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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
(dramatic music) | ||
One of the occupational hazards of doing a show like this is that my friends, my family, | ||
people who come up to me at the grocery store and at Ikea, and pretty much everyone that I encounter | ||
on a day-to-day basis wants to talk politics with me. | ||
Fortunately, I love talking about politics and talking to people about politics, so I'm usually happy to engage with people even when I'm picking out an ice cream or testing out the Kivik couch, which is surprisingly comfortable and easy to put together. | ||
One of the things I've noticed lately about our political climate is that people are having a harder time tuning out of politics, even briefly, to talk about other things. | ||
This is somewhat anecdotal in my case particularly, but I'd bet that it's happening to you in your life too. | ||
Suddenly it seems like every conversation is political, every discussion somehow gets back to Trump, and yes your aunt knows exactly how to solve America's healthcare crisis even though she can't figure out how to sync her iPad. | ||
On face value, none of this is a problem. | ||
I love that people who were largely apolitical are now becoming more politically engaged. | ||
People are not only talking about politics, but in many cases re-evaluating what their beliefs are because of the upside down world we live in right now. | ||
While everything may seem crazy, I really do believe this time we're in right now is a rare special moment when so many people are all doing the same introspection about their beliefs all at the same time. | ||
Whether this will lead to more or less freedom, to more or less tolerance, or to more or less peace all remains to be seen. | ||
But without question, we're in some pretty fertile ground for change right now. | ||
And by change, I mean real societal change, not just hope and change. | ||
One problem I do see attached to all of this opportunity for change and reevaluation is that people are becoming consumed by politics in a way which doesn't strike me as particularly healthy for a human's mental state or for societies at large. | ||
It's one of the reasons I'm a small government guy. | ||
I want a government small enough that we don't have to talk about it that much because it doesn't even have the power to do too much good or too much bad. | ||
There's a built in trade off there. | ||
Small government can only do so much, the rest is up to the people. | ||
So if you want government to do everything, you really can't complain when it does all sorts of things that you don't like. | ||
Well, actually, of course you can complain about it, at least until that big government comes and takes away your right to do just that. | ||
So my message to you this week is, let's keep talking about all of these issues, let's keep staying engaged and trying to change things for the better, but at the same time, let's not let it consume us to the point where it changes who we are. | ||
Social media can be an awful catalyst to the endless focus on politics, which is why I've been trying to take the weekends off and focus on the world that exists in front of my face instead of the one that exists in 140 characters. | ||
When you are online though, try to find some nuance between Trump Derangement Syndrome and Nazi Frog Obsession. | ||
Most people are good and want pretty much the same things that you do, so let's keep growing that new center. | ||
And as long as you're here right now, we're once again partnering up with Learn Liberty this week and we've got author and director of the philosophy, politics and economics department at Duke University, Dr. Mike Munger. | ||
We're going to talk politics, philosophy, economics and much more. | ||
Watch and learn. | ||
unless it's the weekend. | ||
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
We're continuing our partnership with the fine folks over at Learn Liberty today | ||
and joining me is an economist and author and a professor of political science at Duke University, | ||
Dr. Mike Munger. | ||
Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
It's great to be here. | ||
That introduction just makes it sound like I'm confused and that's probably right. | ||
I thought it made you sound very professional. | ||
Well, I have several disciplines that I try to contribute in. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Well, we're going to talk about those several disciplines, but first let's just talk about political science, because I was a political science major. | ||
That explains a lot. | ||
Good or bad? | ||
Good. | ||
All good. | ||
unidentified
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Oh, all good? | |
Okay. | ||
I like to think that I'm one of the few people that's using a political science degree actually to talk about politics and political philosophy. | ||
So my first question to you would be, Do you think that political science right now is sort of needed more than ever, just to understand the basic philosophies behind so much of the craziness that we see in public discourse these days? | ||
Well, for two reasons. | ||
One, political science studies engineering, but it studies the engineering of rules. | ||
And we tend to have this idea that what we need is better people. | ||
We're probably not going to get better people. | ||
What we may need is better rules. | ||
The question is how to try to do that. | ||
The other thing political science does is look at some of the ethical questions that have plagued human beings for the last 3,000 years. | ||
So I see political science as being a kind of ideal liberal arts degree that combines analysis and ethics. | ||
So of course I think, and I would, I'm a political science professor, that we need more political science. | ||
But I really do worry that people just think, well we can ignore the Constitution, the living Constitution, we'll change it to interpret it the way that we want it. | ||
We don't understand enough about rules to be able just to change it willy-nilly and have it turn out well. | ||
So I like what you said there about that we can't change people that much. | ||
A lot of people seem to think that that's what politics should be, right? | ||
We should actually change the way your opinions are about very personally held things through public policy. | ||
Or choose the new messiah. | ||
Every time Barack Obama was going to be the new messiah. | ||
He got a Nobel Peace Prize after he'd been in office for seven months. | ||
So this emphasis on this next person is going to be the one. | ||
And you see it worldwide. | ||
But it's a little surprising to see the U.S. | ||
succumb to it also. | ||
Yeah, so as a, you do consider yourself a libertarian, right? | ||
You ran as a libertarian. | ||
We're going to get to that in a little bit. | ||
I am certainly a libertarian, and in the sense that I am not a Republican. | ||
Okay, and I want to unpack the differences between that and talk about sort of the ever-changing label thing, which is sort of becoming meaningless at the moment. | ||
So, with all the political philosophies out there, do you sense that some of the freedom stuff is taking root right now? | ||
Because to me, things are going crazy right now, but I sense that Liberty, reason, getting back to some of the constitutional stuff. | ||
I do sense people talking about it a little bit more now than perhaps two years ago. | ||
Well, right. | ||
I had a bunch of colleagues who, after Trump was elected, colleagues at Duke, so political science professors and other people on the left, who would come into my office and sheepishly say, you know, you were right. | ||
All this stuff about we need to worry about the constitutional powers of the president. | ||
When George W. Bush was president, they were worried. | ||
With Barack Obama, they say, you know, I don't mind so much as long as my guy is in charge. | ||
That's the point. | ||
Your guy won't always be in charge. | ||
So, what you might want best is a dictator that you can pick. | ||
That's not how it works. | ||
That means that we have to have rules, and it's very frustrating. | ||
The Constitution builds in conflict. | ||
And Barack Obama in many ways was a terrible president in trying to negotiate things with the Congress. | ||
He would prefer to go make speeches. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He liked that Messiah thing. | ||
So I do think that a lot of people on the left are much more worried now about sort of traditional constitutional protections of freedom of speech and about the separation of powers. | ||
So a number of them have actually said, you know, those Federalist papers. | ||
Those are really interesting, aren't they? | ||
Yes, welcome back! | ||
Yeah, so when George W. Bush was signing executive actions, I assume you were basically against them. | ||
When Barack Obama was signing them, I assume you were basically against them. | ||
I assume you're not thrilled right now with the amount that Trump has done. | ||
But that's really interesting to me, that your colleagues on the left are suddenly going, oh, now I get it. | ||
You know, we have people on the left now fighting for states' rights because they don't want the feds coming in and closing sanctuary cities, which I think is what a phenomenal I can't help but gleefully remind them, you know, you told me that was code for racism. | ||
But now you're for states' rights because you're worried about medical marijuana, you're worried about same-sex marriage. | ||
States' rights, it's true, was misused by advocates of segregation. | ||
That's absolutely right. | ||
Hitler was a vegetarian. | ||
It doesn't mean that all vegetarians are Nazis. | ||
It doesn't mean that all states' rights people Are racists. | ||
