Nov. 4, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| With six days left to the election, it's incredible how little public discourse this past year | ||
| has had to do with the actual issues. | ||
| Immigration has become a meme fest revolving around Trump's proposed wall. | ||
| Abortion was basically relegated to one three minute exchange in the final debate. | ||
| There's been virtually nothing on legalizing marijuana, the war on drugs, or reforming our prison system. | ||
| Foreign policy has been reduced to Trump saying he can't tell us what he's going to do so that he doesn't tip anyone off, versus Hillary promoting her experience, much of which was a disaster. | ||
| There's been pretty much no talk of infrastructure or education, but a whole lot on genital grabbing and hacked emails. | ||
| My hope is that this is the last election we'll ever have where seemingly every major issue is neglected and the minutia of he said she said gets center stage. | ||
| Out of all of this anger and frustration and general lunacy, I really do believe that something good will rise from the ashes. | ||
| The majority of us want to talk about the real issues. | ||
| We don't want to demonize everyone, we don't want to be pandered to, and we do want to find solutions. | ||
| We got in this political mess this year because for so long we've allowed the system to let the lowest common denominator rise to the top. | ||
| Maybe we needed this freak show to happen so that the masses, the silent majority, would finally wake up and realize that it's actually our lives, our welfare, Every generation has something new to fight for and maybe for this generation the fight will be to recreate a system by the people and for the people. | ||
| That's why the next few years are going to be an incredibly important piece of history. | ||
| Will we sit back and let the worst of us continue to take control? | ||
| Or will we fight back? | ||
| Will we find allies where we used to find enemies? | ||
| And will we stand for principles even when it's not popular to do so? | ||
| I really believe that we'll do the right thing, but the only way we'll do it is by really discussing issues and not the sideshow. | ||
| Let's demand that our leaders explain why they believe in what they believe, why they vote the way they vote, and why they deserve the right to speak for us as citizens. | ||
| Let's step back from the scandals and the screaming and focus on education and empowerment. | ||
| Politicians and the media aren't going to magically just become better. | ||
| We have to demand that they do. | ||
| And the only way we can demand it is if we demand it from ourselves. | ||
| We can start by being outspoken instead of just outraged. | ||
| This week we're continuing our collaboration with Learn Liberty. | ||
| We're teaming up with Learn Liberty once a month to talk to professors, thought leaders, and authors on a wide variety of topics all related to free speech and classical liberalism. | ||
| Two things we could certainly use a little more of these days. | ||
| Joining me this week is Dr. Steve Davies. | ||
| Dr. Davies is head of education at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. | ||
| He's also a lecturer and a historian whose research includes crime and criminal justice, the history of ideas and political thought, comparative economic history, and much more. | ||
| In short, this guy knows his stuff and we're going to get into all of it Or at least as much as we can in an hour. | ||
| So sit back, take a break from the sound bites and distractions, and open your minds to the issues that matter. | ||
| Your brain will thank you and your country will too. | ||
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| We're continuing our monthly collaboration with my friends at Learn Liberty this week. | ||
| My guest is head of education at the Institute for Economic Affairs in London, as well as a historian and lecturer, and he flew all the way across the pond to be here. | ||
| Dr. Steve Davies, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| I heard you got held up by President Obama. | ||
| So we did. | ||
| We just got told that a VIP was going to the airport, and so they had to shut it down for half an hour, so we were held up. | ||
| I guess it must have been really important. | ||
| Yeah, after an eleven and a half hour flight, you don't even want to hear that it's the President, or there's nobody really that makes that exception. | ||
| No, absolutely, yes. | ||
| Yeah, so, alright, there's so much that I want to do with you, and I watched a ton of your Learn Liberty videos, so I'm pretty well-versed in some of the stuff that you're well-versed in. | ||
| First, did you want to come to America just one more time before our election? | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| There's something really strange going on here in the United States, I think it's fair to say. | ||
| Although, maybe not that strange, because I actually think that what's happening with Donald Trump is part of a more widespread phenomenon in most Western democracies, which is the rise of a kind of politics that's commonly described, I think, misleadingly, as right-wing populism. | ||
| And what it actually is, is a politics that combines left-of-center economics, strong support for the welfare state, with an extremely unpleasant kind of nativism, anti-globalism, nationalism. | ||
| And that's pretty much where Donald Trump is coming from. | ||
| It's straightforward Hamiltonian economic nationalism combined with a very unpleasant kind of identity politics, I would say. | ||
| But he's not alone. | ||
| He's part of a much bigger phenomenon. | ||
| Okay, so let's unpack a couple of those phrases there. | ||
| So you'd say this isn't a right-wing phenomenon because his politics Well, there's also support for the welfare state on a strictly national basis. | ||
| But he is using nationalism, so that is more of the right side. | ||
| What were the other parts that were...? | ||
| Well there's also support for the welfare state, but on a strictly national basis. | ||
| The correct name for this kind of politics, I think, is nationalist collectivism. | ||
| You could call it national socialism, but that's kind of been claimed already. | ||
| That might be a little too scary. | ||
| It's nationalist collectivism, basically. | ||
| And it's on the rise across most Western democracies. | ||
| A few exceptions like Spain, Portugal, Ireland. | ||
| But otherwise, this is the kind of politics that we see on the rise everywhere, I'm afraid. | ||
| Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Donald Trump here. | ||
| Pretty much everywhere. | ||
| Canada is another exception. | ||
| So what is happening globally that has caused that this isn't just a phenomenon? | ||
| I mean, I think everyone in America thinks everything's about us all the time and this is just our phenomenon and it has nothing to do with anything else. | ||
| But what's happening globally? | ||
| Well, there are two things, I think. | ||
| One of them is that a lot of the support for this kind of politics comes from older, Working class voters in what you would call the Rust Belt. | ||
| Decayed, ex-industrial areas where life has not been good for quite a long time. | ||
| And these people feel that they're ignored by the political establishment, that the system is not working in their interests, and they're kicking back. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| That's one reason. | ||
| And some of that, you think, you would argue is legit, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's legitimate. | ||
| Yeah, indeed. | ||
| They're quite right. | ||
| You know, life has been pretty hard for them for quite a long time. | ||
| The other thing, though, which I actually think is more important, is to do with the politics of identity. | ||
| It's to do with a feeling that a certain kind of identity is under threat from the process of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, maybe political correctness, a whole bunch of stuff like that. | ||
| So there's a very powerful cultural reaction, a reassertion of a certain kind of identity. | ||
| And I think that is what is really potent and really driving this kind of politics. | ||
| So how much of that is just a reaction to some of the stuff happening on the left? | ||
| I come from the left so that's the part that I've been focusing on and I do see a certain element of the rise of Trump and the political correctness stuff and the social justice warrior stuff. | ||
| I see it as a natural reaction to what has happened on the left. | ||
| Or maybe in Europe it's more because of the immigration. | ||
| I think there is an altitude to both of those things actually. | ||
| Undoubtedly the push-button issue, as we saw in the Brexit referendum in the UK for example, and with Marie Le Pen, is immigration. | ||
| Particularly immigration from the Middle East, but also from other parts of the world as well. | ||
| But that in a way is not so much because of immigration per se, it's because of the way in which large-scale movement of people is seen to be transforming and changing the nature of a settled and established national community. | ||
| And now I think that in terms, particularly the United States, yes there is quite a lot of pushback against the kind of social justice warrior, as you alluded to, PC politics on the left. | ||
| And in particular the politics of identity. | ||
| If you're going to push a politics of identity where Apparently the only group who aren't allowed to have an identity are white working class men. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Sooner or later, those kind of people are going to say, well, hold on a minute, you know, I have this identity too, which you are not respecting to your own terms. | ||
| So there's a lot of pushback coming on. | ||
| I think that shows how really the response that liberals need to have, and I would include many people on the left in that category, should be one where you assert the importance of individualism. | ||
| and of identity as being something that to a great degree is personally chosen and formed | ||
| rather than being something that's given to you and fixed in some way. | ||
| Yeah, I mean I love that and that's exactly how my own evolution has sort of happened over the last couple years | ||
