Actor Mark Pellegrino, co-founder of the American Capitalist Society, details his shift from state-educated leftist to classical liberal after reading Ayn Rand. He argues both major parties rely on state aggression, defining a true liberal as one limiting government to retaliatory force for rights and property while rejecting altruism. Pellegrino critiques Republicans for social compromises and Democrats for using religion to expand power, asserting rights stem from human nature, not God. Supporting drug legalization to curb cartels and opposing wars of democratization, he proposes a "night watchman" state funded by voluntary taxes to protect citizens from force and fraud. Ultimately, this framework challenges modern political orthodoxy by prioritizing rational self-interest over altruistic moral codes. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.