States rights is an important part of federalism and it means that we can accomplish some things in the states. | ||
So I have this conversation all the time on the show but also privately because I'm a big states rights guy and and what people will say to me sometimes even just a conversation I was having this weekend someone was saying to me well I just don't trust That the states will do the right thing, that the southern states will do all these backwards social things or all that stuff. | ||
Now, I've had many people on here, including Randy Barnett, who I'm sure you're familiar with, who talked about the foot vote and that you should leave states and take your economic value and your personal value and your family and move somewhere else, and that's wonderful, and your ability, that's the beauty of America. | ||
Do you think that's a sound enough argument for states' rights? | ||
That you can just pick up and go? | ||
It helps a lot. | ||
It takes a while to do that. | ||
I guess I would argue for the way that we've elaborated states' rights, which is we take the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and we apply those also to state laws through incorporation, through the 14th Amendment. | ||
So there are limits on what the states can do. | ||
But other than that, yes, the states can have all sorts of different things. | ||
And the Ninth and Tenth Amendments both reserved a bunch of powers to the states. | ||
And that, I think, the expansion through the Commerce Clause, we're sort of getting down in the weeds, but the expansion of federal powers at the expense of the states has been one of the catastrophes in constitutional jurisprudence. | ||
And I hope we'll go back in the other direction. | ||
But it doesn't seem like that. | ||
President Trump's appointments seem to be more like 10th Amendment skeptics. | ||
Right, well, even just in the last week, it's a little confusing what the truth is, but it sounds like Sessions may go after the states because of medical marijuana. | ||
These are the things that I just simply don't understand. | ||
If the Republicans, or conservatives, or the Trump people, whatever that is, wouldn't you want to take a stand that would make some logical consistency? | ||
You'd get decent liberals to go Yeah! | ||
You're doing the right thing! | ||
Well, because that would mean that you would be operating on principle and not politics. | ||
And I guess I had hoped, and am now disappointed, that our Republican friends have not done that. | ||
All they've done is what they decried in others when Obama was president. | ||
Okay, now we're in power, we'll do all this stuff that we rightly criticized Obama for doing. | ||
That means that you have no principle at all. | ||
What does that tell you about power in general? | ||
Like, that the second they get this, and it's still a little unclear to me what Sessions is doing about the medical marijuana thing, but if he was to do anything other than respect states' rights, it shows me that once you have power, you just suck more power. | ||
I think it isn't inevitable. | ||
There used to be a norm of deference to the Constitution and to some extent of forbearance or toleration. | ||
So, you know, I'm Catholic. | ||
Clearly I think that that's the correct religion. | ||
All others are mistaken. | ||
I also think that you get to believe whatever you want. | ||
It's that second norm of toleration that's being wiped away and we're going to end up just being a bunch of competing interest groups. | ||
So I don't think it's inevitable that power is so seductive. | ||
It's like standing in line. | ||
If a bunch of us come up to something and there's more of us than can get through it, we just automatically stand in line. | ||
But if somebody cuts in line, you say, you can't do that. | ||
But if a bunch of people cuts in line, the line breaks. | ||
So the norm of toleration That we actually require, that this sense that it's wrong to do this just because it's wrong, even though I have the power, that's breaking down and I don't think that institution can easily be rebuilt. | ||
Yeah, do you see that breaking down in sort of every facet of public life right now? | ||
Like for a moment before we started we were talking about the media and it seems that mainstream media norms are crumbling and we have activists that are now masquerading as journalists. | ||
This is a huge problem. | ||
Well, for a very long time, in a number of different professions, there were sort of guild rules. | ||
That is, I have to act as a professional or I will lose the respect of my colleagues. | ||
And that respect comes from doing things the right way, not taking positions that are correct according to the liberal or conservative catechism. | ||
It's doing things the right way. | ||
It's actually doing real reporting. | ||
Instead, both sides are substituting what Stephen Colbert called truthiness. | ||
Which is, there's an essential truth that exists irrespective of the facts, and the facts are not evidence, they're examples. | ||
That makes a world of difference. | ||
You're quarreling with my examples, I have other ones. | ||
Well, no! | ||
If you say something that's not a fact, that means you're not a professional. | ||
You should be embarrassed. | ||
That's what we're losing, is those norms of professionalism. | ||
Where do you think that started? | ||
Or when do you think it started? | ||
The most famous incident was Dan Rather and some producers at CBS with the letters from the Alabama National Guard about George W. Bush. | ||
And the letters were provided by someone. | ||
He said he'd found them in some files. | ||
But when you looked at them, it was pretty clear that they couldn't have been done on an IBM Selectric typewriter. | ||
They're a proportional font. | ||
They had the wrong size footnotes. | ||
And they should have backed off. | ||
They made a mistake. | ||
They didn't. | ||
They doubled down and said, well, but there's an essential truth here. | ||
And so what happened was, and this is the origin of the pajamas media, the CBS producer said something he thought was true that turned out to be true in a way he didn't expect, which was, who are you going to believe? | ||
CBS News or some guy in his basement wearing pajamas? | ||
Well, it turns out that the guy in the basement wearing pajamas is pretty good at fact-checking. | ||
And so, it didn't start there, but that was a catalyzing moment where people said, CBS News, Edward R. Murrow, this is as professional as it gets, and they substituted their own ideological judgment for any sort of concern about facts. | ||
The guy in the basement seems to be getting more powerful these days. | ||
Do you view that as a net good? | ||
The power's asymmetric. | ||
We cannot discover truth. | ||
What we can do is impeach falsehood. | ||
So the guy in the basement is pretty good at checking and seeing if there's something contradictory to a claim that you've made. | ||
And what that means is that no one can believe anything now. | ||
Because there's always someone who's checking on it and saying, maybe making this up. | ||
There's a quote in a tweet and then it's to a link and they just assert something and it becomes a fact. | ||
This is a problem. | ||
So it's a problem. | ||
It's a terrible problem. | ||
So it's a terrible problem. | ||
So then how do you, as a political science professor, as someone that's trying to frame this for young minds, how do you give them something that they don't walk out of your class at the end of the semester and go, oh man, we're screwed? | ||
Or maybe they do and that's how you eventually fix things. | ||
Well, I want them to walk out of class saying, we could be screwed. | ||
We have an obligation to try to act against this and one of those obligations is to do the right thing even when it's not in our self-interest. | ||
And so one of my students from a while back from Duke is a guy named Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth College who writes a lot about this sort of problem. | ||
And so I think if readers are interested, if you look at Brendan Nyhan's work on this question, I think there is some hope in this direction, but we're going to have to enlist the aid of more of the mainstream media and the problem that you have is You may just lose the ratings war. | ||
Yeah. | ||
If you're not interesting and provocative. | ||
Have we already crossed that point? | ||
It seems to me that the election got us to sort of parity between the online media and the mainstream media. | ||
Like that night it sort of became equal and now at this point I think the online media actually has more influence. | ||
And that's sort of why the clickbait style and some of the stuff that we've seen with CNN over the last couple weeks, that's why it's gotten crazier because they're just grasping for the last bit of relevancy. | ||
Let's put a more hopeful spin on this. | ||
It is true, remember we talked about states' rights were misused by segregationists. | ||
Well, it's true that some of the power for curation of the mainstream media was misused, and now we no longer trust them. | ||
But it's much easier now to produce content. | ||
And I, self-serving, but your show is a sign that people are actually willing to spend more than three or four minutes or 140 characters and try to understand things. | ||
So there is this desire to know, if not the truth, at least the nuance of the different claims. | ||
And the ability to leapfrog. | ||
You can just put something up on YouTube, you get subscribers, and to some extent that's going to determine something like ratings. | ||
So you don't have to go through these institutions that, until now, have meant that only a relative few people could participate in the conversation. | ||
But do you fear the Wild West factor? | ||
