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May 28, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:02:08
775 The Ron Paul Debate
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All right, move him to listening and move David to talking.
You made it! Hey, can you hear me?
I sure can. Okay, hallelujah.
This was driving me nuts.
I haven't used Skype in ages, so forgive my retardation here.
Now that's three debating points right there, and since it's only out of two, the debate's over.
No, go on. Well, I guess we're here to debate, you know, Ron Paul on the pros and cons of voting for him.
I don't tend to think of it, though. I tend to think of it more of, you know, is it right or wrong?
And as we're debating this on the board, methodology came up, and that to me seems like the most important point here, because that's where several of the disagreements stem from, both in terms of what Ron Paul does, well, actually mainly in terms of that, The other disagreements stem from, I suppose, reasoning starting from the non-aggression axiom and moving forward to what that means in terms of applications to the real world.
I don't know what we want to start with.
Well, I think if you want to start with defining methodology or whatever it is that your thoughts are, it's totally fine with me.
Okay. The methodological issue that stuck out to me was basically in the question you asked, which is, how has Ron Paul reduced spending in his own district?
That is, like, before and after Ron Paul, what's spending before, what's after?
And someone posted some kind of statistic with spending on an annual basis, and there were some issues with the data last year.
Once you corrected for that, there didn't seem to be much difference from the beginning to the end.
My concern here is that my background training is in the scientific method and that's perfectly fine.
You can do that in natural sciences where you can have experiments and control for variables, but in social sciences, particularly in economics, you can't control for variables because there's always something that is different and you can't do experiments on people.
I know the Nazis did, but we libertarians don't do that kind of thing.
The issue is, the way I think about it is you have to ask Ceteris Paribus, how would things be without Ron Paul?
And some people pointed out that he's one congressman representative out of over 400 or however many there are, and he's usually outvoted something, 300, 400 something to one or whatever it is.
So that's obviously an issue.
We've stopped a lot of statism in the Congress because he's outnumbered so greatly.
But what I would say is that you can at least say that things are slightly better off with him there than without him in his home district because, for example, he's not lobbying for pork or federal spending in his district, whereas someone else in his place most likely would be.
So that's where I would start coming at it from that issue.
That's the practical kind of thing.
It gets to the issue of methodology, which is basically I criticize the application of the scientific method to economics.
I think you need to use praxeology in the social sciences, particularly economics, but anything else dealing with human action in that kind of a context where you cannot control variables.
I don't think you can use a scientific method because that requires controlling variables.
Okay, so if I understand correctly, you're saying that Ron Paul's district, that the fact that you could say that his district is better off because he's not lobbying for pork, whereas other people would be.
Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, I guess I can't say absolutely that other people wouldn't be because it's conceivable that whoever else would be there also might not be.
It could be this district just happens to be a district where they like libertarian-leaning guys, and if it wasn't him, it would be someone else.
But I don't see anyone else in Congress who is as consistent as him on these kinds of issues.
Do you think that government spending as a whole has gone down because Ron Paul is not lobbying for pork?
I mean, I think that's arguable.
Well, actually, has it gone down as a whole?
No, because obviously it hasn't gone down since he's been I mean, as far as I understand it, and I'm no expert on how all of this, you know, I've watched a couple of West Wings and that's my indication on the political system in the U.S. But my understanding would be something like this, that it's a zero-sum game, So whatever Ron Paul doesn't get, so he doesn't get some $100 million pork for his district, it's probably closer to a million or 10 million or whatever, but that money doesn't then get not spent.
It just goes to somebody else.
Like if this guy is not lobbying for his district, then it simply goes to some other district.
That would be how it works, right?
I mean, I would probably agree with that in the short run because they have a certain amount of money that they've taken in through taxes and borrowing and inflation, and that's going to be divided up some way I guess even if someone doesn't spend it, it's going to just be put away for future spending or whatever.
But in terms of the effect on how much they're actually going to try to take in in terms of taxes, inflation, and debt, I do think in the future it has an impact on what they're going to be taking in and then splitting up again.
And also, the lobbyists not visiting him, I guess that kind of goes to that.
They're not lobbying for that spending of pork.
And that doesn't get reflected, therefore, back up to the federal level, where they then have justification for raising more taxes and whatnot.
So you think that the taxes that are raised are generated by the pork requirements, or is the money just printed and then handed out like candy?
I don't think that they're purely raised by the pork requirements.
I'm just saying that's one contributing factor, that the more different lobbying groups have their interests there, You know, the more incentive there is for the taxation and inflation, which is even worse to go up.
But certainly there's other causes for that.
I mean, actually, like a lot of the spending, I'd have to say probably most of the spending, at least from my rough imagination, has to be from the war or current U.S. war.
There's not really a lobbying group for war.
It's just kind of under the deal tables and whatnot.
No one gets together and says, yes, we're a pro-war group, but companies have kind of behind-the-scene deals going on there.
Well, I think Boeing and Lockheed and companies like that have pretty strong representation in the US. I don't want to nitpick at everything, I'm just genuinely trying to understand the thinking, because it would seem to me that Ron Paul's district is poorer than it would be.
Then it would be if he was getting money, because they're all paying money to the federal government, right?
So if he's not getting back as much in pork as they're paying to the federal government, then they're net poorer because of Ron Paul and some other guy is net richer, right?
So the fact that he's not lobbying for pork is simply increasing the amount of pork that can go to somebody else.
In the immediate run, yes, because he's not grabbing that part of the pie.
And, you know, it's going to someone else.
But in the long run, like I said, that does not reflect, you know, his not lobbying for pork doesn't mean that it's not going to be reflected back.
In terms of a requirement for more revenue generation on the part of the government.
That's assuming that the government is not going to just make money in order to give money.
I just wanted to understand that you said that his district is better off because he's not lobbying for pork.
I think from a purely economic standpoint, given that they have to pay the federal taxes but they're not getting the pork back, In other words, they're giving the money to the hitman, but they're not getting any goodies back.
I think that it's a net loss to his home district.
I mean, just economically, without the ethics, because the ethics are all horribly complicated, but just economically, his home district would be worse off if he doesn't lobby for pork, because they're paying the federal money without receiving the pork back.
