May 31, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Governors have mandated, generally, not all of them, but most of them have said there will be no elective surgeries because we need to clear the hospitals so that we can have beds and equipment for people with respiratory failure because of COVID. | ||
| Well, the unintended consequence of that is that cancer patients are forgoing treatment and a lot of hospitals are on the verge of bankruptcy because elective surgery was a key part of their economic model. So they've made | ||
| things worse by trying to make things better. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin and according to the paperwork, this is still the Rubin Report. | ||
| Friendly reminder, everybody, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that pesky notification bell. | ||
| Joining me today is an author, a speaker, and the host of Kibbe on Liberty on the Blaze, Matt Kibbe. | ||
| Finally, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Finally. | ||
| Hey, Dave, how's it going? | ||
| It's going all right. | ||
| I have been on your show several times, and we were overdue to do it this way, flip the interviewer-interviewee situation. | ||
| Every time I go on your show, we spend about 80% of it talking about Star Wars and liberty. | ||
| So I feel like that's sort of where we have to start here. | ||
| I'll just tell my audience right up front, you're a big liberty guy. | ||
| For those that don't know you, you're a libertarian. | ||
| You've worked for Rand Paul. | ||
| You run a non-profit, Free the People, that spreads the ideas of liberty and freedom. | ||
| We're gonna get far more into all of that, obviously, related to coronavirus and everything else, but I feel that I have to at least allow you to pontificate on Star Wars and explain a little bit of how Star Wars, at least the prequels and the originals, do have a liberty flair that a lot of people don't know about. | ||
| You know, per your recommendation, I actually went back After the last show we did and I rewatched the prequels and I'll probably get slaughtered for this, but I think you're right. | ||
| I think the prequels may in fact be the most relevant and they may stand up to the test of time. | ||
| I can count at least 25, 30 governors that want to be Palpatine right now. | ||
| So we should probably all go back and watch this and see exactly how freedom dies to thunderous applause because Because I think we're living this in real time, and all of these things that governors are doing seem like fundamentally anti-democratic, and it was all predicted in the prequels. | ||
| It was all, and Jar Jar Binks, who does that make Jar Jar Binks in a modern sense? | ||
| I don't know, I even dislike him less, dislike him, dislike him less than I did before, which is shocking to me because I just, I couldn't, Early on, but I'm even pro-Jar Jar at this point. | ||
| Yeah, and probably dislike him less than the way you dislike some of the current governors also, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, but that's a low bar, so I'm giving Jar Jar more than that. | ||
| Okay, so putting aside Star Wars, although maybe we can sort of weave it back into this whole thing, for those that don't know you, give me a little bit of Matt Kibbe 101 background. | ||
| What got you into the Liberty scene in the first place? | ||
| So my gateway drug to liberty was actually an album by a band called Rush. | ||
| It's called 2112. | ||
| And you'll talk to a number of libertarians, particularly libertarians my age, who will tell you this story. | ||
| It was dedicated to the genius of Ayn Rand. | ||
| I was 13 years old. | ||
| I had no idea who that dude Ayn Rand was, but she had such an interesting name. | ||
| I went out and stumbled across an old copy of her novella Anthem. | ||
| And I devoured it, and I followed the breadcrumbs, and eventually Ayn Rand, if you read her non-fiction stuff, she says to read The Austrian Economists, and specifically Ludwig von Mises. | ||
| So I started reading all that stuff when I was a kid, and if nothing else, it was the perfect way to never get a date, because I couldn't get girls that wanted to talk about Austrian economics. | ||
| It's kind of strange. | ||
| That's very bizarre. | ||
| Maybe you were doing it wrong somehow? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| But I ended up coming to the Death Star, the belly of the beast, Washington, D.C. | ||
| to go to graduate school at George Mason University to study economics. | ||
| And eventually, as it always does, politics sort of sucks you in. | ||
| And I have all sorts of horrible things in my past. | ||
| I was the chief economist for Lee Atwater at the Republican National Committee. | ||
| I was budget director at the U.S. | ||
| Chamber of Commerce. | ||
| And eventually, I went on to found a tea party organization called FreedomWorks, and that was ancient history now, but I went from economist to political hack to grassroots organizer, and now hopefully communicator. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What actually interests you more? | ||
| I guess economics fundamentally interests you more than politics per se, because now we're very much in the same space where we're sharing the ideas of liberty, obviously, but you have more of sort of a A schooling background in economics. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the thing that I wanted to do when I was a kid was write. | ||
| And I spent a lot of time writing. | ||
| I was one of those awkward libertarian kids, so you can imagine that anything that doesn't involve social interaction was pretty attractive to me. | ||
| And I wanted to be a writer, and I started off writing very academic stuff. | ||
| You know, if you were lucky, you could get 10 people to read your peer-reviewed article with all the footnotes and all the fancy words that we academics like to use to pretend that we know more than we do. | ||
| But I wrote my first Wall Street Journal piece, and I just did the math, and I realized, you know what, if I could learn how to communicate in plain English, I could probably reach a much broader audience. | ||
| And that's definitely what we tried to do today. | ||
| We don't do a lot of writing at Free the People, We use video storytelling to try to sort of bridge the language divide between people that would identify with different political tribes. | ||
| Because I do believe that liberty is a human value. | ||
| It's built into our systems. | ||
| And if we could figure out a way to listen to people that are sort of liberty curious and try to connect with them, I think that would grow our community in a way that just speaking economics will never do. | ||
| Yeah, I should mention, by the way, we've already been talking for a few minutes and I did not point out that for a libertarian, you're dressed fairly well. | ||
| You go to a libertarian conference, you got naked people, you got people with crazy shirts. | ||