I do the best job I can, but people sometimes say to me, Dave, you're the only person I trust. | ||
And I go, man, this is a huge problem. | ||
I'm doing the best I can, truly. | ||
We're in a transition. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And the Wild West actually wasn't that bad, in a way. | ||
There's a book by Terry Anderson and P.J. | ||
Hill called The Not-So-Wild Wild West. | ||
They talk about the California gold fields and the fact that people came up with ways of allocating property rights and adjudicating disputes. | ||
So for a little while, yes, it was bad. | ||
But people realized, wait, this sucks! | ||
We can do better than this. | ||
And they organize themselves. | ||
So I think within five years we're going to look back on this time as a time of transition. | ||
But not as a time of catastrophe. | ||
New institutions are going to emerge because the ability to curate and provide news that people can rely on. | ||
As much fun as it is just always to be outraged. | ||
I think we're gonna come up with new institutions, because the stakes are too high. | ||
Yeah, and I hope we do. | ||
I mean, as someone that's an outsider for that crumbling thing, which I think it should crumble, I do want some new institutions to exist, because otherwise we're just gonna filter ourselves into total distance from each other. | ||
In a way, the catastrophe that is the Trump administration, It means that a whole lot of people. | ||
It happens that the editor for the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, is a friend of mine. | ||
His daughter went to Duke. | ||
Not a fan of Trump. | ||
Not really a fan of Trump. | ||
In terms of conservatism, that should be great. | ||
He's got a Republican Congress, Republican President, but he's saying, no, principle is more important than power. | ||
So for a libertarian, and obviously Bill's not a libertarian. | ||
He's not a libertarian. | ||
He's not a libertarian. | ||
But for a libertarian, do you do think Trump has been a disaster? | ||
Because I can see arguments that make some sense libertarian-wise in terms of some of the state stuff and some of the taxes stuff that kind of make sense on a traditional libertarian or even conservative side, and then some of the bigger government things that don't make sense. | ||
I think Jeff Sessions is the worst presidential appointment of my lifetime. | ||
Wow. | ||
He's a disaster. | ||
And that alone, the sort of the no states rights, no Fourth Amendment, Jeff Sessions is terrible. | ||
I have some friends, including Walter Block at Loyola University in New Orleans, who is hoping that Trump will be something good on foreign policy. | ||
I think you can make that argument. | ||
I don't think that I think Trump's inability even to consider rule of law and the constitutional restrictions on the presidency make even worse the slide that we've been in for an expansion of an imperial presidency. | ||
So I worry that all of those bonds are now going to be broken and we're going to look for the big man, the messiah, and we're just going to trade back and forth between different visions of that and that can never work. | ||
Yeah, and that goes exactly to where we started this conversation about looking for that messiah. | ||
Do you think that our institutions are actually strong enough? | ||
I mean, I'm a believer that these institutions still have enough power that if Trump was to do something truly illegal or truly overstepping executive authority, That even though the Republicans control Congress, that we still have enough juice left in the system to take care of that. | ||
So that I think would sort of mitigate some of my fears about him for sure. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
The system is pretty strong in a way. | ||
So James Madison in Federalist 51 said that the structure of the government should be such that ambition is made to counteract ambition. | ||
So you can be a Republican member of the Senate, but you look in the mirror, you see a God. | ||
Man, I am a badass. | ||
I have the power of the Senate. | ||
Here the president is trying to use executive orders. | ||
I don't like that much because it makes me less powerful as a senator. | ||
And so a number of people in the Senate I think will use Madison's ambition must be made to counteract ambition insight. | ||
To limit Trump at some point. | ||
Yeah, so as a guy that I can tell, obviously, you're not a big Trump fan, but you still trust in the system, what do you make of when you hear someone like Maxine Waters constantly saying, we're gonna figure out a way to impeach him? | ||
You know, like, we don't know what it is yet, but we're gonna get there. | ||
To me, that is almost more undermining of the system than the excesses that Trump may or may not have Or may or may not be doing at the moment. | ||
I agree with everything you said except almost. | ||
Oh, alright. | ||
It is more undermining of the system. | ||
So we don't have a parliamentary system where a vote of no confidence is enough. | ||
It takes high crimes and misdemeanors and I was actually proud of the American system in 1998 where for no good reason Bill Clinton, there's a lot of problems with Bill Clinton, but he was impeached and the Senate said this is stupid. | ||
Well I think that that would happen again. | ||
The Democrats were very upset when there was a movement among Republicans to say we should impeach Barack Obama. | ||
So I think this may just be background, and the nice way to interpret it is it's a way for Democrats to raise money from their base. | ||
They don't actually mean it, but it's just, you read me. | ||
Right, which is also pretty horrible. | ||
Okay, but just saying it means that you're undermining the rule of law. | ||
You're actually doing what you say you're upset at Trump for doing. | ||
Yeah, so is there anyone in politics right now that you look at and you go, this guy's basically on board with the principles that I believe in? | ||
I mean, it won't surprise you to learn that I admire Rand Paul. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I actually liked Gary Johnson. | ||
Really? | ||
Let's talk about him for a little bit. | ||
Let's just talk about him within the framework of libertarian politics. | ||
I've had him on the show. | ||
I spent time with him about a half hour before we were on air. | ||
I think he's a totally lovely guy, really. | ||
And I enjoyed talking to him, and I could see us being friends, actually. | ||
But the candidacy was pretty terrible. | ||
It was the greatest ever. | ||
It was three times as much as we've ever gotten before. | ||
We got 3%. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
That's enough for ballot access in many states. | ||
But do you think that might have just been a function of disgust with the other two? | ||
That Gary himself, that unfortunately he just seemed ill-equipped to be up there and have enough of a command of the issues? | ||
And by the way, I say that with total sympathy for him because there was nothing he could do to get in the news except flub. | ||
They would only talk about him when he flubbed. | ||
So he was in an unwinnable position. | ||
He is so much better than anything else that we have had. | ||
I'm actually a libertarian partisan. | ||
I ran for governor of North Carolina in 2008. | ||
I did not win. | ||
We're going to get to that. | ||
I campaigned with Gary Johnson. | ||
I got to know him pretty well. | ||
Yes, he flubbed. | ||
He was tired, he made a bunch of mistakes, and that's what the media emphasized. | ||
It was really important that he got 3%. | ||
And in fact, if you were to look, suppose you strip away the party labels and you're a visitor from Mars. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, there's this person who has been Secretary of State and has experience as a Senator. | ||
And then there's these two people who were multi-term governors of pretty mixed states. | ||
And then some psycho person in real estate. | ||
You don't think, alright, those are the libertarian candidates. | ||
So my question would be compared to what? | ||
I thought Gary Johnson did a great job. | ||
He did the best a libertarian candidate has ever done and he gave us something to build on. | ||
Did I cringe at the Aleppo incident? | ||
Of course. | ||
Yeah, well, that's the thing. | ||
In August, I endorsed him, basically, with the idea of let's get the guy to 15% so that at least for one debate, because we know the Democrats and Republicans control the debates, at least for one debate, because they'd never let him in a second one, but at least for one, let's hear some of these limited government ideas. | ||
And unfortunately, there just wasn't enough juice there. | ||
But you know what, I'm hearing you, and maybe I will ease off him a little bit. | ||
Well, the question is compared to what? | ||
Yeah. | ||
You got 3%. | ||
The best we ever did was 1%. | ||
All right, so then what does that mean to you is the future for the Libertarian Party? | ||
And do you think that a third party actually can, if that 3% means something to you, do you think that that means it could be 6% in 2020? | ||
Could it be really impactful in 2020? | ||
Third parties in a system of first past the post, which is what we have, You're always going to have two main parties in a first-past-the-post system. | ||
But the positions of the parties will depend partly on the pressure that's brought to bear. | ||
And if you have someone who can participate in debates, particularly at the state level, you can remind the two state-sponsored parties of the things that are in their platform that they're leaving out. | ||
So I don't think a third party's going to win, but what I care about is the policies, not the face. | ||
Remember, I care about rules and not the people. | ||