Just economically, I mean, like on a cursory note, I have to agree with that.
They have to know this because this is his consistent policy and they've looked at him many times over again.
I don't know how many terms he's had.
I guess I would have to agree with that.
Without thinking about it any further, I'd have to think about it a little bit.
I tend to think that ethical actions always result, not always, but tend to result in a better outcome.
Although it's, you know, debatable, you know, is it ethical or not to try to get what was taken from you in one way back or whatnot.
So, I mean, yeah, I'd have to agree with that.
Okay, so, I'm sorry to have interrupted you there.
When I started off, and I'll, because I'm going to cut all of the earlier part of people trying to learn English on my dime, I'm going to cut that earlier stuff, so as far as I understand it, and I'll just very, very briefly go over what I consider the pro-Ron Paul positions, and then you can let me know if I'm totally off the mark, just so we understand it on the same page.
As far as I understand it, the pro-Ron Paul position is really centered around a couple of major issues.
It's getting the message out.
Somebody out there saying that the income tax should be abolished.
Somebody out there saying that the prescription drug program should be abolished.
Somebody who's talking about the constitutionality and returning government back to its constitutional roots.
It's generating a lot of debate and bringing ideas into the social sphere that would not otherwise be there.
And so to go and support this guy in whatever way that you can is really helping in getting the message out.
And of course, myself, Steph, I got a lot of my education on war from another presidential candidate, our good friend, the late Harry Brown.
So for me to say, well, it's bad to support a presidential candidate when I got a good deal of my political and particularly military education from Harry Brown would seem rather churlish.
And secondly, of course, I don't think that anyone goes to support Ron Paul.
May I interrupt you there for just a second?
I do agree with that.
Yeah, that is one of the issues.
But I would just note that I don't think it would be hypocritical of you to say we shouldn't support any kind of politician just because you happened to get your education on war from Harry Brown.
I realize that he's a great guy and certainly has a lot of respect.
I got my education from the government, at least until the end of high school, but I still say we should get rid of government school.
Right.
No, I use the word churlish, which just means not exactly hypocritical, but just kind of like not exactly grateful, I guess you could say.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
And another aspect as well, which is more around the particular voting for Ron Paul, is that nobody votes for Ron Paul really with the idea that he's going to achieve the nomination or that if he achieves the nomination, he's going to achieve the presidency, or if he achieves the presidency, that he's going to be able to return the government to its constitutional roots. that he's going to be able to return the government I mean, I don't think anybody who's not currently mowing down, you know, fistfuls of ecstasy is really thinking that that is going to be the sequence.
Like, I vote for this guy. He goes all the way.
He gets in. He uses his veto power.
There's no two-thirds override from Congress.
And he returns, you know, within my lifetime or within a term or two, the government back.
I don't think that's really people's thoughts.
But I think what they do say is that if I vote for this guy, then I'm sort of putting a stake in the ground and sending a message saying, look, I'm really interested in smaller government.
So if Ron Paul, say, gets...
20% of the nomination votes or, you know, if you became a presidential candidate, if you got 20 or 30 or 40% of the vote, then the other politicians being the, you know, the sheep in the sense that they are, would simply line up behind that and would start to figure out.
They'd all fall over themselves figuring out how to please the voters and make government smaller.
So it's really around trying to create momentum, wherein we can change the political discourse rather from how government should become bigger to how government should become smaller.
And that's like turning a supertanker almost by blowing on the bow, right?
I mean, it takes a long time.
But if you can send a message through popular votes, which is really the only referendum in the sense that you have in America...
If you can send a message by voting for somebody to make government smaller, then you are doing something pretty practical to begin to change the debate about what the politicians perceive the voters as wanting.
Because those politicians, all they see is, you know, they don't meet individual voters really, at least not in any substantive way.
All they see is people donating money to them in order to get favors, or lobbyists, or everybody who wants more, more, more.
But if a lot of people vote for a small government candidate, Then the politicians will hear a growing cacophony of less, less, less, which will change the debate to some degree within the country.
Yeah, I think that certainly it sounds very momentous challenge, but that's the hope, at least, to the extent at which that can be achieved is questionable.
Some libertarians, some anarcho-capitalist libertarians, I won't get into the definition of libertarian as anarcho-capitalist.
I think that the strict sense of libertarian is the same thing as anarcho-capitalist.
But in any event, some of them think that the only way you can ever achieve anarcho-capitalism is by basically some kind of collapse, a total collapse of government.
I believe that's on top of his position by and large.
Well, not entirely, because he does try to influence the Prince of Lichtenstein, but he tends to have that kind of a pessimistic outlook.
I hope, you know, you would hope that, you know, anarcho-capitalism doesn't have to arrive through the ashes of civilization being ruined.
But, you know, yes, certainly it's a difficult task to get those in the government to try to realize that, you know, certainly they're never going to be anarcho-capitalists Not in this environment.
Ron Paul is an even anarchic capitalist.
But just to get them to abandon interventionist ideas in general is a momentous challenge.
But let's just say that this whole idea that Ron Paul is going to turn things around and it's slowly going to kind of build out.
Let's just say that none of that happens.
And that all it is is just kind of like a blip on the radar of the increasing statism that might be happening over the next 200 years or whatever.
At the very least, getting out of Iraq would save thousands of lives.
And in my mind, that's a good thing.
And any other reduction in initiation of aggression Even if it doesn't result in the ultimate elimination of systematic initiation of aggression, it's a good thing.
Right, so then the idea is that if 10% of people vote for Ron Paul, but 100% of those 10% say it's entirely because we're in Iraq, then that's kind of like a little mini-referendum on Iraq which might propel people To get the troops out of Iraq,
which would save some lives. So there's kind of like a practical aspect of this, which is let's save lives now rather than waiting for a future that may or may not come where ideals can be enacted in a more consistent way.
Yeah, that's basically the idea.
From my point of view, that comes straight from the non-aggression axiom.
I said this on the board.
It wouldn't be okay to say if the only way we could get anarchic capitalism would be to beat up someone.
That would not be justified.
It doesn't follow obviously from that, but from my point of view, it seems that any initiation of aggression that can be stopped We ought to try to stop it.
