Dec. 30, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:15:30
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| For the last show of 2016, let's unpack the two words that everything circled back to for me this past year. | ||
| Classical liberalism. | ||
| We've had many conversations on the Rubin Report focusing on classical liberalism and how this political philosophy is different than both progressivism and libertarianism for subtle but important reasons. | ||
| For those of you who are a little late to the party, classical liberalism can be defined as a political ideology that values the freedom of individuals, including the freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and markets, as well as limited government. | ||
| It developed in 18th century Europe and drew on the economic writings of Adam Smith and the growing notion of social progress. | ||
| So as you can see, freedom is right at the top of the pyramid of importance to a classical liberal. | ||
| You have freedom to practice any religion you want or none at all. | ||
| Freedom of the press to hold the government accountable. | ||
| Freedom of assembly to protest those in power. | ||
| And freedom for the markets to move the economy. | ||
| All of these are vital in the eyes of a classical liberal. | ||
| These ideas are rooted in the liberty of the individual and a limited government. | ||
| Of course, when you say things like liberty and individual and limited government, these words are usually thought of as libertarian or conservative ideas. | ||
| This is why some of my critics say I'm actually a right winger. | ||
| I'm not bothered by this charge because it doesn't even make sense if you understand the original meaning of liberalism as I just laid out. | ||
| When people say to me, you're not a liberal, what they're really trying to say is you're not a progressive. | ||
| I'll get to more on that in just a second. | ||
| A true liberal is for gay marriage because they believe a gay person should have the same rights as a straight person. | ||
| A true liberal is pro-choice because they believe it is the right of the woman to do with her body as she sees fit. | ||
| A true liberal is for legalization of marijuana because you should be allowed to smoke whatever you want in your own home. | ||
| A lot of this sounds like libertarianism, which I know is scary for a lot of card-carrying liberals to hear, but this is exactly where we can start building bridges to a new political center. | ||
| So what, then, is the difference between a classical liberal and a libertarian? | ||
| And how is a classical liberal not on the right? | ||
| There's a couple things at play here. | ||
| First off, there's the dirty little truth that classical liberalism is technically more a part of the American right because of the importance it puts on individual freedom. | ||
| I know a lot of liberals don't want to hear that or believe that they could be part of the right. | ||
| And I also know that the left-right paradigm is rapidly crumbling as the two-party system is becoming more archaic. | ||
| The reason liberalism became so identified with the left is because of social liberalism, which took over in the mid-19th century. | ||
| For a while, this brand of liberalism worked and helped tremendously, causing huge social change like equality for black people and for women. | ||
| At some point though, social liberalism changed from judging people on the content of their character, as Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| professed, to instead judging people on immutable characteristics, like skin color or sexuality. | ||
| This was the shift that liberalism made to progressivism, which places the group over the individual, and ultimately, in my opinion, isn't very progressive or liberal at all. | ||
| By judging people as groups instead of as individuals, the minorities within a minority will always be thrown under the bus. | ||
| This is where the social justice ideology came from, a liberalism which was rooted in the amorphous term social instead of the clearly defined word liberty. | ||
| That's why being liberal these days, in the classical sense, has very little to do with being on the left anymore. | ||
| Silencing dissent, deplatforming speakers, hurling unfair charges of racism and bigotry aren't liberal ideas at all, although sadly they've become part and parcel of today's left. | ||
| As I often say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I have no doubt that most progressives believe they are correct in their thinking. | ||
| So it's our job as liberals to show them where they've gone awry. | ||
| Then, and only then, can true liberalism be part of the left again. | ||
| As I've mentioned before, I love the convergence of classical liberal and libertarian ideas because it shows that two different ideologies can come to the same conclusions if they're based in individualism and liberty. | ||
| So if you're a liberal who's for gay marriage because you want gay people to be treated under the law, that's just as good as a libertarian who wants the government out of your personal life altogether. | ||
| There's many other places where you can apply this line of thinking which begs the question, what's the difference actually between a classical liberal and a libertarian? | ||
| I've discussed this with a few guests in my partnership with Learn Liberty and would recommend that you check out my interviews with Steve Davies of the London School of Economics and Randy Barnett from Georgetown University for more on that. | ||
| Long story short, classical liberals do see some valid role for government to the ends that it enhances human freedom. | ||
| Libertarians, for as much as you can define them, are a bit harder to pin down on this notion. | ||
| Speaking of Learn Liberty, we're continuing our partnership with them this week and joining me is author of 17 books, economist and former professor of English history, economics, and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Deirdre McCloskey. | ||
| Deirdre also happens to be transgender, transitioning to female over 20 years ago. | ||
| We'll talk about her journey, both personally and professionally, and how individualism, liberty, and freedom are the keys to a prosperous economy and a rewarding life. | ||
| As we look towards 2017, let's refocus on freedom, liberty, and the rights of the individual. | ||
| The voices trying to tear us apart have made it very clear that they're only going to get louder and angrier. | ||
| Russia and fake news are not the problem. | ||
| We are. | ||
| Only when we look in the mirror and are willing to challenge ourselves to be more tolerant of other opinions can we find real answers. | ||
| The only way that we can drown out the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum is by finding allies where we used to find enemies. | ||
| I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you're an old school liberal, your enemy is no longer the old school conservative. | ||
| Defending liberal principles has become a conservative position. | ||
| "As we enter a new year, let's all take the liberal position | ||
| "of extending the olive branch "instead of extending the middle finger." | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week, | ||
| and joining me is an author of 17 books, a former professor of economics, history, English, | ||
| and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a historian and economist in her own right, | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| I'm very glad to be here. | ||
| That is quite a bio for you. | ||
| It took me a while because there was a lot that I had to leave out, but there's only so many words I can say in a sentence. | ||
| Well, I'm very old, so I've had a very complicated life. | ||
| I'm also an adjunct professor of classics and philosophy, or was, and I've taught philosophy for money in Holland. | ||
| So I feel that you can't be a real economist, which is what my original training was. | ||
| Without at least reading books in the other fields. | ||
| To kind of put the rationality of humans in some sort of context so you include the other things they do. | ||
| Yeah, alright. | ||
| So before we get going here, I thought the best way to start would be to read a quote from you. | ||
| I've never done this before in the year plus that I've been doing this show, but I thought this was so perfect and it It sort of captures everything about you, and I think you know what I'm going to read already, but I want to get this right. | ||
| Quote, I'm a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free market, progressive, Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man, not conservative, I'm a Christian libertarian. | ||
| That's me, dear. | ||
| That's me, all the way. | ||
| I mean, you've given me everything here. | ||
| I don't even know where to go from here. | ||
| Okay, so... | ||
| Where should we go from here? | ||