So if the two state-sponsored parties are obliged by opening up to the scolding winds of competition, and they have better policies, that's what I hope that the third parties can do. | ||
Yeah, I hear people on the right all the time say, well, if we back a libertarian, what you end up doing is splitting the vote on the right and then you help people on the left. | ||
How would you explain to somebody that that may not matter and maybe that has to happen? | ||
Well, you only get one vote. | ||
And sometimes people do advocate what political scientists call voting the lote, lesser of two evils. | ||
If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you're certainly going to get an evil. | ||
The only way to waste your vote is to vote for a candidate you don't actually want. | ||
And if you vote for a candidate that you do want, that's going to give a signal to the two state-sponsored parties that we don't find this to be acceptable. | ||
So, all your votes are wasted. | ||
They don't determine the outcome. | ||
Now, what I get then is conservatives particularly saying, what if everyone thought that way? | ||
Ah, a Jedi you are! | ||
So, your vote affects thousands of others? | ||
No! | ||
You have one vote. | ||
You can choose to waste it, or you can vote what you actually believe and try to send a signal. | ||
Which I think would be more important than just throwing it away or going the lesser of two evils route. | ||
I would think that. | ||
I think we've gotten stuck in this lesser of two evils as the two parties have gotten more and more evil. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Do you think part of that also is that the whole system now, and when I say the system I mean our political system and our media system, there's only a certain type of person who would run. | ||
And now we can talk a little bit also about your 2008 campaign, but that it would take, you know, the idea of having to deal with what your family will have to deal with. | ||
They're gonna track down every email that you ever had, every affair, whatever it is, just all that nonsense. | ||
You're only going to get a certain type of person that wants to do this, and that basically good, decent people will self-select out. | ||
I hear this all the time. | ||
Every time I see somebody or I talk to somebody that I think should be in politics, I wouldn't want to subject myself to that. | ||
I've had many guests here that privately I've said, you want to run for something, and everyone, no, never. | ||
There's really two problems. | ||
One is the process of running is very difficult. | ||
It takes a lot of time and you constantly have your motives questioned and it's psychologically very difficult. | ||
The other problem is if you win you have to serve. | ||
And a lot of people that are really good at things really good at things. They're doing something else. So you | ||
have to be the sort of person who, that I don't want to say too much about | ||
Donald Trump, but who just thinks of yourself as being essentially infallible. | ||
And the problem is we as voters validate that. So I found often in debates | ||
and talking to people voters would ask a question about some policy. | ||
And I'd say, well that's actually really complicated. | ||
That's something experts disagree about. | ||
Here are the two arguments. | ||
And you could see their eyes glazing over. | ||
And my opponents would say, I know exactly the right thing to do and here it is. | ||
And then they would say something stupid. | ||
But that wins. | ||
But it wins. | ||
I know what to do is always going to win over this is hard. | ||
Yeah, which is also a great argument for small government to admit it every now and I don't know what to do so maybe we shouldn't be passing just things that are going to completely change the system because the truth is nobody knows what comes out on the other side. | ||
And the fact that something is a problem doesn't mean that there's a solution. | ||
So I call that the we should do something problem. | ||
X is a problem. | ||
We should do something. | ||
Y is something, therefore we should do Y. It doesn't follow. | ||
The fact that something should be done, but then they'll say, well, you don't care about X. So unemployment and poverty are problems. | ||
And so there are these things that we should do. | ||
Right. | ||
And I said, well, those things won't work. | ||
Oh, you hate poor people. | ||
And it's almost impossible to extricate yourself out of that, right? | ||
So all right, so you ran as libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina in 2008. | ||
So first off, since I can tell you're a real politic person, why not just run as a Republican, which would have perhaps given you a better shot? | ||
Just start, just in the reality of. | ||
I live in North Carolina. | ||
Our Democrats are Republicans. | ||
Our Republicans are Taliban. | ||
They want Sharia law. | ||
Now it's Christian Sharia law. | ||
Right, right. | ||
So this is the real Christian right. | ||
I would have come in eighth in a seven-person primary if I had run as a Republican. | ||
So there really is no constituency in North Carolina among the Republicans for my view of conservatism. | ||
But if the Democrats are Republicans, why not run as a Democrat then? | ||
I considered running as a Democrat, but the Democrats have had a machine that controlled | ||
the state and it was clear who the nominee was going to be. | ||
The reason that I ran was my objection to North Carolina's ballot access laws. | ||
We have some of the most restrictive ballot access laws in the country. | ||
If Coke and Pepsi could decide how many soft drinks there should be, they would say two. | ||
The Republicans and Democrats actually get to do that and they think two is the right number. | ||
We had to raise about $300,000 to get on the ballot, and then we could never get enough votes to stay on the ballot. | ||
So eight times we'd spent all this money, all this collection of signatures. | ||
I figured that I could get 2%. | ||
It takes 2% to stay on the ballot. | ||
We've never done that. | ||
So if you set your goals really low, you could be a success. | ||
I got more than 2%. | ||
So I figured I could do that, and I did. | ||
That was my objective, was to get the 2%, and I got 2.8%. | ||
Do you think that some of those ideas that you were running on in 2008 have taken root in North Carolina? | ||
They were at least mentioned by the other candidates, and sometimes the newspapers would even point this out. | ||
Also, I was in four televised debates, and in some ways I'm their worst nightmare. | ||
I have a PhD in economics, I'm a certain superficial glibness, and no chance of winning, so I could answer the questions. | ||
Yeah, I haven't got the superficial glibness yet. | ||
Maybe it'll come. | ||
Or maybe you're very effective at it, and I've missed it somehow. | ||
Thank you. | ||
is the reason that the Libertarians haven't done more at the state level. | ||
When people talk about the Libertarians, they go, well, Gary Johnson, or whatever it is. | ||
And yes, there is Rand Paul, but technically he's a Republican. | ||
There's Justin Amash, there's a couple people. | ||
But why haven't they done more just on the local level? | ||
This seems like a major opening for them. | ||
Coming over here, I was promising myself I wasn't going to answer this question. | ||
But what the heck! | ||
Go crazy! | ||
I'll say. | ||
Here's what happens at Libertarian meetings. | ||
The first one, 20 or 30 people show up and they're all enthusiastic. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And at the second meeting, 10 people show up. | ||
And the 10 say, I'm really glad those others didn't come back. | ||
They weren't real libertarians. | ||
Because what they're mainly concerned about is checking each other's papers. | ||
So you can tell if it's a real libertarian meeting by how long is it before there's an argument about whether individuals should be able to own nuclear weapons. | ||
Nobody cares about that. | ||
When I was running for governor, people would say, would you end the Fed? | ||
I'm running for governor, actually. | ||
But I want to know. | ||
So what we really care about is ideological purity, because if you cared about actual policy or winning, you would suck it up and be a Democrat or Republican. | ||
Right. | ||
So the problem that we have as libertarians is that I don't think people conceive themselves as being part of a political process. | ||
They think of themselves as outré, as being outside and truth tellers, the keepers of a last flickering remnant of truth. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And that's just not a very effective political strategy. | ||
That's interesting because to me after doing this show for about two years and having you know a lot of classical liberals on a lot of libertarians and I've had progressives and conservatives and everything that to me Basically, the difference that I see between classical liberals and libertarians is a little more realistic utility for the state. | ||
So when someone comes in with that question and says to you, well, you're gonna get rid of the Fed, and you go, I'm running for governor, and also that's a really high-level philosophical thing, that to me, it's just a more realistic approach to how to change things. | ||
Do you think that's a fair assessment? | ||
Yes, and I've made a distinction in a couple of things that I've written between directional and destinationist libertarians. | ||
Destinationist libertarians have a particular libertopia in mind. | ||
Anything that's not like that is out. | ||
Directionalists would want to say, are there policies that we could choose that would be cheaper, lower deficits, lower the power of the state, and increase personal responsibility and liberty? | ||