Provided that we don't actually initiate aggression in doing such.
I would certainly never argue that the simple act of writing a ballot and stuffing it in a box is the initiation of aggression.
For sure, and I think you would agree with this though, of course you can tell me if you don't, for sure it is supporting the initiation of aggression.
Because the government, whether it's less, right?
Whether it's less, it's still supporting the initiation of aggression.
And I think that would be where the paths a little bit divide, if that makes sense.
You mean that the act of voting itself is supporting the initiation of aggression?
That's your argument?
Well, for sure. I mean, because you're saying to Ron Paul that you should use the guns.
You're saying to Ron Paul, you should have the right to initiate the use of force.
Or I'm giving my support in your right to initiate the use of force.
Because he can't interrogate you personally, right?
Like, he doesn't know that you're just voting for the lesser of two evils, right?
All he's going to know is that you support him having the right to initiate the use of force, which he himself desires, right?
I mean, he wants to be able to initiate the use of force, such as, you know, ejecting 10 to 14 million people from the states who have come across from Mexico.
He supported this border I mean, I'm not saying he's a bad guy or anything.
I'm just sort of looking at some of the policies.
But you're definitely saying, by putting the ballot in, that you support the initiation of the use of aggression.
You just support it less than some other guy who wants to do even more.
Or you support it more than some other guy who wants to do it more.
I mean, that's certainly one possible interpretation of it.
And I think many people who vote, you know, that's in their head that, you know, Yes, this is the guy that they want to be commanding the military and deciding who to invade.
But I would refer to, let me think, I believe it was Spooner, no treason, the constitution of no authority.
And he basically argued that voting is not either the initiation of aggression or supporting such, but it can be interpreted as an act of self-defense.
Obviously, you know, for some people it's more an act of offense.
I mean, that it's offensive.
People who, for example, are going to be running for McCain, and I think all of anyone, McCain, or actually I meant to say Giuliani, who is much worse than McCain, but the people who are running for these kinds of guys are obviously war hawks, and, you know, they want us to be over there in Iraq and, you know, Keeping those terrorists in line, so to speak, and bombing them into the ground and controlling that country.
So it's not always, you know, self-defense to vote, but it certainly can be seen as an act of self-defense.
In so far as you're going to contract with somebody who's a lesser thug in order to, and again, I'm not trying to characterize Ron Paul as a thug, I'm just working in the abstract here, and we'll keep it out of the immediate political realm if that's right with you.
But in the way that some big thug is coming down the street, so you give a thug some money to aggress and hope that, you know, give him a gun or something and say, you protect me against the bigger thug.
Is that sort of the metaphor?
I would say that that could be, yes.
That could be a map metaphor provided that the lesser effect was the only option you had and you didn't have the option to say run away or deal with it yourself or put up a fence or hire a defense agency to deal with you, I mean to deal with criminals on your behalf that is.
Right, right.
But of course when it comes to voting you do have an option, right?
I mean, you don't have to vote. You can do a lot of other things which are either pro-liberty or not or whatever, right?
But you don't have to vote, right?
The guy's not coming down your street to get you, right?
I mean, this is a political situation wherein your vote...
Oh, sure. Well, sure, yeah, you don't have to vote.
But whether you vote or not, I mean, it seems, at least to me, almost certain that some guy is going to be there as president.
And unfortunately, even though I have some hope for Ron Paul, it does seem like it's going to be of war hawkish type.
So I guess I shouldn't say it's your only option.
That's one option, and voting doesn't take a lot of time.
But it seems like an issue of strategy.
Do you think this is the best or is it a worthwhile way to try to defend yourself?
Maybe it's a long shot, but it doesn't cost that much to do, so do you do it or do you ignore this totally and focus purely on the intellectual landscape so to speak?
I actually misspoke earlier when I said that Rockwell supported voting because the person doesn't vote.
I read that on an interview, a great interview with Rockwell.
It's on ORC. It has to do with the war issue.
I can't remember exactly what it's called, But he said that he likes Ron Paul and would much prefer him to be the president, but that he personally does not vote.
In that article, it was quite striking.
I think specifically he mentioned that Ron Paul is not running for president.
He's running against the presidency as it now is understood.
Yeah, I guess that's an interesting way of putting it because the presidency as it is now understood is a very different thing than probably what, and again I would criticize Ron Paul on this for the idea that there should be a presidency, but it's very different from what the presidency used to be.
It's much, much more powerful because effectively the Congress He has given the presidency additional powers that it didn't have, I should say.
That's a history of precedence there.
I think part of it starts with Andrew Jackson when he smashed the central banks, but that set a precedent for a centralized power in the presidency.
He is, in a sense, running against the presidency as it is now understood.
At least by most politicians, by the president himself, and by most people.
Because it's almost assumed to be a dictatorial position.
Right, right. Now, I would say, though, that, I mean, again, I'm pretty down on the scientific method as well, and I really do try to work empirically so that you don't end up reinventing the wheel all the time.
And one of the issues that I have with this idea of voting, and, I mean, when there's a vote in Canada, I go and spoil my ballot.
I just write down that none of these people are I'm sorry, you go on what, your ballot?
I didn't understand that. So you cast it and you deface it or something like that?
Well, I just write that none of these people are morally entitled to represent me.
So, I mean, they just look at that and throw it out, right?
But, I mean, there's something that you can do to reject the political process as a whole that's not voting for somebody who wants to use less force in a different direction.
Because I think it's one of the arguments that I've tried to make is that If we look at, and I'm going to cast a net wider than you may, perhaps, and say that going back to the classical liberals of the 19th century, and if you want, going 221 years back to the founding of the republic, People have tried to restrain government through democracy, through voting, through political action and so on.
And empirically it's been a complete...
like you couldn't have a worse situation.
Like empirically you could not have a worse result from a group of people for five to seven generations who've been trying to restrain the growth of the government through political means.
That the result has been a government that is staggeringly larger because of the fertility of the economy has become staggeringly larger than any government in history and also because capitalism produces the technology to create weapons of mass destruction you have after five to seven generations of very very bright I mean people whose intellect like dwarfs the mind for sure you've had very very bright people working very very hard to try to restrain the growth of the state through participation in the political process and the end result of that has not been that The state has gotten smaller.