| All right, well, let's start, because I don't think we have to spend a tremendous amount of time on it, unless you want to, but let's just start with the trans stuff. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| I was born Donald, which, by the way, in Irish means world ruler, so you can apply this to our president, our new president. | ||
| Oh, Lordy, Lordy. | ||
| We'll get to him in a little bit. | ||
| We'll get to him in a while. | ||
| And then I, from age 11 on, I'd wanted to be a woman. | ||
| I was born in 1942, so I'm very aged. | ||
| And in 1953, there was nothing to be done about it, so I said, okay, I gotta be a guy. | ||
| So you're looking at the captain of her high school football team. | ||
| Admittedly a very small school. | ||
| And I was an athlete in college and was married for 30 years to the love of my life. | ||
| And have a couple of grown children and three grandchildren. | ||
| So I had a full male life up to age 53 and then I... My joke is, did I want to be an old man or an old woman? | ||
| I thought, oh well, let's be an old woman. | ||
| And it's not as trivial. | ||
| You know, this isn't about cost and benefit. | ||
| It's not a career move to become a female professor. | ||
| That doesn't improve your... Yeah. | ||
| The idea that you even frame that within an economic model is sort of amazing to me. | ||
|
unidentified
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I did. | |
| At one point I did. | ||
| About two months or so before I realized that I could do it and should do it, which was August of 1995, I actually did a cost-benefit study of changing gender. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, this is insane. | ||
| This is not how you make decisions. | ||
| Yeah, so what did you do? | ||
| I mean, you sat down with two columns? | ||
| I sat down and had two columns. | ||
| It was completely ridiculous. | ||
| And then in the middle of August in 95, as the English say, they've got a nice expression, I twigged to it. | ||
| I got it that I could do it and should do it. | ||
| I was not a sad sack before. | ||
| I was not going to commit suicide or something, but I'm happier. | ||
| Unfortunately, my marriage family turned against me. | ||
| My former wife of 30 years and my children haven't spoken to me since those days. | ||
| Did your wife know when you first got married or throughout the marriage? | ||
| Yeah, throughout the marriage she knew what I knew, which was that I was a heterosexual cross-dresser. | ||
| Every once in a while, not very often, I would dress in women's clothes. | ||
| Not in her presence. | ||
| And it wasn't a big deal. | ||
| It was like, you know, a foot fetish or something. | ||
| See, guys, as women learn, have a lot of little weirdnesses that they go in for. | ||
| And it doesn't really amount to anything often. | ||
| And that's how I viewed it for decades. | ||
| I was terribly ashamed when I was younger. | ||
| And then finally, in my 40s or something, I said, well, OK, so what? | ||
| So we went along perfectly well. | ||
| And then that last year, 1995, I finally twigged, as I said. | ||
| So when you did it at that age, I mean, people think of it now, you know, trans has become sort of hot now. | ||
| Not in 1995, it was not. | ||
| Right, it wasn't at that time. | ||
| There was really sort of nobody to, you know, I'm sure you could find somebody academically to look at. | ||
| Not too many. | ||
| If you did some research, you could find somebody. | ||
| Very few. | ||
| But very few in terms of, you know, culturally and on television, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| So when you decided to do it, what was the reaction after? | ||
| You had a career, you were a professional, etc. | ||
| It was kind of funny because the economists tended to, you know, all economists, even if they're not free market economists, tend to think the choice is desirable and we should There's no controversy about it. | ||
| So they would say, oh well, it's okay if he, I mean, she wants to do it. | ||
| I mean, whereas my historian- So that would be the libertarian view of it. | ||
| That's the kind of libertarian view, but most economists, even if they weren't libertarians, seem to have this attitude. | ||
| And then my historian colleagues and my colleagues in anthropology and so on, they were less, it was less easy for them to- Really? | ||
| Because they think in terms of identities. | ||
| Once you have an identity, you're supposed to keep it. | ||
| If you're Chicana, you're Chicana, period. | ||
| I think that was their problem. | ||
| Very few people turned away from me, and the women especially, of all descriptions, were wonderful. | ||
| In my book called Crossing, I have a memoir published in 1999. | ||
| I have an opening section where I thank all the women who helped me a bit, you know, in sending a nice letter or inviting me for lunch and so on. | ||
| And it was 240 names in the three years of my transition. | ||
| What's the part of being trans that people don't think about? | ||
| Well, what they don't get is it's not true, the kind of journalistic phrase of a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice versa. | ||
| It turns out they're about equal numbers on the other side, going the other way. | ||
| So they think it's this terrible Conflict. | ||
| Whereas, you know, people adjust. | ||
| People adjusted to extermination camps. | ||
| They can adjust to almost anything, and I don't mean to compare being a guy to being in an extermination camp, but they can adjust. | ||
| And then the other thing they need to know is that it's a minority interest. | ||
| It's more common than we once thought, but It's not going to change the gender ratios in the system. | ||
| It costs about as much as a new car. | ||
| Kind of a moderate new car, not a Mercedes. | ||
| And when I see new cars on the street, I say, oh, why didn't those people change gender? | ||
|
unidentified
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I say, oh yeah, they don't want to. | |
| Most people are satisfied with their gender, even if they regard how men are treated or women are treated. | ||
| It makes them uneasy and they worry about gender stereotypes. | ||
| Nonetheless, they don't want to change. | ||
| Did you have any regret after? | ||
| There's something that's really important for straight people to understand. | ||
| No one has regret. | ||
| The number of people who have a regret one way or the other, male to female, female to male, is minuscule. | ||
| And B, if they have regret, they can change back. | ||
| You say, okay, well, gee, you can't grow a penis. | ||
| Well, so what? | ||
| Many perfectly well-functioning men don't have penises from terrible accidents or war injuries. | ||
| Big deal. | ||
| It's how you present yourself. | ||
| It's how you live in the world. | ||
| That's what determines how society takes you on. | ||
| So I'm curious, you mentioned the economists that you worked with and the historians and the sociologists. | ||
| What about the psychologists? | ||
| Oh, the psychologists are fine. | ||
| Even back then, where none of them were? | ||
| Not a problem. | ||
| But the psychiatrists are really dangerous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you explain the difference for someone that doesn't know the difference between the psychologists? | ||
| Well, a psychiatrist is one with an M.D. | ||
| He's a doctor. | ||
| They're usually he, but some she's. | ||
| Anyway, he's a doctor, then specializes in diseases of, mental diseases. | ||
| And thank God, there are lots of things we can do about depression. | ||
| A little bit about schizophrenia and drugs and so on that have been developed, and I'm all for it. | ||
| But the trouble is the psychiatrists now, these MDs, know nothing about transgender things, yet they figure they're an expert. | ||
| You know, the old joke is, what's the difference between God and an MD? | ||
| God doesn't think he's an MD. | ||
| So I was seized by my sister twice, she tried it three times, for mental observation, and confined in a madhouse Twice. | ||
| It cost me $8,000 in attorney's fees to get out of these places. | ||
| This is when you were transitioning? | ||
| This is in 95, 1995. | ||
| And the psychiatrists were just really creepy. | ||
| It was the worst horror movie you can think of. | ||
| Here's my advice to anyone who gets seized for, I mean the cops come, seized for observation, don't make any jokes. | ||
| They have no sense of humor. | ||
| You make a joke, they write it down. | ||
| They write it down. | ||
| That wasn't funny. | ||
| It's really, really scary. | ||
| That's really, you know, I never really thought of this before, | ||
| but so for a psychiatrist in a weird way, that they would be the least qualified | ||
| to deal with a trans person because their method is based in drugs, right? | ||
| It's based in drugs and it's based in extreme pathologies. | ||
| And thank God. | ||
| I mean, I'm not against psychiatry as a profession. | ||
