease. | ||
| So you're punishing them. | ||
| I mean, you're and then you're wasting state resources. | ||
| I mean, it's it's coupled with with a lot of stuff. | ||
| So when would it be right to use state power? | ||
| Is there any? | ||
| So if we were attacked, let's just say Canada starts lobbying missiles from Toronto into Detroit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It would be appropriate to retaliate. | ||
| It would be appropriate. | ||
| So retaliate to the extent that you end the threat permanently. | ||
| Not contain it, not marginalize it, and keep it somehow thriving, but eliminate it permanently, because the goal of retaliatory force is to protect the innocent. | ||
| So is this the irony when I hear all my progressive friends that want us out of these wars, and yet they're also for higher taxes, and yet it's our tax money that's funding all this stuff? | ||
| Wouldn't you, it always seems so obvious to me, you would want to starve the government of the money so that every time they want to build a new drone to send to Afghanistan, well maybe, there's always money for war I suppose, but you would want less government money so that they couldn't do all these crazy adventures, right? | ||
| Well, I think the overwhelming majority of the money that taxes are going to is the maintenance of the welfare state, the regulatory state, and a fraction of it goes to our war machine. | ||
| It's hard to tell where it goes, right? | ||
| We hear all that and they show us charts and I'm always like, but there's always money for war. | ||
| It just is always there. | ||
| And that's unfortunate because I think that there is, and of course it was a huge debate in the founding of our country whether or not a standing army was an appropriate thing for a For a free country to have in its wings. | ||
| But I do think it's an appropriate thing, given our sort of global interconnectedness, but not to create wars of democratization and to attempt to change cultures, but simply to protect American lives and property and businesses here and overseas. | ||
| That's it! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you became president tomorrow, knowing that we have these crazy situations, I mean, Iraq actually right now, It's pretty much worse than it's been at any point in the last 20 years. | ||
| We're still at war in Afghanistan. | ||
| I just read that as of two weeks ago, Obama's the longest president in war ever, you know? | ||
| So if you or whoever the American capitalist presidential nominee would be, how do you just end that stuff? | ||
| Just like, I mean, do you literally just the day you're in office, you just rip up a lot of treaties and you just get the hell out of there. | ||
| Is that doable? | ||
| Is that logical? | ||
| Does that create a whole other series of problems? | ||
| Not to sound like a pragmatist, but, you know, one would have to actually get in there, you know, roll up their sleeves and see. | ||
| What the extent of the damage is, I think. | ||
| But certainly having a principled foreign policy would be a start. | ||
| I don't think America's had a principled foreign policy for decades and decades and decades and decades. | ||
| Certainly not in my lifetime. | ||
| And I've been here 51 years on this rock. | ||
| So, I mean, having a principled foreign policy means understanding that the purpose of government is to protect individuals from criminals and from force, and to pursue America's interests, period. | ||
| It would be a principle. | ||
| I think America has indulged itself in sacrificial wars of democratization and literally their | ||
| platform has been, and I know some folks who fought in the wars, has been literally to sacrifice | ||
| American lives for the sake of these other people and cultures. | ||
| And that sacrifice... And oil. | ||
| Don't forget about the oil. | ||
| Well, I don't know that we gained anything from it. | ||
| I mean, that even makes it more appropriate to the altruists' ethics. | ||
| I mean, I think the people that said, you know, we went in there for oil... | ||
| As far as I'm concerned, that would have been somewhat a healthy motivation in that a tyrant was going to try to take over the oil, and the industrial world depends upon that. | ||
| environmentalists have made it rather impossible for us to kind of sustain our | ||
| own energy here through fossil fuel use and it's it sort of made sense to keep | ||
| the the oil flowing and the wheels of industry turning to a degree I mean I'm | ||
| really yeah I know I'm not for the Iraq war and I'm not saying that I'm that | ||
| made you sound for war and against the environment It's always... I mean, I'm saying that that would have been a somewhat legitimate take on things. | ||
| Unfortunately, it wasn't. | ||
| It was about... You're making a philosophical argument, which I always try to explain to people is different than making a fully pragmatic... Right, it was about nation-building, and we don't need to nation-build anybody. | ||
| We need to just protect American citizens. | ||
| And that means always reacting, never initiating, of course, against anyone. | ||
| Isn't it funny, just to wrap up, that even as you were saying that, that your subconscious or whatever is back there is going, don't say something that somebody could construe the other way, which then goes all the way around to where we started, which is just this beast of political correctness and we've got to crush it. | ||
| The hour is gone, which I can't believe. | ||
| Yeah, that was crazy. | ||
| We have done an hour. | ||
| So this has been a pleasure and we will do this again. | ||
| And I hope some of these ideas, I think they're trickling up or trickling down, which would be the better way. | ||
| And they need to do both. | ||
| They just all sorts of trickling everywhere. | ||
| All right, so I want to thank Mark Pellegrino for joining me. |
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