So an example would be when I was running for governor, my educational platform was vouchers. | ||
And a lot of people means-tested vouchers. | ||
So the poorest 40% would get more school choice. | ||
Many of the wealthy have it now. | ||
Let's have more school choice for the very poor. | ||
And a lot of people on the left were kind of interested in that. | ||
There's a lot of African-American citizens that are just desperate to get their children into better schools. | ||
Libertarians, almost without exception, said, oh no, the state would be involved in that. | ||
The only acceptable libertarian policy is the immediate elimination of all taxes. | ||
Right. | ||
Again, this is the part that is not the realistic part. | ||
Because they're destinationists. | ||
So the destinationists are always going to be there. | ||
The libertarians, if they're going to have any success, are going to have to appeal to the directionalists in both parties that say, look, the government has too many powers. | ||
We may disagree about how far back we want to move it, but let's move the train in the other direction. | ||
We're going the wrong way. | ||
I think there's a consensus. | ||
We should move it back. | ||
Where we get off the train, that's a different question. | ||
But let's change the direction. | ||
What would you say is the easiest way to explain state power, when I mean state I mean local or federal, to the person that doesn't quite get this, to the person that when you talk about Government power and government overreach. | ||
They just think it's like you're talking about some sort of ephemeral thing that doesn't really exist. | ||
What do you think the best argument to get them to start understanding the ideas of what liberty really is? | ||
Well, this is obviously something I've thought about a lot and I haven't really succeeded. | ||
So you're asking what the best argument is, but it's very frustrating because people have a conception of a thing called a state. | ||
So something I've written a lot about is the unicorn conception of the state. | ||
So imagine that I have a mass transit proposal. | ||
And what we'll have is these large carts that are pulled by unicorns. | ||
And unicorns are great for mass transit because they eat rainbows, they're very strong, and their flatulence smells like fresh strawberries. | ||
So there's no emissions problem. | ||
I did not know that part. | ||
There's no emissions problem. | ||
That's really great. | ||
Now you could object, well I think there's a problem with this actually because unicorns don't really exist. | ||
Close your eyes. | ||
You see one. | ||
So do I. They totally exist, in the sense that I can imagine them. | ||
That's how people think of the state. | ||
When I say, look, the state is messing up. | ||
Well, right, because we have bad people. | ||
All we need to do is get the right people, because I can imagine a state that's doing these things. | ||
It's very difficult to fight that. | ||
So the argument that I try to make, having given that caveat, that it's hard to fight unicorns, because that's what people want, is something they can imagine, not something that exists. | ||
But the argument that I actually try to make is that every flaw in consumers, and there are many, is worse in voters. | ||
So you think consumers are too stupid to be able to choose what size coat to buy or which car to buy? | ||
Voters have all those problems and more. | ||
So my colleague, Dan Ariely at Duke, who writes about rationality and consumer problems, and wants the state to intervene, there's no such thing as the state. | ||
There's just people. | ||
If we're gonna have voters choose what these experts are gonna make people do, it'll be even worse than the market. | ||
Right, so basically we are the flaw in the system in a really perverse way. | ||
Which means that the best system is one that recognizes that and doesn't try to do too much. | ||
Because if we give voters enough power, they'll do what they did in the South. | ||
and afflict minorities, or they'll say no same-sex marriage. | ||
There's no reason to think that if you take one person who's too stupid to make his own choices at the grocery store and put them together into an angry mob, they can then choose a good president or a good Food and Drug Administration. | ||
So let's talk about that mob for a second, because I sense that both sides right now are being led by their mob. | ||
I see it more on the left, But I do see it on the right as well, that just the hysterical people who have all the magical answers, who have, if it was only their messiah, so the hysterical people on the right, they have their messiah in office right now, but the hysterical people on the left, that if they only had Bernie, it would all be okay. | ||
The middle, it's hard to get that middle mob to get going, right? | ||
It was very difficult to be deeply committed to moderation. | ||
So, Yates has that poem where he says, the worst are full of passionate intensity, while the best lack all conviction. | ||
Because you think, well, this is actually hard. | ||
There's a bunch of people who think it's not hard. | ||
They know exactly what to do. | ||
And politics, if it's going to work, needs to have rules, institutions, constitutions that prevent them from being able to control the government. | ||
And that's the genius of what our Constitution has done, that separation of powers. | ||
I understand it's really frustrating because it means that you feel strongly, there seems to be majority in favor of it and yet we still can't do it because the President doesn't go along, the Supreme Court doesn't go along. | ||
It means that a lot of times the status quo is privileged. | ||
But the alternative is to have a mob. | ||
And Plato, when he thought of democracy, actually talked about too much liberty means that you've got the butlers that are drunk on liberty's heady wine. | ||
Right. | ||
And that they'll say, if they find a leader who doesn't give them too much, they'll call them blackguards and oligarchs. | ||
That you should do exactly what we want. | ||
Well, they don't actually know what they want. | ||
So we have a real problem in, and this is an interesting paradox in democracy. | ||
There was a famous Englishman that said the reason that we put our leaders' heads on stamps | ||
is that we can thumb their noses and lick their hinderparks. | ||
So we have both of those attitudes towards leaders. | ||
We want them to be better than us and to do what we say. | ||
Is part of this also that we think that we need to get our morals from our leaders too? | ||
And maybe that's changing a little bit with Trump, but that we thought that, you know, they always want you, you're gonna be married, you're gonna have the perfect family, we're gonna show you the kids. | ||
We know that it's always a fraud and they're all cheating on their wives and doing all sorts of awful things, but that we've tried to make our politicians into be perfect humans, which again is the Messiah thing you're talking about, but it's just, it's just show. | ||
Sure, it's difficult. | ||
We have other things, you know, there's basketball to watch, there's baseball, there's picnics to go on. | ||
We don't really want to have to watch politicians very closely and so we substitute, I was really surprised at this, how little voters knew or cared about Actual issues. | ||
Issues that I, as a political scientist, I want to talk about that. | ||
They're going, I gotta go. | ||
I'm really not interested in that at all. | ||
Oh, but it's an important issue. | ||
Yeah, I'm out. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
What they're interested in instead is your character. | ||
So if your character is very much like them, it means that you'll go off and when they're not watching, they'll do what they would have done. | ||
You will do what they would have done. | ||
And so they want you to know, are you like me in terms of core values? | ||
And that's why family and things like that matter, is that you're a good person. | ||
But Trump is a strange misnomer in that, isn't he? | ||
He said the things that many white people believed. | ||
Trump won a majority of white women. | ||
I think that's the single most astonishing fact about this election. | ||
Trump won a majority of white women. | ||
And the reason is that the Democrats, for reasons that I have a hard time understanding, mostly campaigned on a platform of white people suck. | ||
You guys are privileged. | ||
And there's all sorts of reasons why actually you can say that that's true, but as a political strategy, it didn't work. | ||
And so Clinton, when she said, how am I not ahead by 50 points? | ||
It's amazing that they didn't recognize that they had actually to appeal to a majority of Americans, not to try to put together a coalition of disparate interest groups that are united by nothing, except the promise that they're going to get paid off. | ||
So that goes directly to social justice, which I talk about all the time. | ||
I assume you see this as a pretty big threat to the way our political system should work, right? | ||
It sounds good, social justice, but in reality, it's creating these competing interests that have to sort of knock each other down a peg. | ||
We're all in favor of justice, and social justice means that we have a system that works. | ||
I see social justice as the claim that there shouldn't be any unearned privilege. | ||
And to the extent that people think they've been denied something, that's where this social justice warrior impulse comes from. | ||
And it's particularly interesting being on college campuses. | ||
to see what social justice warriors have done where they won't even allow other people to speak. | ||
So there's a broad problem of free speech and social justice | ||