It's not been that the state has remained the same size.
It's not been that the state has only grown a little bit.
It's that what has been produced is the greatest and most terrifying and most gigantuan state in the history of the planet.
So that's where some of my skepticism arises, just looking at what has been.
I mean, I have a theory as to why that's the case, which we don't have to get into if you don't want to, because I'm certainly willing to hear arguments for a different interpretation of that.
But the political process has been tried by people interested in smaller government for centuries.
And we have the largest conceivable and most violent and destructive government in the history of the planet.
So, for me, the political process, the political approach has not produced the exact opposite, I think, of what was desired.
And I don't think there's too many of the classical liberals who, if they could see the state now, would disagree with that.
And so, when I look at participation in the political process and the long view of what it's actually produced, It seems to me that participation in the political process, which has been the default for libertarians, is It's just produced this complete, gargantuan, monster, violent, death-dealing state that can, you know, wipe out hundreds of thousands or millions of people at the push of a button.
And I think that's beyond the worst nightmares of the people who wanted to reduce the state through the political process.
And so that's my particular approach about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I'm sort of looking at the last 150 years and saying, well, gosh, even if we throw all of the principles out the window and just say cause and effect, The involvement of the political process has not achieved any of the goals.
In fact, it's achieved the exact opposite of the goals that the people intended.
Certainly that empirical fact exists, but that's something that's open to interpretation.
It's not per se evidence that it's useless to try to restrain the government.
That's where we get into the methodological difference.
I think that you can't just say the classical liberals have been trying to restrain government for the past 200 years and the result has been that government was 1% of the GDP back then, although that's a questionable way to measure things,
but I'll just say government was relatively small back then and today it is relatively enormous and all-encompassing and therefore that The attempt to restrain the government or even roll it back in some areas hasn't achieved anything.
What you have to ask is how much worse would things be if the classical liberals hadn't been there?
And I suppose that's not a precise enough question because they were also acting intellectually because what you're specifically disputing is not the classical liberals and their effect but the way their strategy in terms of political activism So then what you have to ask is how much worse would things have been if they had not been there trying to reduce the size of government or prevent the further growth of it by the political means?
And I would just give one example.
I gave it on the boards, which is Ludwig von Mises in Austria after World War I had, I don't know, he had some personal, not a personal issue, but he knew the The king or the prince of Austria and he persuaded him not to allow hyperinflation in Austria.
So that would just be one example that I would cite where there was just an enormous beneficial effect because Mises used the political means.
And, you know, Rothbard also used it, though he did everything else as well.
I think that it's not an all or nothing question.
Almost all of the great classical liberals and, you know, Rothbard, the modern anarcho-capitalist, the political process was just one thing.
They did that and they educated the public and they participated in an intellectual debate with other so-called intellectuals.
So that was just one of their, you know, one of the things they did.
Now, you know, I guess on the other hand you can say look, you know, these men were, you know, if you look at what Rothbard did or what Mises did in terms of both educating the public and trying to educate some politicians and also having influence politically, you know, engaging in the political process when you could, and then also, you know, teaching, you know, being a mentor, And participating in the academic debate, there was a great debate in the 20s about socialism.
Mises and Hayek were the only ones who thought it couldn't work.
So that was one thing he did.
And you might be able to argue that the normal person cannot do that because you're talking about a genius here.
And most of us are not geniuses, so we have to prioritize.
But I would argue that individuals have to choose for themselves what they think is most effective.
Well, I don't think it's that subjective.
You know, with all due respect, I think that that's just saying that there's no possibility of any right or wrong answers in the realm of effectiveness, right?
Which to me would just say that then there's no possibility of causality between ideas, actions, and results, which to me would just not make sense at all.
I think that I would make the argument, and of course if you want to say that for a short time Austria things were better, well I'm sure that they were, right?
And I'm sure that that was better.
But unfortunately you live in a system where there are other governments, right?
right?
So the fact that Austria didn't pursue hyperinflation was one thing, right?
But of course, Germany next door did pursue hyperinflation, which led to the invasion of Austria in 1938, subjugation under Nazi rule, and then a country that emerged from that destructiveness and embraced socialism, as all the Western countries did, with the somewhat minor exception in terms of the degree for the USA in the post-war period. with the somewhat minor exception in terms of the degree So, you know, it's fine to say, well, there was a short burst of benefit from what von Mises was able to achieve in Austria.
But unfortunately, the fact that government still existed meant that they just got overrun by the Nazis, right?
So And again, nobody's going to say that one argument or ten arguments or a million arguments is going to prevent something like Nazism.
But I would certainly make the argument, and strongly though, not necessarily with extreme precision because it's impossible in this realm, I would make the argument that if intellectuals as a whole eschewed, rejected, violently rejected political solutions,
then we would be a whole lot better off Since they have taken this option of getting involved with the government and attempting to wrestle control of the use of force from politicians And policemen and soldiers who are frankly a whole lot better equipped to use violence than most intellectuals are.
I would say that it's the difference between trying to reform slavery and trying to abolish slavery.
If you say that slavery can be reformed, then you are implicitly saying that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with slavery.
It just needs to be managed better.
Then all the people who feel uneasy about slavery have a place to go called, let's reform it.
Whereas if you say slavery is an unambiguous evil that needs to be wiped from the face of the earth, not through violence but through moral reasoning, Then people don't have a comfortable place to sit where they can focus on just reforming and they don't have a place where they can dodge the kind of really core change that needs to occur within society to get this historical 100,000-year parasite off our necks called the state.
I think that focusing on reforming the state It gives people an easy out, it lets people waste and drain their lives in political energies, and it legitimizes the very power that we all know is morally evil because the state is centered around the initiation of force.
And by not taking that core moral stand and trying to work within the system, I think they just legitimized the system and they gave people an out which says, oh, the way that I'm going to work for freedom is I'm going to go support Ron Paul, I'm going to vote for Ron Paul.
Rather than the state can never do any good, the state is evil incarnate, the state murders hundreds of millions of people, and it's responsible for 99.9% of the non-biologically inflicted human misery in the world, and you can't reform this institution, you can't work from within it.