| Look at you, I mean, you have a tie on, your jacket and shirt seem to fit appropriately. | ||
| Are you sure you're hanging with the right crew? | ||
| What's going on over there? | ||
| This is kind of a forced quarantine counter-revolution because I've worn all of my concert t-shirts, And I haven't showered for days, but I decided that if I'm going to start breaking quarantine, which is where I'm at now, I need to look good. | ||
| The problem is I still don't have pants on, so somehow it's probably going to be awkward if I go outside. | ||
| You and me both, brother. | ||
| You and me both. | ||
| This is a family show, so we'll leave it at that. | ||
| I think having you on now was sort of the perfect time, because if liberty ever needed a jolt, or if it ever was about to have a resurgence, I think both of those things are sort of possible right now. | ||
| That we need it more than ever, at least in modern times right now, and that it could be on the cusp of really gaining momentum right now. | ||
| So give me your basic breakdown of sort of where we're at with corona, sort of what you thought we should have done. | ||
| What was the appropriate liberty-minded response, say, two months ago when this first thing was rolling out to kind of where we are right now? | ||
| So my initial reaction, and I went back and checked the first piece I wrote, about the pandemic was I think March 16th. | ||
| So pretty early on, I actually wrote it on a beach in Joost van Dijk. | ||
| I was on vacation and we had to cancel it to get back to the United States before I was afraid they were going to close the airports. | ||
| And me being a geek, I wrote this piece. | ||
| But I was worried that centralized, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions to very complex problems was inevitably going to create A lot of unintended and destructive consequences. | ||
| And I was thinking about one of my economist heroes, Frederick Bastiat, and he talks about the seen and the unseen and the inability of people to conceive of the incredibly complex division of labor that brings food to your table every day. | ||
| You don't know how it happened. | ||
| And you can see that playing out now. | ||
| People just assumed that food would show up. | ||
| And so when grocery store shelves are empty, They start panicking and frankly they start blaming markets when in fact it was meddling into the market process that created that. | ||
| And so by not even conceiving that we would do these massive never-ending lockdowns the way that the governors did, I was worried that the government was going to do all sorts of things that would make it more difficult to deal with not just the disease and the virus, but all the other things we need to do to keep our families safe. | ||
| And one of those things is earn an income. | ||
| Another is put food on the table. | ||
| A third is actually being able to take care of yourself and go outside, maybe get cancer treatments and all these things that are now proving impossible to do. | ||
| So knowing that government fails, I was afraid that they were going to fail colossally bad. | ||
| And that's kind of where we're at. | ||
| Okay, so I think most of my audience will be with you on the, okay, we don't like the top-down version of this. | ||
| We want to figure out sort of local level individual stuff first. | ||
| What I see a lot of people on the Twitter saying is, oh, this shows the flaw of libertarianism. | ||
| This shows the flaw of small government, because in a time like this, a pandemic knows no borders. | ||
| We need strong national decisions that are across the board and the rest of it. | ||
| How do you combat that concept? | ||
| Well, I think the entire purpose of the market process, and I call it a mutual support system, the entire purpose of people getting together and cooperating and trading and engaging in ideas is because we live in a radically uncertain world. | ||
| What happened yesterday in no way tells us what's going to happen tomorrow. | ||
| And the whole point for that process is for people to figure out really complex things that are going to happen to us. | ||
| And it feels like this exogenous shock, this natural disaster of a global pandemic is exactly what you want a decentralized system to solve. | ||
| And add top on that, how much government officials don't know. | ||
| We always talk about market failure, but we never talk about government failure. | ||
| And you could check some of these boxes, some of the horrific things that federal and state governments have done since the beginning of this pandemic to screw up the food supply. | ||
| You remember this supposed cache of N95 masks? | ||
| Oh yeah, oh yeah. | ||
| That the Obama administration is gonna have? | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| Government fails, it always fails because politics is a horrible way to solve complex problems. | ||
| So when you combine those two things, if you're gonna shut up The ingenuity of free people to solve problems and replace it with a central plan that is by definition going to be dysfunctional and wrong. | ||
| That's where you get really, really bad things in our society. | ||
| Do you sense that a lot of the divide on the people that view the world top-down versus the people that view the world bottom-up, that it's just a fundamental psychological conditioning that they have? | ||
| That it's not just, oh, we have different economic policies, let's say, but that their fear centers are different? | ||
| I find when I hear all the big government people, they seem to have this trust in a thing, Just because the thing exists, so it sort of inherently must be good because it existed, or maybe 50 years ago it was better, or something like that, versus, I think, people more in line with our thinking, where it's like, well, just because it exists doesn't mean it's inherently good, so I want to just scale the power back. | ||
| Do you think that how much a certain amount of this is just your psychological makeup? | ||
| You know, it may be that, and not to Not to sort of castigate my progressive friends, but I think people don't appreciate just how much we don't know as individuals and how much our leaders don't know, even though they went to all the right colleges and have all of these credentials. | ||
| And so maybe there's a line in the sand about humility and being willing to say in public, what is this new pandemic and how does it compare to past pandemics and what don't we know. | ||
| If some of these modelers would have said, you know what, there's no way that I could model this in an honest way. | ||
| So let me tell you the things that we do know. | ||
| But let me also tell you that if I project numbers, there's no way it's going to be right. | ||
| It's always going to be wrong. | ||
| And that sort of goes back to the old dream of progressivism, that you could take science and science was settled and really smart people that went to the right colleges could take that science and impose it on the rest of us, and we would have this sort of rationally planned top-down society. | ||