and then the problem on college campuses that I have to deal with often personally, the social justice | ||
warriors and academic freedom which is a little bit different | ||
from free freedom of speech. Academic freedom is a different concept | ||
but the social justice impulse to the extent that it's | ||
a number of people have said, I think Milton Friedman said it | ||
if you take money from A and give it to B it's likely B will vote for you. | ||
That doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. | ||
You're just campaigning with other people's money. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so all of us are clever. | ||
We can come up with reasons why you should get something and you should get something and you should get something. | ||
But at some point you run out of other people's money. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And you've just split now this thing into a gajillion other things. | ||
So discussing this on the campus front, How bad is it on campuses right now? | ||
I talk to professors in all sorts of different disciplines, and almost everybody says it's pretty terrible. | ||
I'm really spoiled, because I'm at Duke. | ||
So, I mean, you probably heard about how bad Charles Murray's visit to Duke was. | ||
Probably didn't, because it was fine. | ||
We had Charles Murray in. | ||
Which was the one that was the whole fiasco? | ||
There was a number of places that Charles Murray tried to go that have turned out really badly. | ||
He came to Duke, there were three idiots with voodoo sailors. | ||
The room was quiet, you couldn't even hear it. | ||
It was fine. | ||
People asked some questions. | ||
In fact, I asked that they ask more rude questions. | ||
He's a grown-up. | ||
He's happy to answer aggressive, rude questions. | ||
So, I think that the answer is, I have an odd view probably, I'm a big fan of safe spaces. | ||
Yeah, so you wrote, I wanted to ask you about it, so you wrote a piece on Learn Liberty in defense of safe spaces, which as I read it, you parsed it to a point that actually makes some sense to me, because I'm not a safe space guy, so take it away. | ||
Well, it's an attempt at judo, obviously. | ||
I'm using safe space in a way where people who are in favor of safe spaces, they go, yeah, yeah, wait, what? | ||
Right, so you kind of flip it, so can you explain that a little bit? | ||
Well, to me, the main principle universities are operating on is not freedom of speech, where you can say anything you want. | ||
But academic freedom, which means that you can go off into little groups and be insulated from people that you disagree with so you can work on something. | ||
So the political scientists are working on something in a particular way. | ||
Sociology is working on something in a particular way. | ||
We have communities of scholars that work on things, and in our talks there's a bunch of things that are shared premises, shared assumptions, Right. | ||
and we're gonna try to advance without constantly having to confront | ||
all of the other possible ways of thinking about this. | ||
Right, so you're describing that as a safe space, but I feel like that's not exactly what the, | ||
like I don't know that many people would argue that that isn't okay, right? | ||
Even the people that are for a safe space. | ||
Well, but then we can go on to raise the question. | ||
And Van Jones has this amazing video where he makes exactly the right argument, I think. | ||
What you cannot do is annex the entire university as a safe space. | ||
You cannot say, I want to be all across the university safe from anything that I disagree with. | ||
So it's the very fact that there's these different safe spaces that nearly ensure there's going to be somebody working on things you totally disagree with. | ||
And they have to be safe within that space. | ||
You don't get to prevent them from doing that. | ||
So I think we need safe spaces, for example, for fraternities. | ||
And that's the, you know, the safe space people are, fraternities are terrible. | ||
They hate fraternities, yeah. | ||
No, people need to be able to come up with associations. | ||
So there's five freedoms that are guaranteed in the First Amendment. | ||
And we forget freedom of association. | ||
Freedom of association means I get to choose the people that I hang out with. | ||
And if I want to have a club or organization and we have rules, and we want to talk about the stuff we want to talk about and have in the speakers that we want, even if it's my luck, okay. | ||
People seem to be lost on this. | ||
They're confused. | ||
I see even with the guests that we choose here, if I choose one person, someone will love me for a year. | ||
Then I put on one person who they don't like, suddenly they prescribe all of that person's beliefs onto me. | ||
I go, well I was just asking them questions. | ||
And listen to the answers and you can either turn it off or maybe you'll learn something. | ||
So John Stuart Mill has this great idea of education where he says it requires collision with error. | ||
And the way I try to explain it to people is, and I think this happens much more on the left, a lot of the young students on the left have just learned one move chess openings. | ||
They move the pawn in front of their king out two spaces. | ||
And then they're patted on the head. | ||
"Good liberal! | ||
Here's a cookie!" | ||
And somebody knows a five move chess opening in response. | ||
They're really upset. | ||
Can you do that? | ||
Well, you must be a bad person. | ||
And in fact, we're going to prevent that. | ||
Because I don't know why your argument is false. | ||
The only possible explanation is that it's evil. | ||
Yeah, is that you're a racist, bigot, homophobe, etc. | ||
Because they've never actually had to confront people that they disagreed with. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
So collision with error means that you're constantly trying to improve your own views. | ||
Because if you find someone you disagree with, one of two things is true. | ||
Either you're right, but you don't know the reasons, and you should think about it. | ||
Because not knowing the reasons is a lot like not knowing the truth. | ||
Memorizing some catechism of truths is not what college is about. | ||
It's learning reasons and being able to reason critically. | ||
You can't do that unless you know the best argument against your position. | ||
So one of the things, and I'm pretty judgmental about this, I'll ask people That's an interesting claim. | ||
What do you think is the best counter-argument to that? | ||
And if they say, well, there isn't one, we're done. | ||
You don't know anything. | ||
But if they say, you know, there's actually two that I have a real problem with, and I think I can answer them, but they're interesting arguments. | ||
That person's an intellectual. | ||
It's funny, because some of my best moments, you can see the way I interview, and I haven't looked down at the notes once, and I'm trying to hear you and just go where it feels natural. | ||
But some of my best moments on the show, I think, are where someone has pinned me into thinking, Wait a minute, I really have to reevaluate something, and that's how you evolve, and that's how most of us are, and yet we've so let go of that in the public square. | ||
And I think some of it's generational. | ||
A lot of the young students just have never thought about the problem of having to learn by arguing. | ||
So one of the things that I do in class, and it worked better than I thought, was I divide the students into pairs, and they have to choose a question they're going to debate. | ||
And then on the day of the debate, the debates are thirty minutes, on the day of the debate both of them hold up big-ass yellow dice because there's not enough ritual in our lives. | ||
So you have to hold the dice over your head and you roll it and whoever gets the higher roll gets to choose which side they're on. | ||
So you don't know which side you're arguing until that moment. | ||
Yeah, how does that go? | ||
They love it because they actually, they pay much more attention now to things they disagree with because they want to understand it. | ||
They may have to argue it. | ||
Do you find that sometimes the ones that are arguing things they don't believe actually do a better job because of that? | ||
They have to do more intellectual work. | ||
And they're not so emotional, where I have an attachment to a particular position. | ||
It's hard for me to explain it, because I just know it's right. | ||
Whereas if it's an argument I don't agree with, I'm thinking of it logically, step by step, and I'm presenting evidence. | ||
And a lot of times they end up saying, I've kind of got to change my mind, that's not really what I believed after all, or at least I can see why someone would believe the opposite. | ||
That's what education is. | ||
Yeah, so it sounds like your situation at Duke is pretty good and maybe they've managed to figure out the free speech thing a little bit better than most universities. | ||
Duke is really committed to it, and the thing is, it's not a very hard thing to commit to. | ||
So our previous president, Nan Cohen, is the best college president I've ever seen. | ||
And there was an incident where David Horowitz had bought this ad about how reparations for slavery were racist. | ||
And you know, it was pretty incendiary, and I didn't like the ad. | ||
I thought it was out of line. | ||
But the newspaper, the Duke Chronicle, had allowed David Horowitz to purchase a one-page ad. | ||
Now, he had done that in a number of newspapers. | ||
He did it at Brown University. | ||
At Brown University, they had a ceremonial burning of the newspapers on the steps of the admin building in which the president participated. | ||