I think that if the intellectuals had taken that stance, and, you know, it's easy in hindsight, because we have 150 years of a bloated state, I think we would be far better off because there wouldn't be this sort of Weasley middle ground, not that I'm putting you there, but there wouldn't be this Weasley middle ground where people say, well, I don't have to decide that the state is bad because I can work to reform it.
Well, that's an interesting argument.
I'm sorry, I've just got to collect all of that in my head.
Do you want me to go over it again? No, I think I understand your argument.
Certainly, you know, this to me gets to the issue of, Rothbard talked about this, gradualism versus, I forget what the other word was called, extremism or radicalism.
And this is something that, you know, the abolitionists felt with when they were trying to get rid of slavery.
You know, I think what maybe Garrison wrote, that if you aim, if you...
If you aim for the immediate abolition of slavery, you will most likely get the gradual elimination of it.
That is, you'll get a gradual change.
If you aim for the end goal, which is the elimination of evil or slavery, whatever it may be in a particular case, You're going to probably get a gradual change, but if you aim for a gradual change in itself, you're going to get no change at all.
That certainly is true.
Somebody else said gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.
Yes, exactly. I don't know if Rothbard was quoting someone else or if that was what he said himself.
It may have been Garrison who said that.
I'm not sure. That's a great quote.
Certainly, us anarcho-capitalists have to always keep in mind the ultimate end, which is not to reduce the state, to try to get out of Iraq.
It's not just that. It's to actually eliminate the state everywhere and across the entire world, all states.
That's the ultimate end.
Well, I shouldn't say it's the ultimate end.
Because non-aggression action is what it's all about.
But if you follow that and then you think of what could a legitimate society look like, that is the only conceivable legitimate society.
So we can't lose sight of the ultimate end goal.
But I would also say that any step in the right direction ought to be applauded.
And this is where Rothbard would make temporary alliances with the old right and the new left.
Depending on if they were good on a particular issue.
Like right now, I believe Lou Rockwell has combined forces with some leftists who are good on the war issue.
The idea being that any step in the right direction is a good thing.
Now, what you were talking about is, well, what's the most effective thing?
If the intellectuals had stayed entirely out of the political process, would we be better off?
I think you have to get to first what's the intellectual orientation which is the typical intellectual orientation at least now and most likely and I believe even in Mises' day as well and in the day of the classical liberals was very socialist.
The Austrians were the leading lights of free market thought in economics but They had competing schools of thought which were very statist.
I believe the historicists were very statist and then after them there was the positivists and they were actually some free marketeers in that school but another competing statist regime more recently in the past century.
So the issue is that because the vast, vast majority of intellectuals are not in any way libertarian-leaning, libertarian or capitalist, they're nothing like that.
They're more likely to be communist-leaning than libertarian-leaning.
So of course, because they're involved in the political process, things are much, much worse.
Now, I think what you might be arguing is a little bit more specific than that, is that if the classical liberals hadn't been involved in the political process at all, And instead, it focused all of the efforts on...
...thundering the existing state or something like that.
I'll give you a two-second metaphor just to clarify it because I know it was a long argument.
The two-second metaphor is this, that if I tell you that your toothache can be cured by doing the shimmy dance, right?
And you don't have to go to the dentist.
Your toothache can be cured by doing the shimmy dance, right?
And you do the shimmy dance, right?
But your tooth is actually rotting.
Right? Then, if you continue to do the shimmy dance, your tooth is going to get worse and worse and worse, right?
And then at some point you're going to say to me, well, I'm doing the shimmy dance, but my tooth is just killing me.
And then you say, well, yes, but imagine how much more it would be killing you if you didn't do the shimmy dance.
Well, my argument is, if you didn't believe that the shimmy dance was going to cure your toothache, you'd go to the damn dentist and get it dealt with, right?
And so by engaging in political action, which is not going to do anything other than give people an out from what they need to do, which is to go to the dentist of no state, so to speak, it is actually making things worse.
I don't think it's that clear-cut that you can't do anything that's worthwhile in the political process.
Let's imagine if Ron Paul were elected president, I know that's quite a stretch, but he could pull the troops out of Iraq, he could...
He could veto a lot of legislation.
I believe other people were talking about how the Congress might align against him, but I don't think that even the statist Congress could align against him completely enough to make his veto worthless.
They have to have a two-thirds majority to override a veto.
So he could veto a lot of statist legislation.
There's a lot of things that you can do in the political process.
Rothbard talked about this in response to Samuel L. Conkin's criticism of any kind of participation in the political process.
You can get a sweeping change in the political process if you have a broad enough movement and conviction.
So it's not the case that being involved in the political process is like a shimmy dance where it has absolutely no relation at all to What you're trying to get rid of, which is the initiation of aggression.
It can certainly reduce it.
Sorry, can you interrupt?
Because again, without sort of specific blips in the radar, I have never seen a situation wherein the government has shrunk as a result of somebody who wants to shrink government going in.
And of course, you think of people like Nixon, who went in on a fairly free market platform, who then enacted price controls.
And then you look at people like Reagan, who Ron Paul was one of the three people who nominated him.
Reagan goes in, you know, very well read in the Foundation for Economic Education and very well read in, you know, the capitalist economics who just destroyed the deficit, like destroyed the economy with the deficit.
Federal funding, federal spending grew by two-thirds under Reagan, right?
So I think that if you can think of an example other than, you know, when you demobilize an army at the end of a big war, if you can think of an example where somebody has come in And has been able to reduce the size of government or even sort of reduce the growth to some significant degree.
I just can't think of any examples, right?
So I agree what you're saying.
It sounds nice in theory, but the first thing that I'll always do when we're looking at historical things and using the past to predict the future, because if you don't look at the past, you can predict anything you want.
Ron Paul could ascend to heaven on the wings of an angel and bring back an arco-capitalism in a bag.
I mean, if you don't look at the past, and I'm not saying you're making up anything you want, but I just can't think of any examples where somebody has actually been able to do what it is that you want Ron Paul to do, or you think that it would be good if Ron Paul did or somehow could happen.