| But that lacks humility. | ||
| It lacks any sense that you couldn't possibly know enough to plan a complex economy. | ||
| And this was Frederick Hayek's entire critique of socialist planning. | ||
| And I think it applies to any would-be planner, even some of the governors and how they're They're telling us all in a very microcosmic way, like, you should do this and you shouldn't do that. | ||
| Yeah, we talked about this a little bit when I was on your show a couple weeks ago, but do you think some of this sort of also is just the end of secularism in a weird way? | ||
| It's the end of just, oh, people just creating systems in the moment that aren't necessarily experts, and that the experts get everything wrong, and that we just keep sort of outsourcing all of our decision-making, and every day we wake up, and as you're saying, yesterday doesn't, Doesn't really form what tomorrow will be. | ||
| And that we've just sort of hit the end of what we can build in a weird way. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah, like there's definitely been this democratization and decentralization, disintermediation. | ||
| My wife hates it when I use that word because it doesn't mean anything to anybody. | ||
| But technology has democratized knowledge and information. | ||
| And I happened to be one of those guys who was super romantic about the potential to decentralize everything based on that. | ||
| But it seems like there's a backlash now, and you have clickbait, and you have censorship, and you have all these things where sort of the empire is breaking back to get back to that phase. | ||
| I knew you'd get there, I knew you'd get there. | ||
| The experts do not like the fact that we probably don't need to go to school to figure out uh, electrical engineering, we probably don't need to defer to epidemiologists because we could actually do some of that research for ourselves and discover that there is patterns and there is history and, and all that stuff is available to us. | ||
| So I think in a lot of ways, the backlash, uh, by the planners is because we were, we were actually needing them less and they see an opportunity right now to reconsolidate power and, uh, take it back. | ||
| So I'm very much along that. | ||
| That's what this feels to me, that they had almost completely been decimated. | ||
| We've all sort of woken up to the idea that a four-year college that you're gonna spend 120 grand on isn't necessary, and that all of these giant institutions are failing, and we'll talk a little bit more about journalism. | ||
| So you really think, do you think though that this is some sort of coordinated move then by that establishment or those institutions to do this? | ||
| I mean, this is where we get into like some strange conspiracy stuff, but these days anyone who's not a conspiracy theorist isn't really thinking, you know, when you're trapped in your house all day. | ||
| I don't believe in grand conspiracies because of the natural failures of governments and everything else. | ||
| But you know, you go back to Adam Smith and he I won't quote the quote because I'll butcher it, but the natural tendency of business people and others to conspire to hold up prices, this is part of human nature. | ||
| And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that the incentives align with all of the people that are using this crisis to radically expand the power of the state. | ||
| You know, the collusion, and we've talked about this before, the collusion between Government experts and social media czars who are now deciding which scientists we get to hear from, which economists, which opinions. | ||
| And it's gotten really absurd. | ||
| I don't think that's a grand conspiracy. | ||
| I just think their incentives align and they want control. | ||
| And they want control of the narrative. | ||
| They want control of the market. | ||
| They want control of government power. | ||
| Whatever it is they're trying to control. | ||
| This works perfectly because people are nervous. | ||
| People are anxious. | ||
| Radical uncertainty right now and people are exploiting it. | ||
| Okay, so let's back up a little bit. | ||
| So with all this in mind, let's pretend Kibbe's president. | ||
| It's 2020. | ||
| America has some sort of, you know, libertarian. | ||
| I don't like to say libertarian utopia because I don't think libertarians really believe in utopia in the way that progressives tend to believe in it. | ||
| But we have, you know, some sort of more liberty-minded state, maybe, that the founders had planned, and you're president, and you start getting all these communiques and messages about coronavirus, is the first thing that you do as a president to tell all of the governors, you guys just handle this, and when you need help, you call us, but I'm not going to do anything? | ||
| Would that be the sort of liberty take on what the president should be doing right now? | ||
| It would definitely be federalism, but to take it even a step further, localism and even individualism. | ||
| Ayn Rand famously said that the most discriminated minority is the individual. | ||
| And I think that even at the local level, there can be tyranny if governments get too full of themselves. | ||
| And the key to really complex problems, things you don't know anything about, is tapping into local knowledge And problem solving. | ||
| And this is what governors are getting wrong. | ||
| So I don't think federalism is going to solve our problem. | ||
| You know that the libertarian joke is that we're conspiring to take over the government so that we'll leave you alone. | ||
| And I guess that would be my mandate if I was president, God help me. | ||
| But it gets back to the humility thing. | ||
| And you see this playing out in very practical ways. | ||
| have mandated generally, not all of them, but most of them has said there will be no elective surgeries because we need to clear the hospitals so that we can have beds and equipment for people with respiratory failure because of COVID. | ||
| Well, the unintended consequence of that is that cancer patients are foregoing treatment and a lot of hospitals are on the verge of bankruptcy because elective surgery was a key part of their economic model. | ||
| So they've made things worse By trying to make things better, the only people that would know for sure what the right policy would be to make sure that a hospital was safe and well run and had capacity would be to let doctors and patients and hospital administrators in that community figure that stuff out for themselves. | ||
| That's gotta be the way that we get out of this mess now that we've created it, but that would be my take. | ||
| But is the inherent problem with that, that the blue state governors and the lefties more generally, they don't view paying for these things or hospitals having to pay people or any of these things as necessary. | ||