| I think it's fine. | ||
| Although, by the way, it's the source of homophobia. | ||
| A hundred years of homophobia in Northern Europe was, I think, closely connected with the rise of psychiatry as a profession. | ||
| But in any case, not against them in general, but They deal with people who are really ill, and so they want to put you in some illness category. | ||
| Instead of saying, oh, well, that's kind of weird. | ||
| Hey, how about them Hawks? | ||
| That's actually how the students at the University of Iowa, where I was teaching at the time, that's how they reacted. | ||
| They had seen rock musicians with eye makeup and Boy George and so on. | ||
| They didn't care. | ||
| It didn't bother them. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I only went to a psychiatrist once because I wanted to get Xanax, because I used to have anxiety related, just to fly. | ||
| But I was on a plane, and that was it. | ||
| That was the only reason I wanted it. | ||
| The psychiatrist would not let me leave without telling me that I had time shift disorder, which sounds like an absurdly made up thing, and gave me a prescription for something else, which I proceeded to throw out when I walked out of the building. | ||
| But that sort of idea, we can prescribe everything. | ||
| Here's the symbol of it. | ||
| The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM. | ||
| It's been through five editions since, I think, the 1960s. | ||
| It's going to name and tell you how to diagnose all the mental disorders. | ||
| It starts in the 1960s being about that thick, about half an inch thick. | ||
| By now it's about three inches thick. | ||
| Which implies that we've all become crazier since 1960. | ||
| What does that say? | ||
| Does that say that our modern lives have made us crazier or that the pathology of finding things wrong with people? | ||
| It's the authoritarian mentality. | ||
| It's the I'm from the government and I'm here to help you mentality. | ||
| It's the nudge mentality. | ||
| It's the socialist mentality. | ||
| It's the conservative mentality. | ||
| It's everything except true liberalism, which is, if people are not doing something to hurt you, leave them alone. | ||
| And so there's a deep libertarian argument here. | ||
| The famous psychiatrist Thomas Shaws used my case in his last book as an instance of The overreaching of the profession of psychiatry. | ||
| Look, you get put in a mental hospital. | ||
| You may not ever get out because they're in charge. | ||
| If you're put in jail for, I don't know, armed robbery, you pretty much know your chances of getting out and so on, because it's on TV all the time, or at least in the movies. | ||
| So you have some conception from your friends, but you don't know with psychiatry. | ||
| It's very scary. | ||
| So I was very frightened by this episode. | ||
| My sister was a psychologist, academic psychologist. | ||
| And at the time, she was at the Harvard School of Public Health. | ||
| So, you know, you can be sure that when she wrote to the judges, she used the Harvard stationery. | ||
| Yeah, which I assume helped at some level. | ||
| Oh boy, did it. | ||
| She could say it. | ||
| You know, she told lies. | ||
| Now she and I are very close. | ||
| But it took a few years for me to get over it. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so one more thing on trans and then I wanna move to actual issues. | ||
| Not to diminish the trans issue, but I think we've established it. | ||
| Unfortunately, it's gonna be at least the second sentence of my obituary. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| I'm trying to drive it down into, I don't know, Yeah, well look, you gave me a lot of good other buzzwords here, so we're gonna get to those in just a sec. | ||
| My last thought on it would be 2016. | ||
| I mean, this was the year that trans really became mainstream, you know, from Caitlyn Jenner to Orange is the New Black, and just this feeling of there are, you know, trans actors, now there's a visibility. | ||
| Transparent? | ||
| Transparent, of course, of course. | ||
| We're the only sane person on the set is the, is the Transitioner? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly, right, really flipping everything on its head. | ||
| That must feel incredibly validating for you. | ||
| Well, it wouldn't, it isn't so much validating. | ||
| I had a lot of years to work on validation, but it, but it, it's another freedom. | ||
| Look, all men are created equal and endowed by their A slave owner wrote that, yet it's been the kind of marker, laying down a marker for American politics. | ||
| And we keep pushing it. | ||
| First, we got rid of slavery, eventually. | ||
| Then we had votes for women. | ||
| Then we had, finally, civil rights in the South. | ||
| Then we had feminism. | ||
| Then we had gay rights. | ||
| Then we had handicapped rights. | ||
| And all the ones that happened during my lifetime, I had the correct opinions about. | ||
| I was in favor of the Civil Rights Movement, I was against Vietnam, I was in favor of gay rights, I was in favor of women's rights, blah blah blah. | ||
| But I didn't do anything about it. | ||
| I didn't burn my draft card, I was still Donald. | ||
| I just said, oh gee, that's good. | ||
| Then God in 1995 tapped me on the shoulder and she said, she's my Anglican God, she said, okay dearie, now you can testify. | ||
| If you don't do this, if you don't allow yourself to be a public exponent for trans people, then you're just a jerk. | ||
| And so I did. | ||
| And so I've been giving talks. | ||
| I'm not a professional gender crosser. | ||
| I'm a scholar. | ||
| I'm a teacher. | ||
| I'm a writer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think I should, a tenured professor should be the one who stands up, because she can't be fired. | ||
| Yeah, that's a little bit, it reminds me sort of, of when Jason Collins, the NBA basketball player, came out. | ||
| He was really sort of at the end of his career, wasn't, so it allowed him to do it in a way that where they knew the Nets could sign him, and then at the same time, he wasn't gonna play much, he would sort of go under the radar, but something good would have come out of it. | ||
| Even though you took risks, obviously, you put your butt on the line. | ||
| Well, I thought I was going to lose my job, but actually it turns out that the University of Iowa, where I was teaching at the time, was very progressive in these matters. | ||
| Way, way, way more progressive than my alma mater, which is Harvard, in the 90s. | ||
| Harvard, you know, the eastern privates took a long time to get on this particular train. | ||
| It didn't happen, but it shows in such a career-driven person as me, such a person who wants to publish books and so on, it shows how much I wanted it when I realized I could do it, that I was willing to lose my job. | ||
| Now let's shift to some of those other issues because you said something in the midst of all that that I think is a sort of beautiful thing about what real liberalism is. | ||
| And one of the things that I've really been making the focus of this show is to show people what real, true, classical liberalism is because I think it's been conflated with a lot of leftist ideas in America, | ||
| but really all over the West. | ||
| And to also show that it doesn't mean you're purely a libertarian, | ||
| 'cause I think there's some problems with that. | ||
| What would be your best, do you consider yourself a classical liberal? | ||
| Is that would be your, - Sure, although-- | ||
| If I had to put another label on you? | ||
| Yes, yes, I'm certainly a classical liberal. | ||
| The only trouble with the phrase is as soon as you say classical, | ||
| people say, "Oh, well, that's old fashioned." | ||
| (Dave laughs) | ||
| In a modern complicated economy we can't have, we've got to regulate, which is of course exactly the opposite of the truth. | ||
| In a modern complicated economy it's too hard to regulate. | ||
| In a household, households are socialist enterprises. | ||
| Entirely appropriately. | ||
| Mom is the central planner and everything works out just fine. | ||
| People share. | ||
| Okay, that's cool. | ||
| But that's for a very simple little economy. | ||
| For what Hayek, Friedrich Hayek, called the Great Society before Lyndon Johnson took the phrase, namely a large society. | ||
| You can't do the sharing stuff. | ||
| That's not how it works. | ||
| You've got to trade and you can't regulate it. | ||
| It's insane to try to regulate it as though people in Washington knew better what to do than the people on the scene. | ||
| So I call it real liberalism. | ||
| I'm working on a book of essays that I've done on this called How to Be... | ||
| A sisterly, real liberal. | ||
| I'm hoping to catch my left-wing friends because the word liberal in Britain and the United States got way off track in the late 19th century. | ||
| It came to mean slow socialism. | ||