| coming out of progressivism which is more about the collective to ultimately realize | ||
| I would only want to be judged by my own thoughts and my own actions. | ||
| So let's circle back a little bit to Europe and then we'll do our election. | ||
| Then we'll get into some big stuff. | ||
| So when it comes to the immigration situation all over Europe, I sense what you're saying is there's a certain natural reaction to people coming in and not assimilating properly or Well, actually, a lot of the response is misguided, in my view. | ||
| all that stuff. What is the proper solution for all these countries now? | ||
| Because the cat's out of the bag already. Well actually a lot of the | ||
| response is misguided in my view because for example there is a widespread | ||
| perception feeling that immigration imposes costs on the countries that the | ||
| immigrants go to. All of the research shows that actually this is not the case. | ||
| Immigrants are actually extremely good news because typically they are younger than their host population, they are almost always in work, they've come to look for work, they want to do productive labour. | ||
| How can that be a problem you might say? | ||
| And so typically they are taxpayers rather than tax consumers. | ||
| They typically make a net contribution to the budget. | ||
| They do not depress wages because typically they do work that the indigenous population either can't or won't do, usually because they lack the skill set. | ||
| They do have a marginal depressing effect on the wages of the bottom 10% of the income range, but that's about it. | ||
| But there's a widespread misconception or misunderstanding of what the economics of immigration is actually about, and that's a failure of public education really. | ||
| So that's part of it. | ||
| I think the more profound thing though is a feeling that there's a threat to an established indigenous culture. | ||
| And I think the response here is to simply be more confident. | ||
| I have enormous confidence in the assimilative power of the culture of a free society. | ||
| And I think the thing to do is not to say, OK, here are people who are asserting a particular collective cultural identity. | ||
| What we need to do is assert our own one in response to that and aggressively against that first one. | ||
| The thing to do is to emphasize individualism and the degree to which a modern free society is one where people are free to form and shape their own identity through the choices that they make. | ||
| And that should be true for everybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in a way, you're looking at it in sort of the macro sense of how we should deal with all this. | ||
| A certain amount of the people on the ground, they just don't see it that way because they see, well, here are these people coming in. | ||
| Even if the job thing isn't correct, they feel that their jobs are being taken. | ||
| So when I read stories about things like in Germany that I saw something that it was going to cost 1.4 billion euros to give the refugees or the migrants dental care. | ||
| I mean, these things are just not true, basically. | ||
| That isn't true. | ||
| If you look at the areas where there are problems, these are all areas where it's the state that is involved or is a major provider. | ||
| You do not see grocery stores panicking because they suddenly have to find food products and other products for new customers. | ||
| On the contrary, they look at it as a business opportunity. | ||
| The private sector everywhere actually sees large-scale movement of people as being, as I say, an opportunity, not a problem. | ||
| It's the areas where the state is involved that you find problems, and what that shows us is actually the incompetence and inefficiency of modern governments as compared to the private sector. | ||
| So even if we viewed everyone as the individual, and we're going to talk a lot about the individual here, do you think there's possibly something different with this wave of immigration, especially related to Yeah. | ||
| to terrorism and we know that there's a certain amount of people that ISIS wants to infiltrate and cross borders, | ||
| that there is something different about this. | ||
| Because even if all of us in the West say it's about individualism and let's judge people | ||
| individually and by their actions and all those things, | ||
| if a certain amount of people don't want to assimilate, what do you do then? | ||
| Well, in one sense, not assimilating is not in and of itself a problem. | ||
| Where I live in Manchester, there's a well-established Jewish community, been there since the 1880s, 1890s. | ||
| These people are Hasidic Jews, very strict, ultra-Orthodox. | ||
| A lot of them are Lubavitchers, actually, and they're not assimilated in some senses at all. | ||
| They've never watched television, for example, against their beliefs and so on. | ||
| But nobody, I think, would regard that as a problem. | ||
| From my point of view, it just means I've got a wonderful bakery near me where I can make fantastic bagels. | ||
| The problem is, as you say, the association of a certain category of migrants from the Middle East with Islamic terrorism. | ||
| Now, what's the best way to respond to that? | ||
| That is a difficult issue. | ||
| My own view, very much, is that the The ultimate solution is to try and sort out the complete mess that the Middle East has become. | ||
| But in the short term, essentially this is a policing problem. | ||
| What you definitely don't want to think about is dealing with this as a problem of military security. | ||
| It's essentially a law enforcement problem. | ||
| Right, so as someone that doesn't love state power, does it make you nervous that you have to sort of give a certain amount of state power to the police or to the border controls, or whatever, to actually make sure that they're doing the right job? | ||
| Yes, I am nervous about that. | ||
| And what I would say, by the way, is that the kind of increase in state surveillance which has been put through in the United Kingdom, for example, by our current Prime Minister when she was in her previous job as Home Secretary, is actually counterproductive in that regard. | ||
| Because basically, if you think about the task the security services have got, | ||
| they're looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. | ||
| So if that's the case, why do you then make the haystack even bigger | ||
| by intercepting virtually everybody's email? | ||
| That actually makes their job more difficult, not easier. | ||
| And so I think that actually what really you need is good old-fashioned, | ||
| undercover intelligence work, which means penetrating organizations, | ||
| identifying key people you basically track and keep an eye on, | ||
| and good old-fashioned spy work, really. | ||
| It's not always going to work, but that's the way to do it. | ||
| So it's interesting, because you're making a real argument for limited government | ||
| and slim trim government. | ||
| Through a prism that a lot of people don't think of it. | ||
| They think we need big government to protect us from things and have surveillance and all these things, the people that are for it. | ||
| But you're really making an argument for if you actually took a lot of that away, it might be a more efficient way of dealing with this. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| It would be much more effective in my view. | ||
| Huh, that's really interesting. | ||
| So let's talk about Brexit a little bit, because I did a little bit of it on this show. | ||
| And I'm constantly talking about how our American media doesn't give us much of anything. | ||
| So we didn't hear about it at all. | ||
| Then two days before, everybody was freaking out about it. | ||
| We saw it on Twitter. | ||
| Then it happened, and we don't talk about it again. | ||
| So for people that have no idea what happened, can you just give me a little history of it, and then where we're at now? | ||
| OK. | ||
| Britain's relationship with the European Union has always been, I think, a bit Fraught and difficult. | ||
| It's been like one of those unhappy marriages, if you will, where outsiders wonder, why are those two people together? | ||
| The reason being that British politicians and the British public, ever since we first joined the European economic communities it then was in 1973, have always seen it as being basically about economics. | ||
| It's all about getting economic advantage. | ||
| On the continent, however, they've been equally clear, right since they were seeing a conference in 1954, that this is all about building a political union. | ||
| So they see it as part of a kind of grand political project. | ||
| And the British politicians always say, oh, they don't really mean it, these continentals. | ||
| This is just rhetoric, which, of course, is actually quite offensive. | ||
| Not surprisingly, the continentals get a bit irritated by this attitude. | ||
| So essentially there's a growing mismatch between what the British public think the EU should be and the actual nature of that project. | ||
| And that's got significantly worse since the Maastricht Treaty. | ||
| So it caused all kinds of internal political ructions. | ||
| And David Cameron, in what I have to say was a grotesque act of misjudgment from his own perspective, called a referendum to try and sort out his internal politics. | ||
| Now in that referendum everyone thought, the expectation was, that the status quo would win. | ||
| I must say I expected that. | ||
| So that's basically why he called it, because he was in power, he figured, I'll call it, they'll agree with me. | ||
| And that'll sort out my party problem. | ||
| That's that. | ||
| Because generally speaking, referenda normally go for the status quo. | ||
| And in this case, the overwhelming majority of members of Parliament, most of the respected pundits, most economists, virtually all of the big business firms that were asked, the Bank of England, pretty much any authority figure you care to mention said, yes, you need to vote, remain. | ||
| So what took place was a popular insurgency. | ||
| And in which the ordinary British public thought, well, no, we don't agree with this. | ||
| And they basically went against the advice of the bulk of the political media business leadership. | ||