And these people were trying to restrain government when there was no war, when the deficit wasn't $9 trillion, when the unfunded obligations went north of $40 trillion, and the dollar wasn't collapsing or at least taking heavy blows from the euro and the yen and so on.
So when people had a far easier situation to manage, they were not able to even remotely reduce the size and scope and power of government.
government, if we go back to the 19th century, the people who were against the founding of the central bank and then the eventual 1913 founding of the Fed, they had a much smaller government to deal with and a much less well-armed government to deal with.
I mean, in the 19th century, a militia could take on the government.
Right now, it's completely impossible.
So, if it never could happen when it was much easier, how on earth is it going to happen now that it's infinitely harder?
Well, you know, there are other examples of where, you know, the People, individuals have been able to roll back statism in significant ways.
I mentioned Andrew Jackson smashing the central bank, although that had some negative consequences in the long run in terms of setting a precedent, although that precedent had to be reinforced.
You can't say that the precedent for centralization of political power in the presidency is all Andrew Jackson's fault.
Just as a disclaimer here, I'm not saying Andrew Jackson was a great president or a great guy.
He murdered a lot of Native Americans.
So certainly not a great example of a libertarian leaning anything, but that was one good policy that he had.
Now, I believe it was centered around Polk, President Polk.
There was a series of several presidents, I think two, I'm not sure if it was one or two who got elected, There was kind of an idea of going back to the old Jeffersonian idea and I think it was Polk or Grover Cleveland who was in this and the idea was to get basically three Jeffersonians elected in a row.
It went fairly well on the first term or the first presidency.
But then something happened that either the next guy, I think it may have been Clover, was assassinated or shot or something.
I forget exactly what happened.
Just barely into his presidency at all.
And then it collapsed after that because there was the succession of, it went through whoever was else automatically.
But yeah, I mean certainly I will not dispute what you said empirically, which is that it's difficult to find examples where I'm sorry, not just the influence of intellectuals, the influence of anybody. I mean, even the politicians that the intellectuals vote for who want to reduce the size of government.
And, I mean, Reagan had the clearest mandate to reduce the size of government.
And even George Bush said, you know, government is the problem, not the solution.
I'm going to pursue a humble foreign policy, no nation-building, blah, blah, blah.
You're referring to Bush II, right?
We can start referring to them as if they were kings, because, you know...
Right, right. Bushmark, too.
So I know what you're saying.
I think that there's definitely...
I understand the allure. And look, I mean, good heavens, wouldn't it be great if political action could solve this problem?
Because it would be clear-cut.
It would be something that would be a plan of action that would be something we could all sink our teeth into.
My concern is that we do actually have a toothache.
And by doing the political dance, our toothache is just getting worse and worse and worse.
And at some point, the longer we put it off, the worse it's going to be.
And that's why, for me, there's urgency.
Obviously, there's urgency for both of us, and we're both on the same side of the fence as far as wanting to reduce government, me to zero, you to zero, but we have different ways of approaching it.
But my concern is that, I mean, there is an urgency at the moment that hasn't been around for a couple of generations, and that urgency is, I mean, the financial house of cards is just so huge and windy and trembling that we do have to act with fair rapidity.
And so my concern, though, is that the tooth is really rotting out, and if we continue to do the political dance, thinking, despite the evidence of everything that came before, that it's going to do something to reduce the size and power of the state, when in my view it's actually increasing.
Libertarian or anarchist participation in the state legitimizes the state, gives people an out that makes them believe that political action will solve the problem, and historically it's just made the problem worse, or at least that would be a reasonable causality.
And so the urgency is that I really want to do something different.
And of course, I spent 20 years racking my brain trying to come up with something that was going to be different, recognizing that what had gone before had not even remotely achieved the ends that were intended, right?
I mean, I don't think Murray Rothbard ever said, I'm doing this so that I can slow the growth of government down to like 10 times every 20 years' growth.
I mean, that wasn't his stated intention, right?
His stated intention was to arrest.
He said something like, along the lines of, you know, no one's going to...
No one's going to go to the barracks for the idea of reduced transaction costs for a little bit more freedom.
They want the idea of a lot more freedom.
I think that's what you're getting at.
Well, and my...
or whatever. Nobody's going to go to the barricades for Ron Paul saying, well, okay, it's still a shit sandwich, but there's not as much shit as the other sandwich, so that's going to be a great meal.
I just don't think anyone's going to really get that juiced about that.
But I think that if involvement in the political process is actually hurting rather than helping our cause, then that's one of the reasons why there is urgency for me in trying to make the case that there's a better approach, there's a different approach to that.
And of course, you know my approach is around introspection and my approach is around grounding in philosophy and learning personal freedom within your own life, getting bad people out, getting good people in, becoming a real beacon.
Rather than getting involved in a political process, which is sort of like, you know, that old thing, right?
If you wrestle in shit with the pig, you both get dirty, but the pig likes it, right?
So it's kind of like a different situation for that.
So that's my major concern, that if we keep doing the same stuff that's gone before, I mean, if it didn't win 150 years ago, and it didn't win 100 years ago, and it didn't win 50 years ago, when it was much, much easier to win, There's just no way that it's going to win now, that the government is so much larger, so much more powerful, and people are so much more miseducated about the realities of the world they live in.
That's kind of a long one there, but let me just briefly respond.
I don't think that it's really libertarians or the anarcho-capitalists who participate in the political process that are giving people a way out.
You know, whatever we're doing, you know, that doesn't have anything to do, I don't think, with giving people a way out of saying, you know, either I believe in the state or I want to get rid of it altogether.
Because whether or not, whatever, you know, you could take you and me and every other anarcho-capitalist in the entire world, which is not that many relative to the world's population, and, you know, we could all either be in the political process or all either not.
And I don't think that's really going to make much of a difference at all on whether or not people feel that they have an out in terms of a third away between the state and not having a state.
Whatever we do, they're going to have that option.
And right now it seems like most people tend to – this conversation was happening among quote-unquote normal people.
That is, you know, just the majority of the population.
They would think that you and me were crazy for having the idea that we didn't need government.
And, you know, at most, well, not necessarily at most, but it depends on the person.
But the typical person, you might convince them, you know, that maybe the government shouldn't be involved in this or that or whatever.