| It came to mean progressive, basically. | ||
| Progressive, yeah. | ||
| But as I've said many times, progressivism is starting to veer into regressivism because these ideas are not for liberty and freedom. | ||
| It's not starting to, right from the beginning. | ||
| In the late 19th century, it was terribly paternalistic and in the form of American progressivism. | ||
| Wilson and Roosevelt, first Roosevelt and all that, it was highly paternalistic, nasty even, racist. | ||
| One of the things that my friends on the left think is just grand is the minimum wage. | ||
| And a hundred years ago the minimum wage came into being in the United States, state by state, and it's declared purpose was to keep immigrants, women, He blacks his Chicanos out of the labor force. | ||
| To drive them out entirely. | ||
| Newspaper editorials, economics profession, they all said, oh boy, this is good for the Anglo-Saxon race. | ||
| Right, basically because those people would be the ones qualified, because those were good jobs. | ||
| Those were good jobs, and you just take all those people out, and then the only people who are left are Northern Europeans. | ||
| And it was a terrible, terrible thing. | ||
| What did they think was going to happen to the other people? | ||
| They were going to, they literally said they're going to die out. | ||
| Now how, How women are going to die out, I don't quite understand. | ||
| These were people in favor of immigration, closing immigration, in favor of segregation. | ||
| Woodrow Wilson, famously, would not have a great black scientist to the White House. | ||
| And so it went. | ||
| I mean, modern liberalism was conceived right from the beginning in this authoritarian way. | ||
| And it's still, even though my friends, the liberals, liberals in the American sense, I have this assumption that people who are not progressive are just bad people. | ||
| Why would you listen to Hitler? | ||
| So they don't listen to arguments that you or I make, and so they don't get that what they're actually about is authoritarian control over other people's lives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I've mentioned this many times over the last couple of years, but as I've sort of had my awakening to this, and I mentioned to you before, I basically was a progressive for a while, I was, too. | ||
| I was a Marxist at one point. | ||
| We'll get to that, too. | ||
| But as I've had my awakening, I've seen that the most intolerance comes from these people when I try to debate them on ideas. | ||
| Friends, I'm talking about. | ||
| The amount of friends that I've lost in the last couple of years. | ||
| I was just reading this morning a column in the Times, the London Times, by my friend Matt Ridley, who's a science journalist in Britain. | ||
| And he was He was saying that environmental regulations are clumsy and aren't working very well. | ||
| And the comments were just terrible. | ||
| They were, oh, you're a bad man. | ||
| You must be being paid by the fossil fuel people. | ||
| It's as though they're just not listening. | ||
| people, etc. It's as though they're just not listening. | ||
| Matt was making very simple, quantitatively based arguments. | ||
| I don't need to go into them. | ||
| And their reaction was not to listen. | ||
| Oh, I don't know that either! | ||
| Right, they sort of hate religion, like progressives sort of hate religion, and yet they love the purity, the purity test of religion. | ||
| They love that. | ||
| But I want to back up to something you said about minimum wage, because just in the last week, I've been seeing, you know, there were these marches for $15 minimum wage here in the States. | ||
| So we can unpack that a little bit. | ||
| But at the same time that I was seeing this, I was also seeing in the news that Amazon is now opening stores that are gonna have no employees. | ||
| You're just gonna walk in and your phone will recognize something over Wi-Fi and you'll be able to take whatever you want. | ||
| And I thought, what a disconnect in an idea and the actual world. | ||
| Amazon is saying, we don't need humans to do any of this anymore, and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And meanwhile, you have these people out there. | ||
| I think most of their intentions are good. | ||
| Of course, their intentions are pure and it's sort of like Immanuel Kant. | ||
| They think that all that matters is intentions and I wish they'd get over that. | ||
| Look, they'll say, my friends on the left, and I do have a lot of friends on the left, they'll say, we ought to put a tax on soft drinks because boy, it's making poor people obese. | ||
| This is part of the paternalism. | ||
| And then I say, well, Isn't labor the same way? | ||
| If you make the price of labor higher, won't people consume less labor? | ||
| Oh, no, no, no, no, that's not true. | ||
| But dear, you just said that it works for soft drinks. | ||
| Why not for labor? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, labor and soft drinks are different. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Gee whiz. | ||
| So people are going to hire people at $15 when they're only worth $10. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, what kind of Insanity, do you think, prevails in the business world? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then the same people who are out there protesting for the $15 minimum wage are the same people that are buying a lot of stuff on Amazon privately at home. | ||
| So we all sort of live in this strange place between our actions and our... I know, it's like being against Chinese trade, yet then buying a $5 hammer. | ||
| Made in China, or like Donald Trump, the against Chinese trade and those ties that he wears four inches too low are all made in China. | ||
| Right, so in Trump's case, when I saw people tweeting about that, I actually argued he was making logical sense because he was saying, look, our deals are bad, so me as a businessman makes them in China or in Mexico, but I want the deals to be better. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a fair characterization of his thinking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not saying it's right, but I'm saying... To the small extent that he thinks at all. | |
| But it's not, I think you agree, it's not sensible as economics. | ||
| You can't get a better deal than more or less free trade. | ||
| And that's where we've moved. | ||
| I mean, after the war, every country was protectionist. | ||
| There were no free trade countries. | ||
| Even the old free trade company, Britain, had long since, 30 years before, become a protectionist country. | ||
| And then since then, we've been moving steadily towards free trade. | ||
| And it's been very good for the poor of the world. | ||
| This idea that the poor are made worse off by free trade is just lunacy. | ||
| Because, you know, it's the wage. | ||
| Per what you can get with the wage is the key point. | ||
| And what you can get with the wage has steadily increased, even though you've heard people say, oh, things are getting worse. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| The sky is not falling. | ||
| So what do you make of Trump when it comes to economics then? | ||
| Because on one hand, I think there's a sense, you know, a lot of people like the fact that it was buy America, we're going to fix these trade deals. | ||
| We're gonna do that, but that's also, that's not really a conservative position because it is gonna take more government interference to do those things. | ||
| So he's sort of, what does this say really about the conservative movement? | ||
| Well, he's not a conservative and that's why people like Ryan didn't like him. | ||
| And Romney and so forth, who embarrassingly bowed to the new emperor. | ||
| You saw that picture at dinner? | ||
| But okay, but I want what's best for the American people. | ||
| I don't care whether it's thought to be progressive or conservative or liberal, real liberal, classical liberal. | ||
| And his policies are just not going to help the ordinary person. | ||
| In fact, what I kind of hope, actually I don't hope it exactly, but I think what is going to happen is it'll be so plain that his policies don't help those 80,000 people who got him in the White House. | ||
| Maybe they'll wake up, I hope they do, and see that, look, manufacturing jobs in the United States peaked in 1977. | ||
| They've been going down ever since. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Is it because of China and Mexico? | ||
| Not much. | ||
| That's maybe 10% of the lost jobs. | ||
| A lot of jobs are being lost either to other Americans moving to California or Texas, especially to Texas, or to automation. | ||
| Just as you said, the store, the bricks and mortar store for Amazon has no people in it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what's happening and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. | ||