That's horrible. | ||
At Duke, what Nan Cohan said was, it's a newspaper. | ||
You want to buy an ad, go ahead. | ||
That's not a very hard position to take. | ||
It's a newspaper. | ||
I might not have taken that ad as editor. | ||
I'm not editor. | ||
You wanna contest it, buy an ad. | ||
So do you think the students or the faculty or whatever it was at Brown, when they do that sort of thing, do you think they realize that they ultimately strengthen the ideas that they're going up against? | ||
So for example, I've had David Horowitz on the show. | ||
I think he's a decent guy. | ||
I agree with him on some stuff. | ||
He was a former leftist and I think 30 years ago was struggling with a lot of the issues that I'm thinking about these days. | ||
But basically I sat across from him and I thought, he's a decent guy. | ||
I didn't think he was some right-wing maniac or all the things that they say about him. | ||
So that when they then, you know, burn the newspapers or whatever, and then now you have people doing a little research on him and then they may go, well this isn't all crazy what he's saying, but look at the reaction to him. | ||
Well, one alternative would be to look in the newspaper and say, oh jeez, and turn the page. | ||
Right, that would be the same reaction. | ||
You wasted all that money because you're not persuaded by it. | ||
As if people are paying that much attention to newspaper ads, you know? | ||
Well, they did after the administration at Brown burned it. | ||
That got so much attention. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So if nothing else, it certainly does validate two claims. | ||
One, the university is not capable of holding legitimate discussions or confrontations with ideas you disagree with. | ||
And the other is, I'm going to look at this ad and see what it says, because it's pretty controversial. | ||
Yeah, so we've got about 50 minutes and we really haven't done that much on economics, so I want to shift a little bit. | ||
Because to me it seems that economics, if we could get the economic system to work right, whatever that means, that it does resolve a lot of the political things. | ||
Basically, if people have jobs and can buy some stuff and feel that they own property and things of that nature, That those other things will become less important. | ||
That's my basic belief. | ||
Do you think that's a fair premise to start off with? | ||
It's interesting that so many things are going on at once. | ||
Because the most recent Reason Magazine, John Nye at George Mason University, has this brilliant article about inequality. | ||
So it is true that if you look at income levels, there's more inequality. | ||
And the reason is there's more rich people. | ||
And the rich have gained by more than the poor. | ||
But the poor have gained a lot. | ||
So, but let's compare this to 1800. | ||
In 1800, the mode of transportation of the wealthy was very different from the poor. | ||
Now, if I'm really rich, maybe I have a Tesla. | ||
And you have a Dodge Minivan. | ||
Chevy Equinox. | ||
Leased. | ||
It's not that different, really. | ||
It has air conditioning. | ||
It works pretty well. | ||
It gets, well, the Tesla gets good gas mileage, I guess. | ||
But there's some sort of status difference. | ||
But we're basically doing the same thing. | ||
We're the same. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We've got an internet connection at home, we've got a nice television, we've got a computer, we've got a laptop, we've got a cell phone. | ||
There are some differences in status, but there's never been more equality in the basic way that people live their lives. | ||
And the difference in, if you look at the difference in life expectancy between the wealthy and the poor, it used to be enormous. | ||
Child mortality rates, it was enormous. | ||
It's converged. | ||
Our biggest problem is not starvation, it's obesity. | ||
So, there has never been a time of greater equality. | ||
Now, I know some people are gonna hear that and go, ah, you libertarians, what he's saying is, you people on the bottom have a TV, have a cell phone, have a, what about the people that don't have that stuff? | ||
Now, I get what you're saying, those, that most of the bottom has sort of moved up to have a decent level, but what about that other, what's the libertarian view of how you help or not help the people that don't have that baseline? | ||
Two things. | ||
One, when historians look back at the period between 1945 and 2010, the great story is the worldwide elimination of poverty through capitalism. | ||
Every country that has chosen markets has dramatically improved, not just the average, but the least well-off. | ||
China, India. | ||
Poverty is disappearing around the world, if by poverty you use some objective measure. | ||
If you have a subjective or comparative measure, yes, it's a problem. | ||
Because there's always going to be one-fifth of the people in the bottom 20%. | ||
That's just the definition. | ||
I'm not a mathemagician, but I can go with you on that. | ||
So that's one thing, is allowing markets solves poverty in a way that no government program ever could. | ||
It's better to have a job than a handout. | ||
On the other hand, I have written quite a bit about my own support for universal basic income. | ||
So I think universal basic income is a better solution than the hodgepodge of different intrusive programs that we have now. | ||
Let me explain briefly why. | ||
So, what we have is a system, and I wrote a pretty incendiary paper about this, the state is a bad polygamist. | ||
So if you're a single mother, And you have three children. | ||
If you do one of two things, you'll lose your support from the polygamist. | ||
If you get a job or get married. | ||
If you actually do something that achieves some independence for yourself, your husband, the state, will say, we're getting a divorce. | ||
I don't care. | ||
You can have more children, you can have affairs, but you have to be committed to me. | ||
You can only get support from me. | ||
Which means that you can't do any of the things that normally we would expect. | ||
This is a conservative position, I suppose. | ||
Family and jobs are good things. | ||
Being married and having a job is a good thing. | ||
We have What many people, even on the left, have called the cliff effect of benefits. | ||
If I'm in Section 8 housing and I get subsidies for food, I get subsidies for school, the first $10,000 that I earn costs me $12,000 in benefits. | ||
So the poor aren't lazy, they're rational. | ||
Right. | ||
So they're really, it's just a realistic game. | ||
I don't want to say game. | ||
They're not playing a game, but they're making calculations. | ||
It's a game in the technical sense. | ||
They have choices, they have strategies, those have payoffs. | ||
It's unsurprising they pick the ones that make them better off because they're desperate. | ||
They can't afford to lose this money. | ||
So, for example, if you're living through subsidized housing in a decent area with a decent school, and even if you don't want those handouts, well, then you realize, well, I'm going to have to work a third job now, and then they're going to force me to move to a much worse place to live. | ||
I can't afford childcare. | ||
So the state is a bad polygamist. | ||
Let's stop doing that. | ||
And let's say, and another problem as I see it is minimum wage. | ||
Now the effects of minimum wage on overall employment economists debate. | ||
But it's almost certainly true that it's very difficult for people to get a first job or acquire the experience that allows them to start the staircase to the American dream. | ||
So the unemployment rate in some urban areas for like 15 to 25 year olds is 40, 50%. | ||
There's no way for people to find a first job. | ||
Why do we do that? | ||
Well, we wanna say people should be able to live on this. | ||
It's not clear why your first job should be something you should be able to live on. | ||
Yeah, and if you even bring that up, people get upset. | ||
Well, except I say, you know, you're right. | ||
Let's make sure they can live. | ||
Let's give them universal basic income. | ||
And if they want to get a job at $3 an hour, because that's how you get experience in Europe, in Germany. | ||
If you serve an apprenticeship, you're making $2 or $3 an hour. | ||
After two years, you have enough experience, you can now get a job that makes $30 an hour. | ||
So it's an education. | ||
So to me, universal basic income that's given without strings. | ||
We take the money that we're spending now. | ||
Which is enough to give at least $12,000 per poor people. | ||
So you take the amount that we spend, divide it by the number... Where are we taking that from? | ||
Well, all of these different subsidy programs. | ||
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Oh, so all of the subsidy programs then go to... Including Social Security. | |
So we eliminate all those. | ||
Use that money to give everyone a universal basic income. | ||
And if they get a job, they don't lose it. | ||
If they get married, they don't lose it. | ||
They can use it for child care. | ||
One of the problems that people have now is it's very specifically tied to a location. | ||
So I can't go somewhere where there's a job because I won't be able to establish myself. | ||
Universal basic income, if it's federal, means that if I'm living in Cleveland, Ohio, I can't | ||
find a job. | ||
There are jobs in Texas or North Carolina. | ||
When I get there, I get universal basic income. | ||
I can establish myself, I can pay for child care, I can look for a job, and there actually are jobs in those places. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Do you find a conflict between your libertarian self and your economist self on this? | ||