| It's sort of, oh, well, do whatever you're supposed to do as they define it, and then we'll pay for it, meaning we'll just magically make up numbers. | ||
| So logic is just sort of coming against like a black hole in a certain regard. | ||
| There's, you know, that I think a lot of governors are suddenly discovering that if they close down all the businesses, there won't be any revenue to pay for all of them. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| And now they're, of course, going to the federal government begging for a bill out there. | ||
| And I hope I hope we don't give it to them because that'll just reward really bad behavior. | ||
| But there is like a shocking naivete about and I said this earlier, how does food get on the table? | ||
| But but where does where does all that revenue come from? | ||
| that funds all of these programs. | ||
| How do hospitals stay in business? | ||
| It's very much a market that allows for that, where you have customers and you have people selling services. | ||
| And, you know, for some reason, we don't think that that's appropriate in healthcare, but it's essential if you actually want access to a doctor when you're diagnosed with cancer. | ||
| And no amount of empty government promises are a substitute for that. | ||
| And we're going to learn this right now. | ||
| Generous unemployment benefits, all of the people that are on Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| These programs are going to get squeezed like never before because there's just going to be a total collapse in government revenue. | ||
| And they're hoping that the feds bail them out, but the feds don't have any money either. | ||
| So we're going to we're going to print it. | ||
| And there's all sorts of like this would be a different program about what's going to happen when all that stuff happens. | ||
| Everyone thinks that resources are just like this exogenous thing out there that magically is there and all we got to do is redivide it. | ||
| No, it's going to disappear. | ||
| And then we're going to discover what that sort of social justice model is going to lead to. | ||
| And it's going to make everybody less safe, everybody less healthy, everybody more hungry. | ||
| And I hope there's some ownership of that, but we'll see. | ||
| So going on the assumption there is an ownership of that, because that doesn't seem to be how inertia works. | ||
| Or there might at least be states that sort of own it themselves. | ||
| So, you know, Florida and Texas, for example, with zero state income tax are doing nice jobs balancing their budgets. | ||
| And I do sense there's sort of a idea floating around the internet right now that in effect what New York and California particularly are doing is they're trying to absolutely tank their own economies Because they're so screwed, and I say this as someone that grew up in New York and now lives in California, that they have so screwed themselves, despite the 13% income tax that I pay here in California on top of LA, you know, city tax, that they have no way of getting out. | ||
| So it's like, destroy it, let's blow up the whole thing, knowing the feds will have to come in and clean up the mess. | ||
| I know you're not for that, Do you think that that's actually possible? | ||
| That that's really what they're, like Newsom's really sitting around going, we're looking at the numbers. | ||
| There's no way out of this. | ||
| And let's just blow up the whole damn thing and force, we'll stick it to Trump. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think it's clearly part of their strategy. | ||
| They don't have any, they don't seem to have any concern about actually cleaning up their own house. | ||
| So they're gonna look for that bailout. | ||
| But let me, we talked about conspiracy theories. | ||
| Let me take it a step further. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| James Clyburn, who is Nancy Pelosi's number three in the House, in early March when they were debating that first trillion dollar bill, which turned into a 2.2 trillion dollar bill, he said to his colleagues, this is an opportunity to remake America the way that we want to see it happen. | ||
| And I think there's a method to this madness. | ||
| When you give people such extravagant Stravagan unemployment benefits that employers can't hire them back because they're making a ton more money being unemployed. | ||
| That sounds like something that AOC would love to see because she told us all not to go back to our jobs. | ||
| Yeah, she doesn't find that there's no value in work, basically. | ||
| Yeah, and we all know that that's economically ignorant, but what if this is a process to radically expand the welfare state If you're putting a third of Americans out of work, and you're giving them these generous benefits, at what point is any Republican or Democrat going to roll that back? | ||
| They never get rolled back. | ||
| Temporary programs become permanent. | ||
| But the other piece of this, which I think is even more ominous, is this tracking system that they're developing, where if you do decide to go to a restaurant, There's gonna be some government bureaucrat there wanting your information so that they can get in contact with you later. | ||
| That sounds like something the communist Chinese would do. | ||
| Well, I was about to say, if we want to do the conspiracy thing, then it's like, wow, maybe China unleashed this knowing all these stupid things that we would then do to ourselves. | ||
| Well, it is sort of, I don't know if they did it on purpose, but if we do adopt the Chinese model, Based on, by the way, huge government failures that originated in China. | ||
| One government failure after another, and all of a sudden we're like, let's be like China? | ||
| Then America's done. | ||
| We're just done if we're not going to push back. | ||
| But to your point, the only way that the governor of California and the governor of New York are held accountable is if the people do it. | ||
| And it's got to be bottom up. | ||
| The same logic that applies to markets applies to Political pressure. | ||
| And I'm not talking about voting. | ||
| I'm talking about the people that drive public opinion that actually shape what politicians will do tomorrow. | ||
| That's where this revolution has to start. | ||
| It's got to be peaceful. | ||
| It's got to be civilly disobedient. | ||
| And you're seeing it in the streets and on the beaches today. | ||
| People are like, we're done. | ||
| You guys lied to us. | ||
| You told us that we were flattening the curve and now you won't let us out of our houses. | ||
| We're just done. | ||
| All right, Kibbe, so then I want some advice as a guy that lives in California. | ||
| I mean, I've been tweeting about this and Fox News ran a chyron. | ||