| The purpose of the economy is not to make jobs. | ||
| Jobs are infinite. | ||
| We can make construction workers use teaspoons instead of shovels, and that'll make for more jobs. | ||
| But the purpose of an economy is to get more goods and services, so that we have the leisure to pursue our hobbies and to educate ourselves. | ||
| So would a classical liberal What would be the difference in an economic sense from your argument as a classical liberal to someone like Paul Ryan, who I think is probably more of a libertarian, but at the same time, he's stuck in it with the Republicans, so then it blurs the line. | ||
| Well, some of the proposals that he and especially Trump are gonna make, and I hope they pass, make sense to me, like cutting the corporate income tax. | ||
| Corporate income tax Most economists, left and right, agree, is a kind of a silly tax. | ||
| It's double taxation to start with, but it's also... Can we just explain why that is? | ||
| Because I know people say that, but for billionaires, that money's been taxed throughout. | ||
| You paid payroll tax. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| All the people involved, the human beings involved, the workers, people employed by the suppliers to the corporation, The owners of the various corporations that supply them, the customers, the owners of the stock and the corporation you're talking about, all of them get taxed on their income. | ||
| I wish not, I wish there was other ways of taxing like consumption taxes, but set that aside. | ||
| Income tax, we know who pays it very much. | ||
| When I get taxed, I get taxed. | ||
| And there it is, Deirdre McCluskey pays about a third of her income to the government. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| At least the marginal income. | ||
| But we don't know who pays the corporate income tax. | ||
| We've been working on it for about 70 years, trying to figure out with econometrics and fancy math and we do studies and we don't know who pays it. | ||
| It may be the workers for the corporation, it may be the managers, it may be the owners. | ||
| That's what people think, that it's these rich owners, and for one thing they're not rich, and for another thing we don't know they pay it. | ||
| Maybe the customers? | ||
| Meaning that it trickles down to the workers or the customers? | ||
| It goes away. | ||
| The cost is imposed at the level of corporate profits. | ||
| Suppose the corporation moves to Ireland. | ||
| Who ultimately pays for that? | ||
| Who gets hurt? | ||
| Who gets helped? | ||
| Well, some Irish people get helped, and some Americans, employees, say, get hurt. | ||
| So, in effect, the burden of the tax is on these American workers. | ||
| I'm not saying we know that, because we don't know. | ||
| So, it's crazy to have a tax that you don't know the incidence of. | ||
| You don't know who really pays it. | ||
| So when Trump then says, okay, we're going to renegotiate these trade deals to keep companies in America, that makes sense to a lot of people. | ||
| But you're saying it doesn't because it's done via regulation. | ||
| Well, the problem with it is that we don't know who's going to get the benefit. | ||
| What we do know Suppose we just cut off foreign trade entirely. | ||
| Now that's not his proposal, but suppose we just walled off the United States. | ||
| Well then, every American would be poorer. | ||
| Every single American. | ||
| Now some of them It would get fancier jobs because we'd have to make our own steel instead of importing it as we do largely now. | ||
| Plus, for them, everyone else gets hurt. | ||
| That's true of the minimum wage. | ||
| It's true of a lot of the…look, I was talking to the makeup person here about licensing hairdressing. | ||
| She's also a hairdresser, besides being a cosmetologist. | ||
| Cosmetology is not licensed. | ||
| Hairdressing is. | ||
| So hairdressers have a little bit higher income, say. | ||
| Not that high, but a little bit higher because of these crazy licensing laws. | ||
| You have to go to school for two years to become a hairdresser. | ||
| We economists are not licensed. | ||
| You can set up as an economist tomorrow. | ||
| I just spray once. | ||
| Forget about the hair. | ||
| You can become a professional economist tomorrow by just hanging out a shingle. | ||
| It's that easy? | ||
| It's that easy. | ||
| You don't have to get a PhD or anything. | ||
| You just say I'm an economist because there are no laws against that. | ||
| There are laws against calling yourself a hairdresser without licensure. | ||
| That means that everyone, all the women especially, have slightly higher prices for hairdressing. | ||
| And this little group of hairdressers are a little bit better off. | ||
| Now that's a lousy deal. | ||
| And that's what this anti-trade, minimum wage, more regulation, that's what it does. | ||
| It gives George, or Harriet, a little bit It's like agricultural subsidies, and everyone else is made worse off. | ||
| Because then all the people that have to use them have to pay more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| They have to pay more. | ||
| And then they have less money for something else. | ||
| Take a look at agricultural subsidies. | ||
| Cotton farmers. | ||
| Large cotton farmers are the main, I mean large, rich people. | ||
| 20 of the top billionaires in the United States, billionaires, get agricultural subsidies from the United States government. | ||
| I don't mean that's the main source of their income because agriculture is quite a small industry in the United States, but you can tell, you know, it's big, massive cotton fields in Alabama are being financed by the United States government. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| So how do we untangle some of that stuff? | ||
| There's so much of that, this idea of crony capitalism and, you know, the giant, these 20 people that can pay all the lobbyists. | ||
| And this, of course, is what Trump was running against. | ||
| It's what Bernie Sanders was running against. | ||
| How do you untangle some of that stuff without actually burning down the system? | ||
| Because that's what I think a lot of people think is we have to burn the system down. | ||
| And I certainly wouldn't be for that. | ||
| It's puzzling because look, the system is democracy. | ||
| And I'm in favor of democracy. | ||
| I'm a Democrat, small d. H.L. | ||
| Mencken, the great libertarian journalist of a hundred years ago, said, democracy is the theory that the ordinary people know what they want and deserve it good and hard. | ||
| And that's, I'm afraid, what's happening with Trump. | ||
| But what to do? | ||
| Well, maybe Trump will be able to stop some of the regulations, but there's a clumsiness about it. | ||
| He's put this oil man forward as his Secretary of State, and he's handed over the Department of the Interior to another oil man. | ||
| Right, so Rex Tillerson, the Exxon guy, we'll see by the time this airs, it sounds like he is, but I... He might not make it. | ||
| Yeah, we know that Trump... The Secretary of the Interior is not a problem. | ||
| Is it a he or a she? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| But in any case, oil Corporations, big corporations, are going to do very well, probably, in the Trump administration. | ||
| And you notice that, by the way, in the stock market. | ||
| Oil stocks, in particular, have gone up. | ||
| They said, oh, well, maybe this guy, we can work with this guy. | ||
| And that's exactly the problem that you mentioned. | ||
| It's crony capitalism, not the kind of capitalism that you and I admire. | ||
| Which is not cronies, it's letting people do what they want and depending on the tremendous amount of cooperation that goes on in a free market system and the competition that goes on to protect consumers as it does. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I'm a little bit pessimistic that we can untangle it. | ||
| Here's why I mentioned democracy. | ||
| Because the reason we have big government is that about a hundred years ago, the people, now fully enfranchised in countries like Britain and France and the United States, demanded it. | ||
| They demanded protection from the government. | ||
| And so people keep voting for socialism, essentially. | ||
| I mean, the size of governments, the United States and Japan are among the smallest, but still they're very big in the rich countries. | ||
| The people keep voting for subsidies and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Extreme cases, Argentina, where everyone subsidizes everyone else. | ||
| Now just think about that for a moment. | ||
| You can see that's not going to work out. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And so there is this conflict between the democracy of politics and the democracy of the marketplace. | ||
| And I'm in favor of both of them. | ||
| But I recognize that there's a dilemma, there's a conflict here, and that the democracy of politics tends to want to kill off the democracy of the market. | ||