| Now, the vote that came together to vote Leave, if you will, was basically a coalition of three quite distinct groups, I think. | ||
| On the one hand, you had what you might call Brexit Shire. | ||
| Older Conservative voters, typically middle class, slightly older, living in the countryside, living in the affluent suburbs. | ||
| And that was one block. | ||
| So that's a little bit of the people that you described voting for Trump? | ||
| A little bit, but slightly more moderate. | ||
| The second group, however, are like the people who voted for Trump. | ||
| This is older, white, working-class voters in the traditional Labour heartlands of the northeast of England, the Midlands, Yorkshire. | ||
| The vote in some constituencies there, like Sunderland, which is our equivalent of, say, Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, that was a 69% vote for leave. | ||
| An absolute landslide. | ||
| And it was that block of what you might call populist voters, | ||
| working class voters, that put Leave over. | ||
| The third very small group, which I belong to, is what you might call radical classical liberals, who-- | ||
| very small group, but again, you could say we made the difference in some ways. | ||
| Because what we wanted was to be able to have a greater range of options for the British government | ||
| by being outside the EU's controls and constraints. | ||
| So it's those three blocks of people that voted for Leave, Yeah, I like radical classical liberals because I've been saying classical liberals It sounds too too benign or something radical has a little something extra there So okay, so when it was happening and you say you you were part of this Did you expect the vote to go that way because as you're saying the entire establishment was saying don't do it It's not gonna happen. | ||
| The polls were showing it wasn't gonna happen No, I always thought it was going to be tight but my own expectation was it was going to be about 51% remain to 49% leave because normally in referenda like this the undecided voters who make up their mind at the last minute split two to one for the status quo. | ||
| Now I actually think they did here but what happened was that the polls The pollsters underestimated the Leave share of the vote by about 5%. | ||
| The reason being, a lot of the people who voted Leave were people who did not normally vote. | ||
| And pollsters always discount people who say that they don't vote. | ||
| So they got their sampling wrong. | ||
| And so they underestimated the share of the vote that Leave was going to get. | ||
| So looping this back to Trump, because I see such parallels here, I suspect the exact same thing is going to happen. | ||
| I'm not saying Trump's going to win, but I do suspect there's a depression in the polls because a certain amount of his supporters either aren't being polled for whatever, they're in places that they're not polling, Or they don't want to be publicly shamed or admitted or something like that. | ||
| So I sense that what you're talking about here, this groundswell of support that was not spoken of, I suspect that's happening right now. | ||
| Do you think that's fair? | ||
| I do think so. | ||
| I think there's two things going on there. | ||
| One is what, since we're here in Los Angeles, is known as the Tom Bradley effect, where people are not honest in the answers they give to the pollsters. | ||
| But also I think that actually the polls to samples are probably slightly wrong. | ||
| They're probably not counting the correct number of Trump voters because one of the things he did during the primaries was to bring a record number of people into the primary process who had never voted before. | ||
| Now what I suspect that means is he's going to be much more competitive than he currently appears to be in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, maybe even Michigan and Arizona where I think there's a significant number of people who have not voted before who will vote. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of when you see Nigel Farage come here and speak at Trump rallies? | ||
| What do you make of the connection between the two of them? | ||
| And is this really, you know, when I click on an InfoWars link or some of the more right things, Breitbart, that really they're fighting the globalists. | ||
| The globalists are coming here. | ||
| I think there's some degree to a one world government thing that's trying to formulate, but like how much, it feels so conspiratorial. | ||
| Well, that's exactly the kind of alignment that I was talking about. | ||
| Both Nigel Farage and UKIP in the UK, Donald Trump here, they're part of a nationalist reaction against the increased cosmopolitanism, globalisation that we've seen in the last 20 to 30 years. | ||
| There's a feeling that there's transnational organisations that are pushing an agenda they don't like, but basically it's more a kind of localism, a hostility to cosmopolitanism and to globalism, and you see that on both sides of the Atlantic. | ||
| Now that's a politics I strongly reject, but you can't deny the reality and the existence of it. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what makes it so hard to talk about, because it's not fun to talk about something you reject, but to be honest, to be a classical liberal, you have to acknowledge that something's happening, which is really strange. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And it's no point in ignoring this. | ||
| I mean, if you disagree with something, with a belief that a lot of people have, the thing to do is to engage with it. | ||
| What you have to do is to actually talk to these people, respect their views, but show them that you think they are mistaken, and here's why they're mistaken. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so now Brexit happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everyone said the next day, the markets are gonna crash, the economy is gonna crash, everything will be over, we're gonna be fighting for bread. | ||
| Have you had bread lately? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No problem with that. | ||
| I think we're still in the phony war stage right now. | ||
| I think there's going to be an enormous and quite serious political row in the United Kingdom in the next few months. | ||
| The big question now is, OK, what do we do? | ||
| And there are really two routes that the British government can take. | ||
| Quite simply, to simplify it, one is they can go for membership of what's called the European Economic Area, which means that we would be a bit like Norway. | ||
| Now, that means we would have access to the European single market regime. | ||
| But we would still be bound by a lot of EU regulations, while no longer having any say in what they were or how they were formed. | ||
| So that's sort of like staying in the EU but light? | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| And the other alternative is to say, well, we don't want to do that. | ||
| We basically want to negotiate a free trade deal with the EU. | ||
| The trouble is that once Theresa May triggers what's called Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, Which is the withdrawal process. | ||
| It's got a strict two-year limit and it's not clear that you can negotiate a two-year free trade deal in just two years. | ||
| So that would throw us back upon just membership of the World Trade Organisation, which means that would then be a 6.5% tariff between Britain and Europe. | ||
| Now, that's probably more than compensated for by the decline in the value of the pound that's taken place, but it's still not very welcome. | ||
| Now, the critical political thing is, the City of London, 7% of British GDP, would lose its passporting rights. | ||
| It would not be able to do Euro-denominated business unless we're in the European Economic Area. | ||
| The problem politically for Theresa May and the government is that the Europeans have been very reasonably, in my view, saying, look, if you become a member of the EEA, you have to accept free movement of labour. | ||
| That's part of the deal. | ||
| You can't cherry-pick your conditions, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. | ||
| And the problem is that for political reasons, because so many of the people who voted Leave did so on anti-immigration grounds, she is, not all of them, but a significant portion of them, she's not prepared to do that. | ||
| And so the result is that therefore it looks like we're going to actually not apply to join the EEA effectively. | ||
| And that's going to cause enormous political ructions. | ||
| Now, in the longer term, I think the British economy will do fine. | ||
| There may be some losers, probably the City of London. | ||
| There'll be some gainers though, manufacturers in particular and exporters. | ||
| Consumers, because the price of a lot of goods like food will go down. | ||
| It'll even out, it's a bit of a wash really, but in the short term there's going to be quite a lot of political fireworks. | ||
| So all that being said, aren't those subtle reasons that Brexit was actually the right decision? | ||
| Because you guys still have to sort of negotiate things with the EU in a weird way that allow them to have power over you and that was what the whole purpose of leaving was. | ||
| So in a way it's like Better to do it now than ten years when a lot of this stuff has even been tightened, right? | ||
| Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, the point is, what Brexit does, and this is my main reason for voting for it, I wasn't a passionate Lever, but I did vote Leave in the end. | ||
| The main reason for doing it is that it increases the range of political possibilities open to the British electorate and the British government, for both good and bad. | ||
| Right now they're highly constrained because a whole lot of radical policies on both left and right would fall foul of the EU's own rules and regulations. | ||
| So there's actually a very narrow range of what is allowable politically. | ||
| Now that we have left the EU, or once we've left the EU, it becomes much wider. | ||
| A whole range of options are opened up. | ||
| Now, the job for me, then, is to argue for the right ones to be taken, rather than really bad ones. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Your job just started, basically. | ||
| Exactly, yes. | ||