| I didn't realize they were going to when I was on Dana Perino that said Dave Rubin is considering leaving California because of a tweet. | ||
| But I do sense that the rubber is meeting the road with my ideas. | ||
| I believe in federalism. | ||
| I believe in all the things you're talking about and states' rights and the foot vote and all of those things. | ||
| Do you think it's worth it in a place like California for liberty-minded people, and let's say right-leaning people, whatever that is, to stay and fight, or is this thing too far gone? | ||
| What do you actually think? | ||
| I think there's a very strong argument for fleeing these states that are so authoritarian. | ||
| And by the way, I should own up the fact I live in the District of Columbia, and my mayor is every bit as authoritarian as your governor. | ||
| We're locked down until June as well, Here and she's not releasing the data, the modeling. | ||
| No data. | ||
| She says she has it, but she won't tell us what it is. | ||
| So I'm in the same boat as you. | ||
| I'm living literally in the belly of the beast. | ||
| I'm two blocks from the Capitol right now, and I've been trying to convince my wife to let me flee to a red state. | ||
| I actually think there's going to be a political realignment that's not so much red versus blue. | ||
| It's going to be governors that had the humility to let Free people, rebuild the mess that our governments have made, and people are going to vote with their feet. | ||
| This is why we like federalism, because there is competition between states. | ||
| I think Texans are a little worried that too many of you Californians are going to move there and break everything that they've done. | ||
| Well, that's where everybody, you know, people in Colorado are worried about that. | ||
| People in Arizona are worried about that. | ||
| That seems to happen. | ||
| Californians raise taxes on themselves, the state crumbles, and then they export these idiotic ideas. | ||
| I'm almost, I'd almost be for Texas having some sort of test. | ||
| I know they can't really do that, but some sort of like, you can't come here to suddenly institute a state income tax or something like that. | ||
| But all right, so with that in mind though, for people that believe in federalism, that believe that the way we set this thing up was right, if what you're saying is right, and I've been thinking about this a lot, it's almost like, not to say we're gonna end up in a civil war, but we are gonna then have to actually watch states fail. | ||
| That's an almost unimaginable, Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's going to be very difficult. | ||
| I could count on one and maybe two hands the number of Republicans that I think have sort of the testicular fortitude to say no to bailing out California. | ||
| And you know who those guys are. | ||
| And there aren't very many others that are willing to do that. | ||
| And so much about politics is driven by their fear. | ||
| of not getting reelected. | ||
| Their fear that someone's going to call them a bad person because they didn't do that. | ||
| But if you actually want federalism to work, you can't bail out states that have behaved so badly. | ||
| You know, California was broke long before this pandemic, and everything they've done since then has only exacerbated their ability to grow their way out of it once we get past the pandemic. | ||
| It's got to be held accountable. | ||
| And this gets back to this political realignment That I'm thinking about. | ||
| You know this. | ||
| I was a Tea Party organizer in 2008 when Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner walked down the aisle of the House floor and said, we must bail out Wall Street together. | ||
| And the American people rose up because they had access to information online. | ||
| That, to me, was the day that I think the Tea Party was born in opposition to the Wall Street bailouts. | ||
| And by the way, in the beginning, it wasn't a partisan thing at all. | ||
| Occupy Wall Street had some of the same predilections and some of the revolts against the injustices of that. | ||
| I think the lockdowns are that same seismic shock on our political alignment and we'll see where the chips fall, but I think there's an opportunity out of this disaster to get people to pay a little more attention to what the government's doing to them. | ||
| It's interesting because as you're saying that you'd love to convince your wife to get moving and we're having those same discussions here, I'm kind of with you on what you just said there, which is maybe this is the shock. | ||
| Maybe the average Californian is going to go, whoa, this just does not make sense. | ||
| What have we done? | ||
| Now, that's putting maybe a little too much faith in people waking up, but that's the part of me that wants to stay and fight because I do love it here. | ||
| That's the part that's like, all right, dig in for, you know, we try it for like two, three more years. | ||
| to see if, in the aftermath, this thing can rebuild properly. | ||
| I don't know that it's possible. | ||
| Maybe that's a little too rose-colored glasses or something. | ||
| Well, I'm a libertarian that has spent most of my career in Washington, D.C., so I'm perfectly willing to chase impossible rainbows. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If the states actually do go these separate ways. | ||
| Do you think we have enough of a national ethos anymore to keep us together as a nation? | ||
| Because that seems like the next step down the road with this, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's become increasingly worrisome that the way that this tribal divide, and how everything is political now, and it's always red versus blue, even for most of us who don't even identify with either one of those tribes and the authoritarian left has so pushed a libertarian like me away from it. | ||
| We're all looking for a home and I still think that classical liberalism or libertarianism or humility, just call it the kind of humility that your mom tried to teach you, that to me is the only thing that holds us together. | ||
| Because if we're going to use the reins of power at the state level, at the federal level, to force everybody to live just the way that we believe they should live, I don't see how that doesn't get violent at some point. | ||
| Because the alternative has to be peaceful cooperation, tolerance, you live your life exactly how you want as long as you don't hurt me or take my stuff. | ||
| There is a solution here. | ||
| And that solution, by the way, was very much built into the American blueprint with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. | ||
| So, we're going to have to revisit that. | ||
| And yeah, getting back to this counter-revolution that we hope will happen. | ||
| It's got to start there because that is the only solution that keeps us together. | ||