| Yeah, that's really interesting. | ||
| So when somebody would say, and I think this is most of the criticism that I hear when I've brought on classical liberals or libertarians, and they say, free market, free market. | ||
| We don't like crony capitalism, but we want the free market. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| Most of the pushback that I get is people say, well, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. | ||
| If you let people do whatever they want, then ultimately that's what will breed crony capitalism. | ||
| Now, I suspect you don't agree with that, but how would you argue against that? | ||
| I don't agree with it. | ||
| There's this tremendous fear Among my friends on the left about shoe companies. | ||
| Continue. | ||
| They're terrified at the big corporations, you know, New Balance, just oooey oooey scary music, oooey the monopoly. | ||
| And it's so silly because the big monopoly is the government. | ||
| Because the government has the monopoly of violence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alas. | ||
| Well, it has to. | ||
| I'm not in favor of multiple competing violent forces. | ||
| You're for one government that should have the army. | ||
| I'm for one government that has the monopoly of violence. | ||
| But then we've really got to watch it very closely because it's easy to misuse it. | ||
| And the underlying threat of a government is violence, physical violence. | ||
| And the trouble is that they They can use it whereas New Balance can't force you to buy, can't put a 38 to your head and force you to buy its shoes. | ||
| So Nike and New Balance and all the others are competing with each other and that's by far a better protection for the interests of ordinary people than are the so-called protections that the government offers because let's take food quality. | ||
| Why aren't, why isn't there very frequent cases of people being killed by restaurants? | ||
| Poisoned? | ||
| I mean, why not? | ||
| What's stopping it? | ||
| And they'll say, oh yes, food inspection. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Any person who owns a restaurant knows that the food inspectors come once or twice a year, max. | ||
| And often they're corrupt, and you can pay them $20 to overlook the rat feces in the kitchen. | ||
| Whereas, look, put it this way, if Coca-Cola Yeah. | ||
| if they found one mouse in one can of Coca-Cola anywhere in the world, | ||
| the Coca-Cola Corporation would go bankrupt. | ||
| Yeah, the endless PR, the years. | ||
| All the years of building up Coke is the real thing would go right down the drain. | ||
| And so that expenditure they make on advertising is a bond, so to speak. | ||
| It's a bond they've put up, enormous billions of dollars bond | ||
| to shore up their reputation for having a soft drink that doesn't have mice in it. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| I think they tried that. | ||
| Wasn't that New Coke? | ||
| That was consumer preference. | ||
| Well, that was consumer preference. | ||
| But, you know, poisoning is not popular. | ||
| There's a nice fact. | ||
| If you ask, who's that guy that travels around doing food shows? | ||
| Oh, Anthony Bourdain. | ||
| Yeah, Anthony Bourdain. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| If you ask him what to eat in a foreign country, he says, for God's sakes, don't eat the hotel food. | ||
| Eat the street food. | ||
| Because the street vendors have regular customers in their neighborhood, they poison someone, they're finished. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Whereas the hotels, they go away. | ||
| So that, to me, is the best argument for a free market, that your own interest, if you own a restaurant, it's not that the inspector is going to force you to do it, or that the government comes in, or as you said, you can pay them off and all this stuff, but the best is that your reputation, the caring of your work, which is a great segue to, I want to talk about virtue. | ||
| By the way, that's why we need a free press. | ||
| That's why these movements in Russia and now in Turkey, in imitation of Russia, to close down the newspapers is a complete disaster for the ordinary people. | ||
| Where do you think that puts us in America right now? | ||
| Because Trump has this massive fight with the press on it. | ||
| As an alternate press guy, as a digital online guy, I see a lot of value in what he's doing. | ||
| And at the same time, I absolutely see the risk in what's happening. | ||
| He's a danger to the First Amendment. | ||
| But fortunately, the genie is out of the bottle. | ||
| You can't put it back in. | ||
| So far as electronic media is concerned, the newspapers are slowly descending, which I, you know, personally, I love having a newspaper, but OK. | ||
| It's like the invention of the printing press. | ||
| In many countries, although not all of them, the printing press was very hard to control. | ||
| And now it's even less easy to control the Internet. | ||
| The Chinese do a fairly good job of it. | ||
| But when I was in China a month ago, My friends told me, oh yeah, here's how you get around that. | ||
| And it was free. | ||
| You could do it and sneak around the wall that they had put up around. | ||
| Yeah, so the Great Wall was probably more effective than the Internet Wall. | ||
| The Great Wall was effective, surprisingly effective actually. | ||
| Its purpose was to slow down the barbarians long enough to bring reinforcements. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know if the reinforcements are going to come in time to stop this barrage. | ||
| That was the big problem. | ||
| Every two or three hundred years in China, the Great Wall defense would fail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's some parallel to the Internet Wall there. | ||
| Yeah, there is. | ||
| Well, what there is, is that the cost of liberty is constant vigilance because it's in the interest of the government. | ||
| More or less every time, to cut off free speech. | ||
| And if they can get away with it, they will. | ||
| More or less, no matter who's in charge. | ||
| Obama, who I didn't vote for, but I don't think is the Antichrist, as some of my conservative friends think. | ||
| He claimed that he was gonna have an open government. | ||
| No way, Jose, he kept closing it. | ||
| But that happens in every administration. | ||
| Yeah, so it just happened, no matter what they say beforehand, like when he said, you know, Obamacare, we're gonna air the hearings on CNN, or on C-SPAN, right? | ||
| Of course that didn't happen. | ||
| He's jailed whistleblowers. | ||
| Look at Snowden and all that stuff. | ||
| And yet the left lets him off the hook on that, because we've all been just sort of relegated to our teams, right? | ||
| You just pick your team. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| It's because people come to their political opinions in their late teenagehood, most of them. | ||
| And then it becomes part of their personal identity. | ||
| I have a roommate of mine, a man who I love very much, from college. | ||
| And he was a lefty, as I was in college, and he still is. | ||
| And then my sister, my beloved sister, who I really do love. | ||
| The other month she said, you know, I watch RT, Russia Today, and I think that's just great. | ||
| They give me an alternative view. | ||
| I said, dear, don't you know this is Putin's propaganda arm? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, I don't think so. | ||
| I think it's wonderful what they do. | ||
| So people get these identities of left and right, and then they don't ever listen to any more evidence. | ||
| Another hero of my youth, John Maynard Keynes, Someone complained that Keynes had changed his views on free trade, to which Keynes said, when I get new information, I change my mind, what do you do? | ||
| And isn't that true liberalism, right? | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
| That finding new information. | ||
| Bertrand Russell, there's that great quote about not being tied to an ideology, but to reality. | ||
| Except he was tied to an ideology, except for that problem. | ||
| The perfect example of this is John Stuart Mill, who was very open-minded. | ||
| He was open-minded to socialist ideas. | ||
| Harriet, his friend, eventually became his wife, was more of a socialist. | ||
| This is the middle of the 19th century. | ||
| And so he was very open to that. | ||
| Someone said, a great economist friend of mine said, John Stuart Mill tried the experiment of being fair to his opponents. | ||
| This experiment has never again been done in economics. | ||
| Yeah, in economics or almost in any field anymore, right? | ||
| Look, the assumption on the left in the United States among progressives is that if you make a free market argument, it's because you're a bad person who hates poor people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so why pay attention to such a person? | ||