| So that's my main reason for doing it, and I think there are much greater options open to us now in the future. | ||
| Entity is really in trouble. | ||
| I mean everything beyond what just happened with you guys I mean, they've got Greece basically in a hostage situation, right? | ||
| I mean is that am I being too hyperbolic? | ||
| No, I think most Greeks would agree with you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so what do you think the future here is you have you have you know Britain leaving you've got Greece in a hostage situation I mean ultimately the borders that are crumbling people aren't happy with and Well, the real problem that the EU faces is the incredible act of hubris they did at the Maastricht Treaty, which is to create a single currency when they don't have a single government. | ||
| Now, interestingly, pretty much every economist on the planet at the time, regardless of their politics, said that this was a really bad idea. | ||
| And they all thought it was a bad idea for the same reason, which is that there's no historical case ever of a single currency area that doesn't have a single government surviving. | ||
| And if you do have a single currency area in countries that are not economically aligned, if you will, and you don't have a single government, all kinds of really bad stuff happens. | ||
| Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman in the same wake, made almost exactly the same point. | ||
| Now, they ignored the advice from all the economists. | ||
| And as Paul Krugman rather wittily put it, the good news is we know now the optimal currency area | ||
| theory is completely correct. | ||
| The bad news is we've had to bugger up the economy of a continent to do this. | ||
| To figure it out. | ||
| Figure it out. | ||
| So the point is they still haven't resolved that problem. | ||
| Now, Greece is a small country. | ||
| They can handle Greece. | ||
| What if Italy goes under, which is quite likely? | ||
| The Italian banking system is in really, really bad shape. | ||
| If there's a major crisis in Italy, or maybe in France, or some other larger country, they won't be able to resolve it. | ||
| So they're going to have to either create something like a government for the Eurozone, Or they're going to have to allow the Euro to be dismantled. | ||
| And either of those is a huge event. | ||
| Plus, there's an election next spring in France. | ||
| And there's a pretty reasonable chance that Marine Le Pen will win the election. | ||
| If she's up against one candidate from the centre-right, Alan Juppé, she will lose. | ||
| If she's up against the former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, the polls show it's very, very close. | ||
| And I would actually tip her to beat him. | ||
| Right, because that could be one of the situations where the polls are going to deflate her support. | ||
| Plus also, these polls are now before a campaign. | ||
| She's a very effective campaigner. | ||
| And so I think she could well beat the rival candidate, Yvette Sarkozy. | ||
| Now if she became president, I mean the odds are still against that, but if she did, she said she'd immediately call a referendum on France leaving the EU. | ||
| Now, all the polls there indicate 65% of the French public would vote Leave. | ||
| Now, if that happens, the EU is finished. | ||
| It's done for. | ||
| So it's in a very tricky situation right now, the EU. | ||
| So for someone like yourself, again, classical liberal, and you want this to be about the individuals, so I can understand the separation, why you think ultimately this is good. | ||
| It seems like in a weird way, you then have to align yourself with the Marie Lepens, with the, you know, you end up by default falling into a category with the people that wanna leave and with the nationalist streak that I don't sense that you have. | ||
| So how do you negotiate that with yourself? | ||
| With great difficulty. | ||
| This is the big problem. | ||
| The problem for many classical liberals in the UK was, if we vote leave, will this not give a big boost to precisely the kind of politics that you most dislike? | ||
| That was the argument to several of my colleagues, for example. | ||
| I think that basically you have to realise if things like this happen you are going to be alongside a bunch of people that otherwise you totally detest. | ||
| And what you then have to do is to argue the case very, very strongly against them. | ||
| Now the crucial thing here I think is for liberals, both left and right if you will, classical liberals and social liberals, to come together. | ||
| And to realise that they have common foes, if you will, in the shape of the national collectivists, and on the other hand, the radical left. | ||
| And so here in the United States, for example, I think it's quite likely that there may well be a kind of rapprochement in the next few years between the kind of moderate part of the Republican Party, so-called, which is actually in many ways the more libertarian part, fiscally conservative but socially liberal, if you will, and on the other hand, the mainstream of the Democrats. | ||
| And this will be aimed at both the kind of people who are now voting for Trump and also the kind of people who were supporting Bernie Sanders earlier on in the primary. | ||
| Yeah, so I know this is this political realignment is one of the things you've been talking about lately and I love that because that's exactly What I've been trying to talk about, that I no longer, as a classical liberal, I don't really see conservatives as my enemy, as maybe five years ago I might have thought that they would be. | ||
| Where now it's like, yeah, we can have some disagreements about taxes, and maybe we're not in the exact place related to abortion, or a series of states' rights, or whatever. | ||
| But there has to be a new center developing here. | ||
| Otherwise, a lot of classical liberals will end up Well, indeed. | ||
| The way to think of it is this, I think. | ||
| Since about the 1970s, the big argument in politics on both sides of the Atlantic, but | ||
| particularly here in the U.S., has been between one group of people who are economically interventionist | ||
| and egalitarian but socially liberal versus another group who are pro-free market but | ||
| socially and culturally conservative. | ||
| That's been the big division. | ||
| What I think we're now moving towards is a situation where the divide is between one | ||
| group of people who are broadly free market, broadly individualist, globalist, perhaps | ||
| a bit more egalitarian than classical liberals would like, but broadly liberal, versus another | ||
| group which is the national collectivists I mentioned earlier, who are actually economically | ||
| interventionist, pro-wealth estate, but very culturally conservative, quite authoritarian, | ||
| anti-globalist, anti-cosmopolitan. | ||
| And that's the new division I think we're seeing in politics everywhere. | ||
| What that means is that a lot of the existing groups are going to split up, so conservatives are going to have to decide what is more important to you, the cultural conservatism and the nationalism, or the free markets and the individualism. | ||
| And if you're on the left, you have to decide, well, OK, what am I really more interested in? | ||
| And if you're one of the kind of identitarian, anti-globalist left, you actually may find yourself thinking, I probably got more in common in some ways with this kind of new emerging Hamiltonian nationalist politics. | ||
| If on the other hand you really value individual liberty and globalism, openness to the rest of the world, then you're going to find yourself making alliances with these other people who are forming your opponents. | ||
| So I think there's a kind of big shuffling of the deck going on in most Western democracies. | ||
| So as a historian, can you think of another time where we had such a, maybe not on a global scale because we're so connected now, but where you saw just these real fractures happening in real time. | ||
| When's the last time you saw something like this? | ||
| Well, the last time it happened in the UK, certainly, was in the 1960s and 1970s. | ||
| And I think something like that happened over here in the United States as well, where you had this sudden reversal where the South went from being Solidly Democratic, where, you know, if you found two Republican votes in a county, you'd reckon the guy must have voted twice! | ||
| To the situation we have now, where the South is solidly Republican, and the Democrats have become the party of the North entirely. | ||
| That kind of switch took place then, in the 60s and 70s. | ||
| Similarly in the UK, back in the 1890s, here in the United States, with William Jennings Bryan, the Cross of Gold, and the famous Democratic Convention in 1896, when the populists basically took over the Democratic Party. | ||
| Major change in the nature of the Democratic Party, landslide victory of Republicans, again, | ||
| big realignment of votes and interest in the states then. | ||
| So this kind of thing has happened before. | ||
| It's not unprecedented. | ||
| Yeah, but what do you add about the global element, where now it's like we're so connected, | ||
| we're all on Twitter, we're all watching TV and on the internet, | ||
| and that these things are happening at once, and that where 100 years ago, | ||
| if something happened across the pond, it mattered, but we didn't know about it for a while, | ||
| versus now it's all happening in real time. | ||
| This is true. | ||
| I mean, there were more connections than you might imagine in the 19th century, but, as you rightly say, they're much slower. | ||
| So now there is much more of a global phenomenon. | ||
| In fact, what is interesting is there are very few countries where this kind of realignment isn't happening. | ||
| Canada is one, not happened there so far. | ||
| Spain is another. | ||
| Japan. | ||
| But generally speaking, you can see the same thing happening everywhere. | ||
| And I think what happens is that what now, because we're so interconnected, what happens in one part of the world tends to feed into what's happening elsewhere. | ||
| Hence the great interest that Donald Trump and his supporters have shown in Brexit and Nigel Farage coming over here and making all these talks. | ||