| Yeah, because I could also see a situation where the red state people, so now you're in Texas, you have your no state income tax, you still have federal income tax, but you're going, wait a minute, why am I paying all this money to the Fed to bail out the guys who screwed up the whole thing? | ||
| So I could see an average Texan who's living their life, doing everything properly, following the law. | ||
| voting in the right type of people, becoming seriously resentful of people in another state, and that's deeply dangerous. | ||
| You mentioned classical liberalism, of course, so I have to ask you the question that every single interviewer, I think, asks me on my book tour, which is, do you see any meaningful distinction between classical liberalism and libertarianism? | ||
| Does it even matter, or is this just for the wonky guys to sit around after libertarian conferences, have a drink, and whittle it away? | ||
| Well, of course, there's only one perfect libertarian and that's me and everybody else. | ||
| That's a libertarian joke, but because we spend so much time arguing about the minutia. | ||
| So I actually don't think there's a difference. | ||
| And I could, depending on who I'm trying to speak to, and I don't think there's any contradiction in this, I either use the word libertarian, which Hayek says is a made up word. | ||
| He likes the word liberal. | ||
| But now we have to qualify it by saying classical liberal so that people appreciate that it's different than how it might be used today. | ||
| But I think constitutional conservative is kind of the same thing because we all may have personal preferences and lifestyle choices that we make that are different, but in terms of governance and how we cooperate with each other, it's the same philosophy. | ||
| It's all about that localism, that bottom up. | ||
| There's a couple rules. | ||
| Don't hurt people. | ||
| Don't take their stuff. | ||
| Other than that, we all get along and if you want to go to church, go to church. | ||
| If you don't want to go to church, don't go to church. | ||
| I don't really care because I'm minding enough of my own business the way my mom taught me to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| No, I'm with you on that. | ||
| So let me ask you one or two sort of the core libertarian things. | ||
| Where are you at with open borders? | ||
| This is one of the ones where when I talk to the more libertarian minded people, like I am completely not an open borders guy. | ||
| I get some of the arguments. | ||
| I'd be happy for you to lay out some of the arguments if you are. | ||
| But this is one of the ones where I think, especially now, I think the more nationalist And I don't mean nationalist in a scary word, nationalist. | ||
| I believe we're nations and we can set our own borders and things like that. | ||
| I think Trump has some wins on that coming in the election because of coronavirus, our ability to control our own borders. | ||
| But I know a lot of libertarians don't like that. | ||
| They want free trade, free, complete ability to bounce across everywhere all the time. | ||
| Where are you at on that? | ||
| So I used to be for open borders, but now I've sort of changed my position because I do think we need to build a wall Between California and America. | ||
| Because it's very dangerous. | ||
| Can I just get a date on that? | ||
| Because I've got to get my stuff. | ||
| But you know, I have a more libertarian view on you than this. | ||
| And I used to give speeches to Tea Party audiences. | ||
| I talked to progressive audiences and my view is the same. | ||
| If you want to come to this country and work and follow the rules, we want you. | ||
| And I don't think You need to build a wall to enforce a rule like that. | ||
| What you need to do is get politics out of the process of getting the people here that want to work and want to follow the rules. | ||
| Because right now the system is gamed. | ||
| There are some Republicans that don't want any immigration. | ||
| There are some Democrats that don't want any immigration because it undermines union power. | ||
| There are other Democrats that once people get here illegally, they want to sort of own and control them. | ||
| So the whole thing is super political. | ||
| And I think the answer has got to be a simplification of the process so that if guest workers want to come and they want to follow the rules and they want to, or if they want to become a citizen and be an American, I think those processes should be predictable and unpolitical. | ||
| And I think if you did those things, you could focus border security on violent gangs that are running drugs across the Mexican border. | ||
| You could repeal a drug war, which would also get rid of the gangs. | ||
| There's all sorts of free market things you could do that I think would solve some of the concerns that conservatives have about border security without building a wall. | ||
| So I am more libertarian on that, but I don't think it's unreasonable because so many of the things that do make America great come from immigrants that came to this country and added value and built this beautiful quilt that is America. | ||
| So I don't wanna shut that down. | ||
| Yeah, it actually doesn't sound like we're very far off on that. | ||
| I always say, I'm not sort of for a wall or against a wall. | ||
| If you told me there were certain parts of the border that we could prove a wall would be particularly effective, and there have been some places like that, then I'm okay with that. | ||
| But I don't like the idea of the 3,000 mile wall just so that we have this this idea of protection when in many ways we're not going to be doing that. | ||
| And then, you know, I'm sort of, well, where are you at on like pathway to citizenship for the 12 million or so people that are here? | ||
| What do you, do you put them back at the back of the line or how do we even get these guys to come out of the shadows and the rest of it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I, I think I would, I would be for a pathway of citizenship and it's easy to say that. | ||
| And I think politics would screw it up, but I think a better way to solve that problem is that a lot of people that came here illegally probably would prefer a reliable guest worker program so that they could go back home and be with their families. | ||
| I have lots of friends in the free market community in Latin America, in Honduras, for instance, and I hear the story again and again and again that the reason that people are illegal in the United States is that they don't have the confidence that they could come and go with the seasons, say they're picking crops or whatever they're doing, They can't do that. | ||
| So I feel like the path to citizenship thing is almost a changing of the conversation because we're primarily talking about people that just want to do work that's actually available to them. | ||
| And they're doing it because their economies are so screwed up in Honduras that the American drug war has given all the power to the drug gangs. | ||