| Why pay attention to Hitler? | ||
| Hitler may have arguments to hell with that. | ||
| I'm not going to listen to Hitler. | ||
| I don't listen to Hitler. | ||
| I don't say, oh gee, that's interesting. | ||
| Let's exterminate the Jews. | ||
| Maybe that'll be a good idea. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I don't view that as on the table. | ||
| So it's this off-the-table business that makes our friends on the left impervious to any argument. | ||
| We make arguments against, I don't know, against the minimum wage or agriculture. | ||
| Look, I was talking to a friend of mine on the left the other day. | ||
| And she said, I'm very suspicious of this Uber business, breaking down the taxi cab monopoly. | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| You mean you're in favor of taxi monopolies? | ||
| Do you know who owns those? | ||
| She said, no, I don't know. | ||
| Isn't it the cab drivers? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's the millionaires, the multimillionaires who own 30 hack medallions in New York, each of which sells for a million and a half bucks. | ||
| Yeah, you're not making that up, by the way. | ||
| That's actually true. | ||
| You get that medallion that a cab driver needs. | ||
| In Chicago, it's a third of a million. | ||
| In New York, it's a million and a half. | ||
| So it's so strange. | ||
| Any free market argument is just off. | ||
| I think the image of being off the table is correct. | ||
| It's just not for discussion. | ||
| So it's maddening. | ||
| We on the free market side, You know, we laboriously argue against this stupid regulation and that stupid regulation. | ||
| We offer facts and we have comparisons of one country to another and we're very earnest and we expect our friends on the left to say, oh yeah, you're right. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| They don't listen. | ||
| So they don't understand the arguments. | ||
| A spectacular example of this is the bottom of page 6 in the English translation of Thomas Piketty's book on Capital in the 21st Century, where he screws up supply and demand curves. | ||
| I mean, he really does. | ||
| He doesn't understand supply response to a higher price. | ||
| He doesn't even think it's possible. | ||
| So, this guy is an economist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe he wrote the book upside down? | ||
| I don't know what is wrong with him. | ||
| No, actually, I know what's wrong with him. | ||
| He was educated in France. | ||
| And in economics, that means you're educated in mathematics without knowing anything about how an economy works. | ||
| So, I plead with them. | ||
| Please. | ||
| And they won't listen. | ||
| So what do you do, then, if... Well, first off, I know a certain amount of people are gonna watch this and say, well, wait a minute, then Deirdre must be right, because you focused on the left here. | ||
| Left, right. | ||
| Yeah, and it's just nonsense, right? | ||
| That's all people can do. | ||
| We say, we real liberals say, now look, there are at least two dimensions. | ||
| One is economic freedom, left-right, that's pretty easy to talk about. | ||
| And the other is personal freedom, left-right. | ||
| And we libertarians are up on the left-left quadrant. | ||
| We believe in keeping out of people's bedrooms and keeping out of people's voluntary deals in the economy. | ||
| It's a keeping out mentality. | ||
| What's the beef here? | ||
| Why are you complaining about some deal I want to make? | ||
| Shut up. | ||
| It's none of your business. | ||
| Let's just make it. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And so we believe in freedom. | ||
| Whereas in one aspect or another, our opponents, whether Republicans or Democrats or conservatives or progressives, they all believe in compulsion. | ||
| I'll believe in getting out the government gun, forcing people to do things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that's going to make the world better. | ||
| It actually makes the world more resentful, I think. | ||
| Usually it does. | ||
| Now look, there are some things, always, it's so tedious, I always get people, my progressive friends will say, oh, don't you think there should be a role for government? | ||
| And I say, yeah, yeah, there should be a role for government. | ||
| Preventing force and fraud, and a few other things. | ||
| So basically, you're not an anarchist. | ||
| No, I'm not an anarchist, although we, Real, true Christian liberals. | ||
| You are anarchist friends, and I have some, with a certain sisterly sympathy. | ||
| But I'm not an anarchist. | ||
| I don't believe in zero government. | ||
| Actually, my first politics was when I found Prince Kropotkin's book Mutual Aid in the local Carnegie Library. | ||
| I like the irony of that. | ||
| In Wakefield, Massachusetts. | ||
| And for, you know, six months, When I was 15, I was an anarchist. | ||
| How did those six months go for you? | ||
| Well, I didn't tell anyone about it, so it didn't bother anyone. | ||
| Yeah, it was fine. | ||
| You just kept it to yourself. | ||
| I wasn't secret about it. | ||
| I just didn't notice that politics was about telling people stuff. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so I want to back up to virtue because I think it's sort of a through line in almost everything we've discussed here. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| And you've written a lot about it, you talk about it, and I think it's something that's so missing in society. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Doing something virtuous just because. | ||
| You know, and I've been studying China for the last 10 years, a bit. | ||
| For a long time I tried not to because I knew I would become fascinated and I needed to know more about Europe and the United States. | ||
| I was afraid I would drift off into China studies. | ||
| But the interesting thing about the Confucian attitudes that start in the 6th century BCE is that it claims that the main protection of the citizens is the virtue of the governors. | ||
| And that's correct to the extent that they're being treated by the government. | ||
| And the Confucians were not particularly, didn't have a lot to say about regulation of the economy. | ||
| So, you know, they have the economy off to one side and indeed it was heavily regulated | ||
| in China as everywhere else. | ||
| But let's talk about the relationship between the government, the emperor and the citizens. | ||
| And the Confucian idea is not the balance of power of the founding fathers, where we're trying to make a machinery That will keep the governors from hurting their citizens. | ||
| Which is what we have here. | ||
| What we have here, and we try to make it work, and I'm all for it. | ||
| But the Confucians, like the so-called civic Republicans in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, said, look, rulers need to be good as well. | ||
| I think this is true. | ||
| Look, corruption. | ||
| In Italy, say. | ||
| You're not going to solve Italian corruption by passing another law. | ||
| They've got laws against corruption. | ||
| The problem is... The laws will actually breed more corruption, right? | ||
| Because they'll just breed somebody to do this. | ||
| They easily do it, particularly if the ethical mentality of Italians is the government is a band of robbers into whose clutches we've fallen, to quote a famous anarchist writer. | ||
| And so we've got to evade every law we can. | ||
| And as long as you do that, as long as the people are not being virtuous sensibly, following the sensible laws, and the government is not being virtuous, it's stealing from everybody, you know, passing another thing through Parliament is not going to have any effect at all. | ||
| So there has to be an ethical change. | ||
| And I claim, this is my big claim in this trilogy of mine, called the bourgeois era, Which I, praise the Lord, I just finished last spring. | ||
| That it's a change in attitudes towards the virtues of the bourgeoisie that made the modern world. | ||
| That up until liberalism, the coming of liberalism in people's heads in the 18th century, and then in actual policies in the 19th century, until that happened, People were extremely suspicious and hostile towards merchants, manufacturers, inventors. | ||
| Innovation. | ||
| The word innovation in English, you can look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, was until the 19th century a bad word. | ||
| You don't want to innovate. | ||
|
unidentified
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Peace! | |
| Innovate! | ||
|
unidentified
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That'll disturb things! | |
| That was the universal attitude. | ||
| in liberalism, the basic idea of which is let people alone. | ||
| As Adam Smith said, What we need is the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice. | ||