| That would not have happened 100 years ago. | ||
| I don't think that would have happened. | ||
| I don't think that would have happened 10 years ago. | ||
| When I saw Nigel Farage out there at this rally, I thought this is really unprecedented. | ||
| When is the last time that a leader from another country, even an ally, whatever, it doesn't matter, came and was supporting the opposition presidential candidate? | ||
| I thought this is completely unprecedented. | ||
| Yes, it probably is true. | ||
| It's a function of cheaper air travel and things like Twitter and the internet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so let's shift a little bit from the politics of the day to sort of the broader stuff. | ||
| You describe yourself as a classical liberal, correct? | ||
| So now, what is the difference, so that I can explain it to my people properly, when they say, Dave, you've become a libertarian. | ||
| How would you describe the difference between a classical liberal and a libertarian? | ||
| I don't think there is really such a difference. | ||
| The word libertarian, strictly speaking, means an anarchist. | ||
| It was originally used to describe communist anarchists of the Peter Kropotkin variety. | ||
| The problem here in the United States is the good word liberal has been hijacked by social democrats. | ||
| And so unlike the European continent, where liberal still means a believer in private property, limited government, little government intervention, individual liberty, pluralism, It's now in the United States come to mean something slightly different. | ||
| So the word libertarian came to be used here in the United States to mean basically what everywhere else would be called a classical liberal or a liberal, full stop. | ||
| So I don't think there is that much difference. | ||
| There is perhaps a slight difference emerging now in as much as increasingly the word libertarian does mean something more radical, a bit more extreme. | ||
| So, if you say you're a libertarian, you probably imply that you're either an anarchist or very close to it. | ||
| If you say you're a classical liberal, you imply that, well, you're not an anarchist. | ||
| You do think there is a necessity for government. | ||
| So you're slightly more moderate. | ||
| So I think that's what it's like. | ||
| So I like that distinction, because that's definitely where I fall. | ||
| I think there is some use of the state. | ||
| You know, as I said, I watched the Libertarian Party, you know, their convention, and it was like they're screaming about, you know, driver's licenses. | ||
| And it's like, guys, you're really missing the ball here. | ||
| You know, like, if we can't just let that go, because we're not going to, even if you're 100% right, There's no way to really deconstruct an entire system like this. | ||
| Even if the Libertarians were purely, purely right, is there a way to actually take a somewhat functioning society and really unfurl the whole thing? | ||
| Not through the political process, anyway. | ||
| If you do want to change society in the longer run, the thing to do is to do it at a grassroots level, to create alternatives to government, which I think is what you should be doing. | ||
| But I think with the kind of politics you're describing is rampantly self-indulgent, I would say. | ||
| This is the kind of politics of a certain kind of person who is interested in being more pure than everybody else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Having an identity that is not compromising, completely pure. | ||
| It's the same kind of mentality that leads people to become religious fundamentalists of one variety or another. | ||
| It's a desire to be the person in the group who is right when everybody else is wrong. | ||
| And so the more other people move towards your position, the more you're going to insist upon these really extreme, peculiar things that still make you distinct. | ||
| So I'm afraid I'm not at all sympathetic to that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it just seems like a non-starter when they're screaming about legalizing heroin, which we could talk about the war on drugs, which you talk about a lot, and I'd be happy to do that. | ||
| But when they're going there to start and driver's licenses to start, it's like, guys, Yeah. | ||
| This is not where it is. | ||
| Go for issues where you can persuade a significant part of the public to come to your position. | ||
| That's what politics is about. | ||
| Politics is not about striking a pose and trying to show how morally pure you are. | ||
| That's just pure virtue signalling. | ||
| I can say it's self-indulgent nonsense. | ||
| What you want to do is make clear what your ultimate position is, but then say, well, OK, you go for issues where you can persuade a significant part of the broad public that you are right and that yours is the way to go for. | ||
| And that's where you go for mainstream issues, not Fringe issues like that, which may be interesting for a small number of people, but they're not going to win the election. | ||
| Right, there's a fun discussion to be had, I suppose, about that stuff, but not really, in a broader sense. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| All right, so how do you decide how much state power is okay? | ||
| How do you make that distinction between pure anarchy and I want something to keep the wheels on here? | ||
| Okay, right. | ||
| I think state powers That's part of where it is, but it's not really just that. | ||
| The real distinction is between what part of your life do you want to be driven by individual choice or choices made by voluntary collectives, versus what part of your life do you want to be determined through some kind of collective decision-making process, through politics, if you like, through government. | ||
| And I think the answer that if you're a classical liberal you would give is that you want to maximise the scope of individual decision making. | ||
| Because that means greater scope for individual discovery and it also means that most people are, you would argue, the best judges of their own interests. | ||
| So if you allow people to follow their own judgement as to what their best interests are, collectively you'll end up with the best outcome that maximises human welfare. | ||
| So that leaves, though, a certain number of areas where there may be structural problems. | ||
| It's very difficult to act collectively in these areas. | ||
| If you want to use the technical and economic terms, maybe there's a public good aspect to what you're talking about, like national defence. | ||
| And in these areas, it probably does pay to do things through a collective decision-making process. | ||
| There's something about these core areas that means that they are so important that they have to be done universally. | ||
| You can't have a situation where, say, 90% are covered by the law enforcement system and 10% are not. | ||
| That would have all kinds of major negative effects for the 90% who were covered, never mind the 10% who weren't. | ||
| And so there's a kind of limited range of areas where, yes, you do definitely need the government. | ||
| Now, I know there are people who will say, oh, no, no, you could, in theory, yes, you can do without government. | ||
| But my own view is that if that's the case, why isn't everyone going to Somalia? | ||
| I know people say Somalia is better off than some of its neighbours. | ||
| And it's true that if the choice is anarchy or Pol Pot, you will go for anarchy. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that necessarily a stateless state of affairs is your first choice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So for all the people that would say, well, you know, for the pure libertarian or whatever you want to call them at this point, that would say, no, remove the social safety net altogether. | ||
| Don't help the poorest under any circumstances, because if the government gets out, then private entities and private people Well, no. | ||
| The thing is, I would ideally like to see a situation where you don't have the government providing that function. | ||
| But the trouble is, how do you get from here to there? | ||
| And the difficulty is that if you do simply withdraw government safety net provisions, fundamental social welfare transfers, It's going to take a long time, probably, before you get something that takes its place. | ||
| And in the meantime, a lot of people are going to suffer quite severely. | ||
| And I don't think that's acceptable, quite honestly. | ||
| So the argument should be that you should, A, through private action, develop non-state forms of welfare. | ||
| We should revive mutualism, friendly societies, fraternal orders, all the great institutions that we used to have. | ||
| Which delivered a huge range of welfare functions very, very effectively, particularly here in the United States. | ||
| So we should be looking to do that, privately revive that. | ||
| But at the same time... But we got rid of those as the state groups. | ||
| Well, yeah, what happens as the state groups. | ||
| Plus also, though, it was due to quite concrete legislative measures, particularly ones urged by the medical profession, which were designed to drive friendly societies out of health care provision to what was called lodge practice. | ||
| That was a purely legislative function. | ||
| It wasn't crowding out by the state. | ||
| It was just that a lobby group, the doctors, got legislators to pass laws which made it very, very difficult for private voluntary operation. | ||
| But the other thing you need to do, going back to my original point, is to say that, well, yes, there is probably going to be a kind of Bottom level provision provided by government through the political process to ensure that nobody falls below a certain minimum level, that nobody's starving in the street, people do have a minimal amount of resources so that they can actually survive. | ||
| Now, what you can then do is get into a highly technical argument about what the best way of doing this is, and certainly the way we're doing it Now, in many Western countries, is not the best way of doing it. | ||
| But that's a minor argument. | ||
| The major principle, I think, is you do concede, if you're in my position, that there should be some kind of residual state function of that sort. | ||