| So families are making that march because they're desperate. | ||
| It's not a choice they would make. | ||
| So again, I think there's a, There's probably a freedom-based solution that doesn't reward illegal behavior, but would get people to voluntarily go back if there was a predictable process by which they could come back and forth based on employment opportunities. | ||
| So where are you generally at with Trump? | ||
| I think the name Trump was only mentioned once in this entire interview, just a moment ago. | ||
| I sense with most libertarians, they kind of like a lot of the stuff Trump has done. | ||
| Regulation, cut taxes, we don't seem to be going to extra wars. | ||
| If anything, we're trying to get out of Afghanistan now and we're not going to be nation building. | ||
| That's all very libertarian stuff. | ||
| I think a lot of libertarians, and one night we were at a, I think it was a Yale conference, and we had a table of libertarians, and it seemed very obvious to me that everyone sort of liked the things he was doing, but just had a personal, they just don't like him personally, like it was that idea. | ||
| And I sense that a lot of people have that thing. | ||
| Is that kind of where you are? | ||
| What do you make of this whole thing with Trump? | ||
| Trump and the liberty-minded people, because obviously he's not, his core is not a liberty-minded core. | ||
| He would love to take more power if he could, but yet it seems like he's doing a pretty decent job. | ||
| You know, he does have a sort of an authoritarian mindset, and I'm not even convinced he's ever read the Bill of Rights, so I guess that's an excuse. | ||
| Full disclosure, and you mentioned this, I did work for a Rand Paul super PAC when he was running for president. | ||
| And then I ran a Gary Johnson super PAC after that. | ||
| So as a candidate, I was a never Trumper because I had a candidate and his name wasn't Trump. | ||
| As president, it's a totally different thing. | ||
| And I'll go back to when Barack Obama was president. | ||
| I spent a lot of my time organizing the Tea Party and opposing The stimulus and the bailouts and Obamacare and all that stuff. | ||
| But when he wanted to do criminal justice reform, I went to the Justice Department and worked with Eric Holder in hopes to get something done. | ||
| My attitude with Trump is kind of the same way. | ||
| When he's good, I want to work with him. | ||
| I've done lots of shows supporting him on things like criminal justice reform, staying out of so many permanent wars and stuff like that that he's done. | ||
| Um, but on other things that, that libertarians care a bunch about, uh, you know, we just had a vote on, on surveillance power and whether or not the deep state would get more power. | ||
| Trump's been horrible on that. | ||
| And I don't know if it's bad advisors or what, if you care about debt and spending, um, Trump's been horrible on that. | ||
| So it's a mixed bag, but, but our job when we have a president is to make them better. | ||
| And so I don't spend all my time railing about Trump. | ||
| I'm hoping that he will do some of the things that would make more sense. | ||
| And I was hopeful, for instance, that he would be a strong voice on reopening the economy. | ||
| But he's been a little hard to understand on this. | ||
| He spent a lot of time picking on the governor of Georgia, Kemp, who was one of the first to unlock down their economy. | ||
| So even on that, it's a mixed bag with Trump. | ||
| You know, I'm a libertarian. | ||
| I don't really get on board with big government, whether it's Republican or Democrat. | ||
| You mean you don't think Trump can solve all of your personal problems? | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| I kind of want to live in a world where I don't have to worry who the president is. | ||
| That's how naive I am. | ||
| Like, if you had a president... I'm with you, man. | ||
| All right, so let's move off Trump. | ||
| You mentioned Rand Paul and since you did work with him for a little bit. | ||
| I had him on last week and one of the things that I said to him was sort of exactly what you just laid out there about Trump, which is that one of the reasons I'm more okay now with Trump is that Rand Paul has become one of his biggest allies. | ||
| And it's interesting 'cause Paul's explanation of why he's okay with Trump is sort of what you just said, | ||
| that yeah, there's good, there's bad, but I can try to push him the best I can | ||
| on the good stuff and the rest of it. | ||
| So in a weird way, it almost seems to me that that's the best libertarians can do. | ||
| We're not particularly good at getting candidates out there. | ||
| The party's just an absolute disaster. | ||
| Do you wanna explain a little bit about why the party seems to be such a disaster, even though so many of the ideas, if you could get people to listen to them, they are, right? | ||
| And again, maybe, sort of getting us back to the beginning, maybe they are about to have a real moment. | ||
| Yeah, so first of all, I just wanna add that both Rand Paul and Mike Lee are in a highly leveraged position in the Senate. | ||
| And they, on any given vote, they could be the difference between passing and not passing. | ||
| And I think they both done a very good job. | ||
| You know, neither one of them, obviously Rand Paul ran against Trump and Mike Lee supported Ted Cruz in the primaries. | ||
| But they've sort of stepped up and said, Mr. President, I'm going to work with you. | ||
| On the things that we share in common, and I'm going to try to convince you on some other things. | ||
| And I think that's a really smart thing to do. | ||
| And libertarians that criticize that, I don't really understand because the point is to get the right policy. | ||
| The point's not to sort of virtue signal that Trump's an awful guy. | ||
| But for the libertarian party and third parties generally, I think that there is inevitably a moment where the two-party duopoly does break up. | ||
| And the reason I think that the Libertarian Party has struggled so much is that it is the two parties that set the rules by which political parties operate. | ||
| And Gary Johnson was a great example of that. | ||
| They kept changing the rules of how you got onto the presidential stage. | ||
| By any historical measure, Gary Johnson would have been on that stage, but they keep changing the rules. | ||
| And that makes it very difficult for parties to compete, because if you're raising money for politics, The value pitch that you make to donors is, we can win this race. | ||
| For a third party, and not just Libertarians, but Greens, or Constitutionalists, or whatever, the two parties that control all the power make it virtually impossible for them to compete, and it's usually some accident, like, say, Abraham Lincoln, that creates a new third party. | ||
| It's going to happen, but it's kind of a chicken and egg thing. | ||