| By equality, he didn't mean equal income distribution. | ||
| He meant equality of social standing by liberty. | ||
| He meant the ability to start a business or become an economist or whatever you want. | ||
| Equality of opportunity. | ||
| And justice means equal justice before the law. | ||
| Neither of which is perfectly attained in any society I know of. | ||
| But the change from, say, the 17th century to the 19th century was dramatic. | ||
| And that made people bold and they enriched us all. | ||
| I speak of the bourgeois deal. | ||
| You let me, a bourgeois, start a business. | ||
| In the first act, I'll make a lot of dough. | ||
| That's a good business. | ||
| In the second act, these pesky competitors will come in and drive out my profit, but oh well. | ||
| In the third act, I'll enrich you. | ||
| And that's what they did. | ||
| So, there's an ethical change. | ||
| Wait, how do you get from the second act to the third act? | ||
| It's the second act, now the competition comes in. | ||
| Competition, and so my profits are eroded, so everyone's doing it the better way, whatever it is. | ||
| Uber, or improved. | ||
| Look what happened to film. | ||
| When I was young, Kodak, and then boom, suddenly we had pixels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now we're doing it on the internet. | ||
| I don't know how it's happening, but it's happening. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Here we are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the third act then is that the product itself gets better. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Those cameras that are pointing at us are, by historical standards, are ridiculously small. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These are high quality cameras that do as good a job as an enormous TV camera, much better job than a TV camera, and even better than a great big film camera in the 1930s. | ||
| And there they are. | ||
| And that's the first person to think of this made a ton of money. | ||
| But actually, in the end, the inventors don't make that much. | ||
| They make about 2% of the social gain, which, you know, if you're Steve Jobs, there's a lot of money. | ||
| But still, 98% goes to us, the consumers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And bringing this around to Apple, they make a lot of the stuff. | ||
| The ideas come from Cupertino, as they always tell us, but a lot of it's made in China, and don't they do everything they can to avoid corporate taxes? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Which sort of ties in everything that we're talking about here. | ||
| Fine with me. | ||
| There's a crazy regulation that the EU, the common market, is trying to impose. | ||
| To equalize corporate taxes across the EU. | ||
| Because they don't like what Ireland's doing. | ||
| Which has a 15%, no 12.5% corporate tax instead of our 35% corporate tax. | ||
| And the people in Brussels are really annoyed at the Irish. | ||
| And I think it's outrageous. | ||
| There should be the Cayman Islands. | ||
| There should be competition. | ||
| The government shouldn't have us as serfs. | ||
| To extract money from anytime they want to invade Iraq. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To heck with it. | ||
| But that is, I always find to be the funniest argument, is that the progressives argue that they want, that the government is deeply corrupt. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| And then at the same time, their response is to make it bigger. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| Look, I've spent some time in Italy in the last few months, and I love Italy. | ||
| Who doesn't? | ||
| The Italians know how to live. | ||
| But they all ought to be classical liberals. | ||
| Because any sentient Italian knows that sending more money and power to Rome is a terrible idea. | ||
| Just awful. | ||
| Framed with that, saying Rome actually adds to the picture. | ||
| Well, it's like our Washington or Springfield in Illinois. | ||
| Everyone knows it's a terrible idea. | ||
| The Italians keep voting for socialists or for conservatives who are actually socialists. | ||
| I mean, I can't understand it. | ||
| And in Sweden, I get it. | ||
| I've taught in Sweden and I like Sweden a lot. | ||
| Lots of friends there. | ||
| And they all tell me, well, you know, our government is honest. | ||
| And I say, yeah, yours is. | ||
| Minnesota is. | ||
| But Illinois isn't. | ||
| Italy isn't. | ||
| 86% of the people of the world are governed by governments that everyone would agree are completely corrupt and incompetent. | ||
| The Italians of the 180 or so governments that were surveyed, the Italians rank 75th. | ||
| And yet they keep voting for more of this. | ||
| I don't know what to do, I'm desperate. | ||
| Yeah, I wish I had an answer for you, but you're not going to get it to me. | ||
| There's so much more that we could do here, but I will end on something that you slipped in once or twice, is that you used to be a Marxist! | ||
| I was! | ||
| Marxist, I think people have no idea what they're talking about. | ||
| Like socialism, they don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Most of these words, most people don't know what they're talking about, but Marxist I find to be the one that people really just have no concept of what they're talking about. | ||
| So first, can you just define what a Marxist is, and then just tell me a little bit about your journey? | ||
| Well, a Marxist, really in the simplest terms, is someone who follows Marx. | ||
| Just as I'm a Christian, I follow Christ. | ||
| Marx was here's where I get my right-wing friends. | ||
| Just they go nuts I say Marx was the greatest social scientist in the 19th century without compare and all my friends at the at the Hoover Institution go And then I say but he got everything wrong and then my friends on the left go Which is why I haven't got any friends and The life of a classical liberal, it ain't easy. | ||
| It ain't easy. | ||
| Well, you're pissing off people on both sides. | ||
| Pissing off people on both sides. | ||
| Now, the basic idea of Marxism, of course, is that history has a particular pattern, and that ideas come from that pattern, from that material pattern, that the class struggle is central. | ||
| The history of all hitherto existing societies, to quote the Communist Manifesto, is the history of class struggle. | ||
| And if you believe that, and you believe that ideas are just epiphenomenal, that they just come from your class position, which is what Marxists are supposed to think, then you'll be a follower of Marx. | ||
| And oddly, from about 1890 to about 1980, nice symmetry there, most intellectuals in the West were some kind of Marxist. | ||
| Even the conservatives were. | ||
| Even the conservatives believed that material interests were what determined ideas. | ||
| Whereas my claim and the claim of a growing number of historians and especially historians | ||
| is that no, no, ideas themselves have an influence, an independent influence. | ||
| The idea that all men and women are created equal is a terrifically powerful idea. | ||
| So it's that egalitarianism of 18th century liberalism that I'm trying to reinvigorate. | ||
| Well I think you're doing an incredibly good job at it. | ||
| In my books, you've got to mention my books. | ||
| Yeah, well I'm going to tell people about Twitter and the whole thing. | ||
|
unidentified
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So the bourgeois, wait, vignettes? | |
| This is the first volume. | ||
| The Bourgeois Virtues and there's Bourgeois Dignity and then the last one is the thickest called Bourgeois Equality. | ||
| (coughs) | ||
| 1906, sorry, hi my historian. | ||
| 2006, 2010, 2016, all available at the University of Chicago Press. | ||
| I'm hoping for a boxed set like Harry Potter, the three of them together. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| I'm a Star Wars guy personally, It makes a wonderful Christmas present. | ||
| Your mother will be delighted to get these highly academic books. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| We're going to put the link right down below, and then people will just be able to click it and get it. | ||
| It really was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Thank you, dear. | ||
| It's been fun. | ||
| You know, these are the ideas I'm trying to get across, too, so I guess we're stuck in the middle, but that's alright. | ||
| Yeah, we're stuck in the middle. | ||
| We get unfriendly fire from both sides. | ||
| Yeah, but we got each other. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I want to thank Deirdre McCloskey and Learn Liberty for sending her our way. | ||
| And for more on Deirdre, you can follow her on the Twitter. | ||
| It's at Deirdre McCloskey. | ||
| And thanks for watching. |
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