Because it seems like the idea of a libertarian going, the state should give people money, probably seems like there's some fight there, right? | ||
Sure, if you're a destinationist. | ||
If I'm a directionalist, I say, dude, we're giving them the money now. | ||
Right, we're already doing it. | ||
We're already doing it. | ||
Let's just give the money in a way that's cheaper and increases liberty. | ||
That's the basic directionalist argument, which is why Milton Friedman and Charles Murray are both in favor of universal basic income. | ||
But it has to be a directionless argument. | ||
We're already doing that. | ||
Now, you're saying we shouldn't do that. | ||
Great. | ||
Good for you. | ||
We are. | ||
And unless you have some plan to end that and improve things, I'll listen to that. | ||
That's not what they say. | ||
They just say, well, the government shouldn't be giving out any money. | ||
It already is. | ||
Let's do it in a more efficient way. | ||
And in a way that increases liberty. | ||
Because I can then spend that money on what I actually want. | ||
We give these vouchers for food. | ||
Which, I don't really want to buy that. | ||
I want to buy something else. | ||
I sell my food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar. | ||
If I get money, I already have 100 cents on the dollar. | ||
Now, the one objection that people on the left make is, well those poor people, you know how they are. | ||
They'll spend it on the wrong stuff. | ||
Is that the argument the people on the left make? | ||
Isn't that usually from the right where they'll say they're going to spend it on booze? | ||
Of course some people, but a surprising number of people on the left believe that, yes. | ||
So one of the things I like about this is it sort of divides the usual political split by how paternalistic they are. | ||
There's a whole bunch of people on the left that really think Experts and, honestly, rich white people should be saying, here's how these poor people should be spending their time and money. | ||
Yeah, which is probably not, well, that shows you a lot about paternalism and authoritarianism and all that. | ||
So your next book, which is called Tomorrow 3.0, this is sort of partly what it's gonna be about, right? | ||
Because we're about to go into another revolution, which is gonna be a shared economy and technological revolution, and that all sort of plays into, I suppose, basic income and just the way technology, you know, iPads are replacing people at McDonald's. | ||
This is just a fact. | ||
It's interesting, so Marc Andreessen in November 2011 wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he said software eats the world. | ||
And what he meant was that software is to service jobs, as robots and automation are to production. | ||
So we're used to thinking of factories as being a transformation from a bunch of people putting stuff together to machines putting stuff together. | ||
And it's more efficient, but it means there's fewer jobs. | ||
So capitalism almost always Reduces jobs by increasing productivity. | ||
So Trump was wrong in saying that we're sending jobs to China. | ||
The whole world is losing jobs to productivity and that's good because consumer products are reduced in price and it means that we're all wealthier. | ||
The reason that everyone, almost everyone, can afford a car and a cell phone is that the price of those things has fallen so much. | ||
Problem is, until now we've said, well there's always the service economy. | ||
People can always get service jobs. | ||
They can't. | ||
And that's being hastened by the push for increased minimum wages. | ||
So in Seattle, for example, if you have a fast food restaurant, you're probably investigating kiosks so you don't have to pay $15 an hour to have some guy who really isn't worth $15 an hour at the front desk. | ||
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Right. | |
So the service jobs are going to be taken over by software. | ||
It's not clear to me that We're going to be able to take people who are not sufficiently well trained by the state education system to be able to work in the new economy to make that transition very quickly. | ||
So I think universal basic income, you can make a static argument, we're spending the money already, so we might as well spend it more efficiently. | ||
But then there's a dynamic argument too, over time The move to the sharing economy probably benefits most of us. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because we can rent rather than own. | ||
Prices are gonna fall dramatically. | ||
We'll need a lot less stuff. | ||
The sharing economy, just so for the people that don't fully get it, so basically that you wouldn't even have to necessarily own your car. | ||
That all of the things that we kind of have, we'd figure out better ways to use them so you wouldn't have to fork out as much money for them in the first place. | ||
And we'd figure out, well, I'm gonna use it on Tuesdays at this time, and you're gonna use it then. | ||
Is that the basic? | ||
Sure. | ||
The example that I always use, and I think people recognize it, is I have a black BMW 330i, and I'm just the sort of person you think I am, that drives a black BMW 330i, zooming in and out. | ||
It's a very expensive car. | ||
I park it at a special shrine at my house. | ||
When I approach it, the door opens. | ||
Now, it's a garage, but that's pretty expensive storage. | ||
And since I worked as an administrator at Duke for a long time, I have the parking space of God. | ||
I can park in a great space. | ||
So my car is really expensive, and it's always taking up two pieces of real estate, the garage and my parking space at Duke, which is reserved for me. | ||
When you multiply that by the... I drive my car 30, 40 minutes a week. | ||
All the rest of the time it's just sitting there. | ||
I think what's going to happen 50 years from now is that people are going to look back and be astonished at the extent to which we were so selfish that we wanted to keep stuff so other people couldn't use it and spend a lot of money storing it so other people couldn't use it. | ||
Now, to some extent that gives us status. | ||
I'm an old guy, I probably have pictures of my pathetic car on Facebook. | ||
Young people don't do that. | ||
They're more interested in accumulating experiences than they are stuff. | ||
So I think that there's a cultural shift towards a sympathy towards not having such a big impact on the environment, reducing your footprint. | ||
So if a car is constantly in use instead of sitting in my garage or a parking space all the time, we'll need far fewer of them. | ||
We'll be able to have bike lanes because we won't need to have all this parking space. | ||
We won't need to have closets or storage units where we have all this crap that we don't even need. | ||
Storage units are pretty amazing. | ||
You have all this stuff that you're not using. | ||
And you never go there. | ||
Well, but somebody else could be using it. | ||
The reason that they're not using it is that it's too difficult for you to find that other person. | ||
Software is gonna change our ability to find someone to share it with. | ||
Do you find a little bit that that can be at odds with individualism? | ||
You're not saying that you wouldn't have the right to own things, right? | ||
Of course. | ||
That's not the end conclusion. | ||
Most people, I think, want the use of something. | ||
And in our current system, owning it is the cheapest way to have something available to use. | ||
But it's fairly common for... I have a tuxedo, I don't wear it very often. | ||
Many women have gowns that they wear maybe once. | ||
Now the reason that they don't rent the gown is that it's too difficult to find it in exactly their size. | ||
But suppose you had an app that could take computer laser measurements and get exactly the right measurement and it's delivered to you two days from now. | ||
And instead of an $800 gown that you wear once, it's a $100 rental. | ||
And it's a designer gown! | ||
That would be great! | ||
Yeah. | ||
So everything's changing, I think, is the theme of this hour. | ||
There's a lot changing politically, there's a lot changing economically, and we just got to be smart enough to hopefully not, you know, go totally off the ditch as we're navigating it. | ||
I'm mostly optimistic because I think our institutions are pretty strong and people recognize that there's a problem. | ||
Social media, the internet, access to software, all create disruptions. | ||
But when you look at human history, a lot of the best things have happened after a period of disruption. | ||
But the period of disruption can be pretty bad. | ||
The 1840s and 50s in Europe, cities were on fire because of the Industrial Revolution. | ||
The result was mostly good. | ||
So it's not clear to me what's going to happen, which again is one of the reasons I'm for universal basic income. | ||
Let's make sure that those who are least well off, and who are through no fault of their own, find themselves not able to work in the traditional manufacturing jobs that they expected to be there. | ||
Let's make sure that there's some minimum on how bad off they are. | ||
Yeah, I love the framing of that, because it really is an argument that transcends the left-right thing, because you're hitting them both at their soft spots. | ||
So it's got a nice ability to get some people to come together. | ||
Well, we'll see. | ||
That's how you end the show. | ||
For more on Dr. Munger, follow him on Twitter. | ||
Maybe he'll respond, right? | ||
Oh, you do respond sometimes. | ||
I do respond. | ||
And you wrote a nice piece on Learn Liberty about how when every now and again you have an experience that actually changes. | ||
Again, I'm positive. | ||
There you go. |