And, you know, that's just about as much as you're going to get.
I don't think it's libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are providing that way out.
The other thing I would say in response to the argument that we've been doing this for 200 years and the state is bigger than ever and worse than ever and it has the power to destroy the world ten times over again with all the nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia and that's just the U.S. and Russia.
So the argument is that the political process is kind of like a jimmy dance or a rain dance or whatever.
But I don't think that is exactly correct.
I think that it's more like, let's do a slightly different analogy here, which is that we have a toothache, which I guess you could say is the state.
And no matter who is elected as president, that toothache isn't going to go away.
But if, say, Rudy Giuliani or John McCain or Hillary Clinton, those seem to be the leading candidates, are elected as president, then we're not just going to have a toothache.
They're going to basically grab our jaw and tear it off.
Whereas if Ron Paul is elected president, well, hopefully the toothache won't get any bigger.
At least we can delay the onset of total collapse and disaster somewhat.
Let's just say that no one knows when this wave of statism is going to cause collapse.
Right now the U.S. is heading in a fascist direction.
Eventually there has to be a collapse as a result of that.
Civilization will crumble and collapse.
But just because that collapse happens doesn't mean that out of the ashes we're necessarily going to get anarcho-capitalism.
There needs to be a large ideological support for that to get that.
It's conceivable that you're not necessarily going to get something better arising out of the ashes I'm sorry, can I just...
I'm so sorry, and I just want to put a bookmark here because I don't want to interrupt you, but I think three or four times now you've said the destruction of civilization when the state collapses, and I don't think that would...
I don't think that is quite the equation that I would make, but I don't want to interrupt you too much.
We'll just bookmark that and come back.
Oh, okay. I see what you're saying.
I don't want to say that the collapse of the state is, you know, as if the state...
Being there is what's supporting civilization like the steel structure of a building.
What I would say is that precisely because of the expanding size of the state, this is just all culture.
It's going to lead in the direction of destroying all culture and civilization as the state expands further.
And then at some point, you're going to have a collapse.
It is a total collapse.
And of course, the state will collapse with it.
And civilization will collapse as well to some extent.
Would you say that if you were in Russia in 1987 that you would have tried to keep the Soviet government going rather than have it collapse?
No, no, of course.
I wouldn't say that.
But what I would say is that just because the Soviet government collapsed doesn't mean that something better is going to rise out of it.
Because, I mean, in fact, maybe something somewhat better rose out of it, but certainly nothing approaching libertarian society, respect for private property rights, nothing close to that.
No, it's a lot closer than the previous government though, right?
It's closer, yeah, it's certainly closer than it was.
I guess you could say that, yeah.
But the issue is, is there the ideological understanding and support there For freedom and also the economic know-how because we can talk about ethical arguments all day long, but there's a lot of people out there who no matter what you say about ethics,
they're hopelessly grounded in a utilitarian mindset and they just don't understand how the free market could do it in terms of providing for national defense or whatever it is.
And yes, that is a problem of perspective because it's, I think, I don't know if it's Robert Murphy or no, actually it's my friend Manuel Lora who said that it's always like in Russia where they had the government made shoes and then they say if there wasn't shoe communism, how would the free market provide for shoes?
And it's just, if you really think about that problem, it's a nightmare of a problem to think about.
So of course people say, yes, we ought to have the government do it because they just can't imagine how it could get done.
I can guarantee you that neither you or me could write out a specification for how the free market makes shoes.
There's just a thousand steps in there that all operate seamlessly because it's the free market.
If the government is producing shoes and the government runs out of money, then the government stops producing shoes and then people see that the free market produces shoes.
You can see people through that kind of example.
right so people couldn't imagine how the government could how cell phones could be provided in soviet russia but then within six months of the collapse of communism you've got an entire network of cell phone towers and people are out there getting cell phones and now they understand that right i'm not saying that russia is the perfect society by any means right they've got a lot of bad history but um there's a way of showing people which is after the collapse um they see the free market do the things that they never could imagine the free market doing before and then that you don't need to argue with them anymore
but as long as the state is still holding reality at bay the intellectual arguments that are hard to make right are harder i think um yeah yeah sure uh you know um In a sense, it's difficult to imagine what you can't see.
Or anything similar.
If people can't make that kind of an analogical leap from one thing to another, it's difficult for them to imagine how this could do something.
But I guess what I'm getting at is that there's a lot of initiation of aggression that could be stopped in certain cases, not in general.
If the right guy is, quote unquote, the right guy is elected, If someone who is, like Ron Paul, broadly libertarian-leaning, I'm not sure if I would say if a minarchist like Mises was.
Mises, by the way, was kind of the borderline between minarchism and anarcho-capitalism.
There's a lot of initiation of aggression that could be stopped there, and that has kind of a compounding effect because any initiation of aggression, someone is harmed in some way.
Maybe they're murdered. Maybe they're just stolen from But in some way, either their life has ended or their preferences are overridden, and they can't do whatever it is they're going to do if not from initiation of aggression.
So you could imagine that there's lots of people who just because of wars, let's just take that alone, wars, and maybe you could talk about the DDT ban as having murdered millions of people and that.
And also then of course, democide, that is when governments murder their own people, which actually there's been more deaths from democide than from war.
So just imagine if any extent to which that is reduced, you never know what kind of a person might be allowed to develop if he weren't murdered or stolen from as much as he's stolen from or raped or whatever happens.
But instead, you know, that person gets the mind, you know, either they're not there or they have a statist mindset, or they just didn't have the time to devote to what might have been a pursuit of an understanding of liberty.
Right. I do understand.
You could use John McCain as an example.
I mean, he seems to truly believe in what he says with regards to, you know, this crazy war on terrorism and war on the Middle East.
And that had something to do with the fact that he was tortured brutally when he was captured in Vietnam.
So you could imagine what would have, I can't exactly imagine, but he probably would have been a better human being if not for the fact that he was tortured and his viewpoint was so perversely warped.
Well, sure, sure. But I mean, I think that this is for me the problem with starting midstream, right?
Like, so when I have arguments with people about the war, they say, well, yes, but, you know, we had to fight the Nazis, right?