| The Libertarian Party would Would have ballot access in all 50 states, would have a better donor base, would attract more talent if they were allowed to compete. | ||
| And I don't know how that breaks through. | ||
| They gotta break through somehow. | ||
| Yeah, so you're saying it's not the naked guy running on stage that's gonna break through. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that what you're saying? | |
| So when I was raising money for Gary Johnson, I had brought on some Republican donors, major guys, That we're finally paying attention to the Libertarian Party, and they tuned into that convention on C-SPAN, and the first thing they saw was a fat, hairy, naked guy, and they're like, ah, okay, thanks. | ||
| There's other places to spend my money. | ||
| Yeah, of course, that was before imposed lockdowns, where none of us are really wearing pants anymore. | ||
| Exactly, there you go. | ||
| So all right, so to just sort of bring this full circle then, so with all of these ideas and with us still in these rolling lockouts, you in DC, me in California, we're watching Texas and Florida, are you worried that the biggest disaster looming, actually sort of directly coronavirus related, is that if there's suddenly a bump, let's say in two weeks, in Texas or Florida, which in a weird way it almost feels inevitably will have to happen because That's sort of the risk that they're playing with. | ||
| That the media will use that as such a freaking hammer to prove that they should have never opened up, that it basically puts D.C., New York, and California in perpetual lockdown, and then it actually scares, I'm doing the reverse of the silver lining thing now, it actually scares the people who have been fighting for their freedom enough to shut up, and then next thing you know, Texas and Florida are back in a lockdown. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a real risk. | ||
| You know, historically, and I'm not an epidemiologist, but I've read so much, we all have, just trying to figure out what the hell's going on. | ||
| And during the Hong Kong flu, there was very much a peak in the winter of 68 and a second peak in the winter of 69. | ||
| In the summer, things settled down a little bit. | ||
| In that particular one, the peak wasn't in the same places. | ||
| So San Francisco was a hotbed in the first peak of the Hong Kong flu. | ||
| So how this plays out, I don't know. | ||
| But I look at the same data that people on the other side are looking at. | ||
| I look at what's going on in Sweden. | ||
| I look at what's going on in New York and other places. | ||
| And the way that people manipulate data to tell their story is deeply frustrating to me. | ||
| So yes, we might have a beautiful revolution that discovers humility and localism and American freedom again. | ||
| Or this could be the cudgel that big government types use to permanently implement social tracing, to permanently implement a massive welfare state where most Americans don't work anymore, to permanently implement government-run health care. | ||
| All of these things that they've wanted to do They're trying to do it now, and if they're going to keep demonizing, they're going to keep demagoguing, and the media is going to keep helping them, so we're going to have to create that alternative narrative, pretty much no matter what happens with the virus. | ||
| All right, so we started at Star Wars, we're ending in dystopian futures, so let's add a little more dystopia to it then, and we'll see if maybe we can end this on a positive note. | ||
| Big Tech, just talk to me about your feelings. | ||
| We've talked about it a whole bunch. | ||
| I do not want Government regulating this. | ||
| I think if you have one huge problem and another huge problem, then you combine them into the Voltron of problems. | ||
| That is not good. | ||
| Do you think there is a way we can survive this technological adolescence where we've already all conceded all of our information? | ||
| We have no idea how we're being manipulated with algorithms and shadow banning and the rest of it. | ||
| Has the ship just totally sailed? | ||
| Do you think that competition can fix any of this? | ||
| Where are you at? | ||
| Well, we talked about this last time and the way that YouTube is essentially doing the bidding of international health organizations when they decide what is true and false is a new level of dystopian 1984 style creepy. | ||
| And I think they're going to pay a price for that. | ||
| The alternative is people seeing that happen and seeing videos that are banned For nothing that is even slightly controversial. | ||
| Just having a different opinion about something. | ||
| I think there's going to be a lot of other platforms. | ||
| And I'm seeing people are now posting those same videos on their websites. | ||
| I can tell you Free the People's website and all of our videos, it's gone up 82% in the last month or so. | ||
| And I think that's probably natural because people are getting off of those dictated, censored platforms and moving to other things. | ||
| And you're gonna have to do that too, because ultimately, they're gonna kick us all off, and we're just gonna have to prepare for that day. | ||
| That felt good, and then right at the end, then the prepare part got depressing again. | ||
| Give me some libertarian hope here, Kibbe, to take us out. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Markets work, and I'm old enough to remember, and we've had this argument over drinks, I'm old enough to remember when we were all scared to death Microsoft and Windows was going to be this forever dominant thing. | ||
| And it just wasn't true. | ||
| It's never true. | ||
| And I think even with the collusion between big corporations and big governments, there's always an innovation. | ||
| There's always a disruption. | ||
| I have a lot of faith in entrepreneurship. | ||
| And I think that despite what the government does, the human spirit always rises above that. | ||
| I think it's going to be beautiful. | ||
| I've always believed that the future is beautiful and I think that markets have always cleaned up the mess after governments have destroyed lives and disrupted businesses and broken people's wills. | ||
| Everything that we're seeing happening today, people have risen up to much bigger challenges than that. | ||
| I'm thinking about, you know, what Mao did to the Chinese people and what Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro did to the Venezuelan people. | ||
| Cannot be stopped. | ||
| Freedom cannot be stopped. | ||
| There's your optimism. | ||
| You did it, Kibbe. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, everyone can watch Kibbe on Liberty on Blaze TV. | ||
| And I look forward to seeing you in person probably around 2024 or so. | ||
| We'll get permission from somebody. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. |
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