| Singapore probably has the best way of doing it, I would say. | ||
| Which is what? | ||
| Well, they have a system of forced savings, where essentially you are obliged to pay money into a series of accounts, one of which covers your health care costs, mainly in old age, one of which gives you a pension, Another one gives you protection against sickness or unemployment. | ||
| Now the crucial difference between that and the system we have is that the accounts have your name on it. | ||
| So it's your money. | ||
| And you make these forced savings into these accounts throughout your working life. | ||
| You draw on them when you need them. | ||
| And if you die, let's say you fall under the proverbial bus, all the money you paid in, it becomes part of your estate and goes to your heirs. | ||
| That's incredible! | ||
| Now that's a much better system than the one we have here. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| So it doesn't just get pooled into something else and redistributed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| It's got your name in it. | ||
| And it's your property. | ||
| If you die, let's say you have a large amount in your health. | ||
| The left would not be happy with this. | ||
| I'm not sure about that. | ||
| It's very effective. | ||
| You've got a large amount in your health savings account to cover the really expensive part of health care, which is looking after you in the last six months of your life. | ||
| But let's say you die suddenly from a heart attack. | ||
| You die like that. | ||
| You won't have drawn on that fund. | ||
| And it's there for your heirs. | ||
| It's part of your estate. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm completely for that. | ||
| I suspect that the left, you know, they would say, well, no, the state should be able to take that now. | ||
| You're gone and give it to somebody else. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| But I mean, the point is, I think I would argue against that for a whole number of reasons. | ||
| But I think that that's a much better system. | ||
| As I say, that's the system they have in Singapore. | ||
| So what do they do for the people that are outside of the system? | ||
| Well, if you're really, really poor, the government actually makes contributions on your behalf. | ||
| But Singapore is such a successful economy and society that very, very few people are on such low incomes that they can't make some contribution. | ||
| And the ones who are very low incomes, as I say, either the state makes contributions entirely at the minimal level or it tops them up. | ||
| But that's actually a very marginal, very small number of people there. | ||
| So if we wanted to change to a system that was a little more like that, and we've already hit on this a couple times about how incremental change is tough, but you don't want to burn it down at the same time. | ||
| Beyond just making the case for it, and I hadn't even heard of that Singapore thing, so now some new people are going to hear about that concept. | ||
| How do you actually start making that happen? | ||
| Do you have to start doing it at the local level? | ||
| That probably would require change at the national level because you're talking about something which would replace the way Social Security is currently run. | ||
| You would switch Social Security from a pay-as-you-go system to a fully funded system of this kind. | ||
| That would require action by Congress or at the very least maybe by state legislatures for some of the other forms. | ||
| I think you just need to make the political case for it. | ||
| And the difficulty, of course, is that you have a whole bunch of people in the existing system who can't simply be switched over to the new one. | ||
| So you're going to have a period of about 30 years, certainly 20 years, where there's an overlap, where you have the new system in place and you have people who are under the old system. | ||
| That's inevitable, it seems to me. | ||
| And that means in the short run this could be quite costly, but I think in the long run well worth doing. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| So I heard you in a video that I saw you do yesterday talk about how libertarians are generally thought of as non-interventionists. | ||
| You think there, although I don't think you prescribe to it, you think there is a situation where a libertarian could be for some intervention. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| OK, for any kind of libertarian, classical liberal, the question with foreign policy is which course of action is going to most maximise liberty, both in the country that is potentially doing the intervening, in this case the US for example, And the part of the world where the intervention might take place. | ||
| Now, that should be the guiding principle behind what your foreign policy is. | ||
| Now, what I would say, and I agree with a friend of mine, Randy Barnett on this. | ||
| He's been on the show. | ||
| There's nothing inherent or necessary about libertarian principles that means you must be a non-interventionist. | ||
| What I would argue, and here perhaps I disagree slightly with Randy, is that the number of cases where the benefits of liberty will be so great that you would support intervention is actually very, very slight. | ||
| I would apply something like a just war principle. | ||
| You have to show that really the benefit is bound to exceed the cost. | ||
| And that this is knowable and that the intervention could be done in a way that doesn't systematically violate human rights. | ||
| So that's quite a high bar. | ||
| Yeah, wait, let's pause there for a sec. | ||
| How much does the benefit have to be for you and your society, not just the people that you're potentially doing this for? | ||
| Well, I think it's more a matter of the cost because if you think about intervention in foreign parts of the world, one of the main arguments against that from a libertarian or classical liberal position is that it actually is bad for liberty back home in the country doing the intervening. | ||
| To the extent that the United States becomes an empire, and it is an empire, that's not pussyfoot about this, that undermines Republican institutions and liberty back home. | ||
| And this is not a new phenomenon. | ||
| Many of the things that led to the growth of the state in Great Britain were because of British intervention outside the rest of the world. | ||
| The India office, which ran the Indian Empire, was our first big modern department of state and then transformed the rest of government by its example. | ||
| So basically you do these things over there, wherever there is, and then you actually need more state power at home. | ||
| Well, it provides an example. | ||
| So in order to have, for example, you need a really large military if you're going to have a kind of global interventionist role. | ||
| And that inevitably does things like increase the role of the military domestically, increases | ||
| its purchasing power, its clout, builds up the military industrial complex that Eisenhower | ||
| warned against, has all kinds of bad effects. | ||
| It also leads to the growth of a surveillance state. | ||
| It leads to the growth of the police power of the state, which we spoke about earlier, | ||
| which you might say is necessary in certain cases, but certainly not to the degree we've | ||
| got it now. | ||
| And it just also generally gives our rulers ideas above their station. | ||
| Because if you have the mindset that, oh, we can go over and be this benevolent despot and transform the lives of these people in other parts of the world, this tends to naturally create a mindset where you think, well, there's these people here in our own society. | ||
| They could do with our benevolent interference as well. | ||
| And that's a very dangerous mindset. | ||
| Right, and somehow we always have money to do those adventures, but we never have money to help what's happening here. | ||
| Yeah, what a surprise. | ||
| Yeah, what could be happening there? | ||
| You know, it benefits all kinds of people. | ||
| I mean, the other quite shameful thing is that this typically involves sending young men from often poor backgrounds into harm's way, when the children of the people making these decisions are certainly not joining the military. | ||
| And if they are, they're probably not going to be sent into harm's way in that way, which I think is seriously disreputable. | ||
| So I think I wouldn't rule out that there are certain cases where an intervention could be on balance beneficial for liberty both at home and in the place where the intervention takes place. | ||
| But I think that's vanishingly very low probability. | ||
| There are very few cases like that in my view. | ||
| Right, so let's just take Syria, for example, because that's obviously the big one at the moment. | ||
| We know over 400,000 people are dead. | ||
| This thing is not ending anytime soon. | ||
| It's hard to know whose side we're on, what's going on with Iran and Russia, all of that stuff. | ||
| Now, I think the mainstream libertarian think would be, even if we partly created this mess, we just gotta cut our losses and let it be. | ||
| How does ethics and morality get involved as a classical liberal, where you see, okay, we don't wanna be killing more people, but maybe we could create humanitarian corridors, or maybe there's a way to do some good There, but it may not be cost effective for us. | ||
| The question is, who are the actors in this thing? | ||
| Because people always say, OK, we've got to do something, or what should we do? | ||
| Who is the we in this sentence? | ||
| Now, I think people get two things confused and conflated. | ||
| One is, what should civil society do? | ||
| What should or can we do as individuals? | ||
| And there are all kinds of things we can do, depending on what you think is the right course of action. | ||
| But the other thing, of course, it means is what should our government, the government of the United States, the United Kingdom, wherever, do? | ||
| Now, in terms of what governments should do, governments in this context are basically the purveyors of deadly force, which is their core function. | ||
| And so the question, therefore, I think, is slightly different. | ||
| And really, you want to minimise harm, it seems to me. | ||
| Now, I would argue that actually the course of action that will minimise harm in most cases is classic foreign policy realism. | ||
| Because what you want to do is to minimise the chances of war and large-scale conflict. | ||
| And I think actually, channelling Bismarck is probably the way to go. | ||
| Strange thing for a Liberal to say, but I do think in foreign policy, asking yourself the question, what would Bismarck do, is probably a good way to go. | ||
| Because foreign policy realists like Bismarck do not generally cause large-scale wars. | ||
| And that's what you want to do if you're looking at what the government should do. | ||
| You're looking to try and minimise the amount of armed conflict that happens. | ||
| Sure, so what would Bismarck do in a situation that's already begun? | ||
| It's too late for us now. | ||
| But is there a moral cost, I guess is what my question is, is there a moral cost of knowing that something horrible is happening and that perhaps you could do something? | ||
| Again, who's the you? | ||
| The question is this, if you're saying there's something terrible going on there, I feel a kind of moral responsibility as a human being for the suffering of my fellow human beings in that part of the world. | ||
| All kinds of things you can do. | ||
| You can give money to a non-government organisation or a charity, something like Médecins Sans Frontières. | ||
| You might even volunteer to work with MSF if you're a doctor or a paramedic. | ||
| You might support things like the creation of lobbied the government in Syria or the combatants to allow | ||
| people to leave, non-combatants, civilians to leave the combat zone to cease | ||
| fires, you might argue for, if you, on the other hand, you might say, well I think that | ||
| this is the right side in this conflict and if you feel strongly about it, pick up | ||
| a gun and go That's the honest and honourable thing to do. | ||
| Or give money to help people acquire mercenaries and things like that. | ||
| Now on the other hand, if the government is what you're talking about, my argument is that typically government intervention, military intervention by states in conflicts of this kind is almost always going to make the conflict more intractable, more bloody, more extensive, more long-lasting. | ||
| And it's not going to be, ultimately, the interest even of the outside powers. | ||
| So much of this is driven by the desire to avoid the other side getting on top. | ||
| And so, you know, the realist view there is, well, usually, steer clear of it. | ||
| Unless a vital national interest is at stake, you do not get involved. | ||
| Because both on on pragmatic Machiavellian grounds, but also on moral | ||
| grounds. Because if you intervene, this is very likely to make the whole conflict worse than | ||
| it otherwise would be. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| In the case of Syria, I mean, let me show this work. In the case of Syria, I predicted | ||
| when the Arab Spring was going on that if it came to Syria, it would be a bloodbath. | ||
| Now this didn't require great prescience on my part, because the whole point about Syria | ||
| is that the government is dominated by a clan/religious sect, the Nusairis, the Alawites, which is | ||
| Asser comes from, who come from the mountain region of Latakia. | ||
| Virtually all of the other people in Syria, particularly the Sunni, orthodox Sunni Muslims, regard them as rank heretics. | ||
| That means that a democratic regime in Syria is probably not feasible at the moment, because if Assad and the Alawites give up power, they are dead. | ||
| So they're not going to do it. | ||
| So I knew there would be armed resistance to any movement to overthrow the state. | ||
| Now once the civil war had started, the question is, What do you do? | ||
| The problem, I think, as far as Western policy goes is that a large part of Western policy has been to try and overthrow Assad. | ||
| But they have willed the end without willing the means. | ||
| They've intervened, but the intervention has actually been of a kind that has simply made the conflict more intractable and gone on longer. | ||
| And it's provoked countervailing intervention by the Iranians and the Russians who, for their own strategic reasons, don't want to see Assad overthrown. | ||
| That shows how government intervention can actually make a conflict that probably would have ended one way or another much more intractable. | ||
| My own view, actually, for what it's worth, is that the only really effective way of resolving that conflict is to partition Syria into three or four states. | ||
| I think that's the only way to actually do it. | ||
| I mean, incredibly, Joe Biden, when he was running for president, when he ended up being Obama's Absolutely. | ||
| That's a perfectly rational solution. | ||
| there was a moment in the debates where he said, we have to partition Syria and partition Iraq. | ||
| Exactly, that's a rational-- | ||
| There should be an actual Kurdish nation and the Sunni should have a nation, | ||
| the Shia and all that. | ||
| And people laughed at him because it sounded very academic and we're not gonna split these countries. | ||
| But at this point, Syria is not really a nation state. | ||
| That's a perfectly rational solution. | ||
| He was completely right about that. | ||
| Anybody who looks at that part of the world and is a political realist is going to say | ||
| that partitioning several of these states that were created totally artificially | ||
| by the British and the French, during World War I. | ||
| Not even on geographic lines, I mean, really on ridiculous-- | ||
| Just drawing lines in the sand, as the famous book calls it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those states are not viable, they should really be broken up and that would be a rationally humane response to the situation we now have. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to spend a ton of time on this because we don't have that much more time, but how much of what's going on in the Middle East is just because of the guys that were drawing the map? | ||
| I mean, if you look at a country like Jordan, it looks ridiculous. | ||
| The shape of Jordan is absurd. | ||
| It looks like a puzzle piece that got mangled. | ||
| I mean, how much is just that the people actually drawing the map had nothing to do with what was happening on the ground? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| And by the way, I don't blame you guys solely for that, because the Ottoman Empire ran a lot of it for a long time. | ||
| Well, no, actually, what means seriously, if you talk to most Turks, what they will say pretty quickly is that things were working a lot better there when they ran it. | ||
| That's a widespread Turkish view. | ||
| If France and Britain had followed the Ottomans and used the Ottoman local government units, things might well have worked out better, because those units actually reflected underlying realities in many cases. | ||
| But no, that's part of the problem. | ||
| Part of the problem in there, as in large areas of Africa, is that you have political units which do not make demographic sense. | ||
| But it's not just that. | ||
| I think there are other factors as well. | ||
| There's been a collapse in the government in a huge area of the world, Central Africa up through the Middle East. | ||
| Places like Libya, for example. | ||
| What has happened is that the state, the political order, has collapsed. | ||
| And what we're seeing is lots of violence caused by non-state actors. | ||
| Basically clans, gangs, tribes, terrorist groups. | ||
| We call them terrorist groups, but we might as well call them criminal gangs. | ||
| That's what they are, basically. | ||
| And until some kind of stable political order is recreated in that part of the world, I don't see that state of chaos ending any time soon. | ||
| The problem is that the existing political order And this is where those guys, Sykes and Pico, come in, is simply not sustainable because it's based on an irrational thing. | ||
| The other thing that's going on there is that basically you've had very, very rapid population growth in that part of the world in the last 30 to 40 years. | ||
| Probably more than that region can sustain ecologically, and you have an economy in large parts of that region which is A, very badly run because it's corrupt and you have incompetent governments, and B, is very dependent on oil. | ||
| And what you have now is lots and lots of unemployed, but over-educated young men. | ||
| And that is always, and everywhere, a recipe for trouble. | ||
| Right, it's fertile ground for terrorism, I think is what Bill Maher says. | ||
| Absolutely, and war of all kinds, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, is there a little saving grace in that, because of the internet now, and that information can spread so fast, that these people are learning there's other ways of life? | ||
| And that maybe that ultimately will be what allows them As they get older, to create societies that'll be a little more egalitarian? | ||
| Hopefully, yes. | ||
| I am optimistic in the longer term. | ||
| In the short term, I'm a pessimist, I'm afraid. | ||
| In the longer and medium term, I'm an optimist for that part of the world, as I am for most of the world, because I do think that things like that mean that the world is going to become more interconnected, people are going to be more aware of different ways of doing things. | ||
| To go back to what we spoke about earlier, they'll realize that their identity is not something they're stuck with, that they can actually shape their own life more. | ||
| But I think it's going to be a while before we get there, I'm afraid. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| There's a whole slew of other things I want to talk to you about to finish, but we only have time for one of them. | ||
| Should we talk about drugs or is there something that you want to really discuss? | ||
| Do you feel like we hit most of the big stuff? | ||
| Whatever you want. | ||
| I always say a good interview is when I don't look at the cards once, so we did it here. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about drugs a little bit, because I think this is an interesting place for the libertarian or the classical liberal. | ||
| You basically think that our war on drugs is completely ridiculous, right? | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| One of the worst policies ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What would be a better policy related to drugs? | ||
| Well, I think there are two things to do. | ||
| The first thing is quite simply to legalise drugs. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Across the board. | ||
| Across the board. | ||
| What people do not realise is, until the 1890s, any drug was freely available. | ||
| If you were a chemist in Great Britain until 1922, the United States until the 1890s, you could go in, you could order opium, you could order morphine. | ||
| After Conan Doyle could go to the chemist in London and get his weekly supply of cocaine. | ||
| Serious coke habit. | ||
| Which is why Sherlock Holmes has a coke habit in the stories. | ||
| So this regime we now have has been created piecemeal since the 1920s basically. | ||
| So it's not inevitable. | ||
| It's a specific policy response. | ||
| And the results of it have been catastrophic. | ||
| It has led to incredibly high rates of incarceration here in the United States, which means countless lives ruined and severely damaged, if not destroyed. | ||
| It means it's given enormous amounts of money to some seriously evil and unpleasant people and led to the growth of an enormous network of international organised crime, which would not otherwise exist. | ||
| In terms of the geopolitics, this is one of the major ways terrorist organisations get money. | ||
| It's a catastrophe in terms of that. | ||
| It's undermined the stability of large parts of the world, like Colombia for example. | ||
| Increasingly, that's one of the reasons why Venezuela is in bad shape, quite apart from the incompetence of the government there. | ||
| Mexico, we all know there's like a war going on in some parts of Mexico at the moment. | ||
| And also, it hasn't even done the thing it's meant to do, which is reduce the use of drugs. | ||
| Where in fact, actually this has gone up. | ||
| Not only that, but an inevitable result of this policy is that the suppliers and the users both go for harder drugs. | ||
| Because you want to get more bang for the buck, you want also to sell and to use products that are less bulky, easier to conceal. | ||
| Same thing has happened with prohibition during the 1920s, where the Americans went from being a beer-drinking nation to being a hard liquor-drinking nation, which is not what you want if what you want to do is control alcohol drinking. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I would say that this, in terms of its own goals, this is a catastrophic policy failure. | ||
| Now, having said that, I'm not one of these people who is channeling Timothy O'Leary and thinks that drugs are good for you. | ||
| There's no doubt there is a problem with widespread use of drugs. | ||
| It's worth saying, by the way, that the real problem anyway, not least here in the United States, is the massive increase in the use of prescription drugs. | ||
| The number of people who are psychotropic, mood-altering drugs, is staggering and it has grown dramatically since the 1960s. | ||
| So there's a more general problem of drug use in advanced countries, particularly North America, of which Illegal drug use is a subset. | ||
| Am I mistaken? | ||
| You guys in Britain, you don't have the commercials we have, right? | ||
| Are they not legal there? | ||
| Every commercial, especially on cable news, is for all of the prescriptions. | ||
| Yeah, that's not allowed now. | ||
| That's not allowed under the advertising regulations in the United Kingdom. | ||
| That might be a regulation I'd be for, actually. | ||
| It is strange when you're watching African television in the United States, you're going to think, does everyone in this country suffer from enlarged prostate? | ||
| Yeah, and you've got that cartoon cloud following you. | ||
| Anyway, so the thing is, what I think is that what you need to do is to Have a social movement to address the undoubted real problems of the drug trade, which you could do if the government got out of this. | ||
| And my model would be temperance. | ||
| Where in the 19th century, at the start of the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, pretty much everyone was in a drunken stupor most of the time. | ||
| The amount of drinking was phenomenal. | ||
| And by the 1880s or 1890s, most British and the great majority of Americans have become seriously sober people who maybe drink very occasionally. | ||
| They're not heavy drinkers the way their grandparents have been. | ||
| That is not due to government. | ||
| It's due to the enormous social movement of temperance, which unfortunately also wanted to use the law to stop the residual 10% from drinking. | ||
| If you think about smoking, okay, I'm not keen on all the anti-smoking laws we have, but on the other hand, there's been a huge change in social attitudes to smoking, which has made it socially just not the thing to do, to smoke in company. | ||
| That's the way to address the undoubted problem that we have with drugs. | ||
| It's through social action of that kind. | ||
| The war on drugs is actually making that kind of effective social action less likely and causing a ton of other problems. | ||
| Right, is the smoking one must be a tough one for you though, because on one hand, at least here, | ||
| our taxes are incredibly high on smoking. | ||
| So this is a government, so they sort of tried to price it out of the market, which I guess you wouldn't really be for. | ||
| I don't think they are trying to price out of the market quite frankly. | ||
| Or they're trying to maximize their profits. | ||
| They're trying to maximize their revenue, which is something different. | ||
| Because the theory of these taxes is they're meant to stop you and I buying cigarettes. | ||
| But actually, I don't know about the US government, the British government would have a panic fit | ||
| if people stopped smoking. | ||
| Because they get seven billion pounds a year of revenue from smoking taxes. | ||
| Right, so in a weird way they need it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Plus also, they really ought to encourage people to smoke because if you smoke you're likely to die younger and you won't be claiming a whole bunch of health care benefits and things. | ||
| But no, the point about that is that that is actually a very bad policy because the demand for cigarettes and tobacco products is highly inelastic and so what you're doing actually is hurting the poor more than anybody else. | ||
| There are other ways of doing it. | ||
| Like I say, social pressure. | ||
| Yeah, so what about for the person, so I'm pretty much with you on the philosophical part of how the government should deal with this and the actual tangible part of drugs. | ||
| I would have some concern if they just say, if heroin was legal tomorrow and kids could just get it at a corner store. | ||
| We're here in LA. | ||
| There are pot stores on every corner. | ||
| I have a license for it, so I'm not doing something illegal. | ||
| But what do you do for the real... I'm not even talking about the Timothy Leary mushroom stuff, you know. | ||
| I'm talking about the really addictive stuff. | ||
| Well, actually, some of the drugs that are... I'd be much more worried about things like sedatives or cocaine than I would be about heroin, actually, interestingly. | ||
| But that's another matter. | ||
| The thing is, To say that drugs should be sold legally does not mean there'd be a complete free-for-all. | ||
| There would quite clearly be regulations, for example, saying that people cannot buy them below a certain age, just as we have with alcohol and tobacco. | ||
| For good reason, because you think that somebody under a certain age, which you set arbitrarily, does not have the judgment to know whether or not they should do this. | ||
| And you should enforce laws on that very, very strictly and very, very firmly. | ||
| You might well have a system where certain categories of drugs or substances, you basically say, You could do what the Swedish government tried with alcohol and have a rationing system. | ||
| There are various ways around that. | ||
| The point is, it wouldn't be just a case of, oh, you can walk into any store and just buy your shots of morphine and heroin over the counter like anything else. | ||
| Almost certainly, there would be a whole array of legislation. | ||
| The point is, it would be sold by a legal retailer who would have strong incentives to have high quality product, not to sell it to people who are going to be problematic in one way or another, because they would have a vicarious liability under the law, for example. | ||
| And unlike the situation at the moment where they're being sold by seriously dodgy people, criminals of the worst kind, who actually have an incentive to not care about who they sell it to or how they sell it. | ||
| So actually if you're concerned about protecting vulnerable people, which is what we're talking about here, Right. | ||
| then actually making the sale of the substance legal is the way to go because it means that you're much more | ||
| likely to be able to look out for their interests and the sellers are much less likely to have an incentive | ||
| to screw them over, to be blunt about it. | ||
| Right, and interestingly, it gets back to sort of what's been the through line here, | ||
| which is that a little government involvement in a certain way could be okay. | ||
| So I almost think I almost think that my new phrase now when people say classical, what's a classical liberal? | ||
| I almost think it's a realistic libertarian. | ||
| Do you think that's a good way of putting it? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And I mean the thing is say very often limited government and smart limited government even more so is a lot more effective at achieving the ends that big government liberals wanted to have than a big government is. | ||
| That's a very good way of thinking it. | ||
| I think that's a perfect way to end this. | ||
| It's been a pleasure. | ||
| I didn't look down once. | ||
| That's how I know it's a good one. | ||
| For more on Dr. Steve Davies, you can check out learnliberty.org slash speakers slash steve-davies. | ||
| Thanks for watching. |
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