But that's sort of popping into 1939 and saying, well, what are we going to do now?
So my issue is that you're saying, well, if we get Ron Paul in, he's going to stop the war and then fewer people will get killed, right?
But the problem is...
That after 150 years of involvement in the political process, we still have this war.
And there are still hundreds of wars going on around the world.
Right? So that, to me, is the issue that you say, well, I need to involve myself in the political process so that I can reduce the number of people who are getting killed.
But all these people are getting killed after hundreds of years of intellectuals' involvement in the political process, right?
So you look at it backwards, at least from my perspective.
Maybe I'm looking at it backwards.
This isn't my perspective, but...
What comes first is the involvement in the political process, which we know has been going on from freedom-loving libertarian intellectuals for hundreds of years, which has resulted in all these people getting killed.
I mean, I'm not saying it's causal, right?
I mean, I don't think I'm going to be able to win that argument unless we have a much longer debate, and even then I might not.
But for sure, there's an enormous amount of effort put into trying to get involved in the political process to shape the ends, to control the guns of the government, to control the military, to control this violence.
And people say, well, I want to do that so that I can reduce the amount of violence.
But after 150 years, the violence keeps escalating.
Right? So I don't think that there's any reason to believe that it's gonna stop the next step, right?
150 steps, 150 years we've been taking these steps to try and reduce the violence of government.
And it keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
So then saying, well, I need to get control of government to reduce the violence.
But the violence has been growing despite the fact that everyone in the libertarian movement, not everyone, but most people have been trying to get control of the government, if that makes sense.
Yeah, again, I agree with that observation.
And you said you didn't think you would win the causal argument there.
I don't think, I hope you're not making a causal argument that, you know, the libertarians or classical liberals being involved in the government have caused that.
I mean, I would say is, look, let's just imagine if the classical liberals hadn't existed at all, because it's entirely conceivable that, you know, it was maybe a fortunate byproduct of the fact that, you know, They began to understand the key development in economics was the understanding of what makes a diamond more valuable than bread even though bread is more essential for life.
That is the marginal utility, one of the most essential developments in economics.
I guess maybe you shouldn't say it was chance because three guys developed it simultaneously.
Only one of them had a really truly proper outlook who was Menger.
But, you know, let's just imagine they hadn't existed at all or they hadn't been involved in the government, you know, whatever, whichever alternate, you know, system you want to imagine.
And I can't believe that, you know, there would be any, you know, that, you know, all of this, the war still would have happened.
I guess that's also your argument.
If they hadn't existed at all, you know, all of these, you know, millions and millions of people still would have been murdered.
So I guess maybe we both agree on that point.
No, no, no. But then what I would say...
I'm sorry. My argument is that...
If the intellectuals who believe in the non-aggression principle, of which there have been hundreds, if not thousands, right, over the past 150 years, thousands for sure.
Do you mean just, I'm sorry, let me just interrupt you there, because, you know, the non-aggression principle, like, you know, the classical liberals, I don't think broadly, you know, they didn't have a stated principle that was where they deduced everything from the non-aggression principle.
They had a broad liberal outlook.
They preferred less violence to more violence.
They didn't believe in it as consistently as anarcho-capitalists do.
Maybe I'm casting my net too wide.
And this is, of course, in no way, shape, or form meant to blame any of the mysteries of the world on the intellectuals of the past, because Lord knows I'd be scratching my name on a cave wall if these people hadn't written, right?
So I don't mean anything like that.
I'm just trying to sort of dispassionately look at...
At the cause and the effect.
What my argument is, is that if these guys had said, you know what?
There is no possibility that we can use violence for good.
We can't tame it. We can't control it.
We can't manage the state.
We can't figure out how to control these guns of the government because we're intellectuals, not politicians.
We're intellectuals, not soldiers.
And we're never going to win against these guys.
They're just going to use us as a shield, right?
So you get some moral guy like Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw or whatever, and they're all about, ooh, the government is great.
Let's get more of the government and so on.
Of course, the average guy in the street is like, well, I don't know.
I guess that sounds good. The intellectuals are saying it.
But if all the intellectuals who worked from the non-aggression principle, to whatever degree they did, had stood up and said, there is no conceivable possibility that a political solution will ever free us.
Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.
I'm not going to spoil every ballot.
These guys have guns, guns, guns.
It's violence, violence, violence, and we have to stop it.
This is not a compromise situation.
This is not a work-within-the-system situation.
This is stone evil, like slavery, like child rape, like the war of crimes of aggression in war, like torture.
This is not a compromise situation.
This is stone evil, and we will stand for none of it.
Then that would have filtered through to society and all of the energies that get drained out of the intellectual world trying to pursue this political solution is heartbreaking.
And it makes the job of anarcho-capitalists infinitely more difficult that people go for political solutions because then people say, well, I don't want to do anything as extreme as anarcho-capitalism because there are all these really intelligent people working within the system.
So my argument is that We'd be a whole lot more free if people had not tried to work within the system and tried to get control of the gun but had just thundered against it as a moral crime consistently and perpetually.
I think I would disagree with that just because...
I just don't think that if they had said...
I think that they would have been sprawling the ballots and Certainly, if they had had that radical outlook, you know, that we're just going to say, you know, we're going to try to convince our students and everyone we meet that, that the government is not the way that you need to have anarchic capitalism, you need to eliminate government, that probably would have had,
I would agree, a much, much more beneficial effect than them trying to use influence with the politicians they had influence with or whatnot.
Just because all the students they taught and all the people they influenced, yes, that certainly I think would have had a very beneficial influence and probably more so than that certainly I think would have had a very beneficial influence and probably more so than the limited successes they had
But the thing I would say is that until very recently there weren't really any anarcho-capitalists.
There was Molinari who was, to my knowledge, the first anarcho-capitalist.
He was a member of the French School of Economics.
This predates the classicals.
I believe he was one of these French economists and there was a few others.
Bastiat, he wrote a great essay called What is Seen and What is Not Seen.
But Malinari was the most extreme of them and the first anarcho-capitalist.
But then between Malinari and Murray Rothbard, I really don't think there were any anarcho-capitalists.
There were some anarcho-syndicalists who were not in any way our allies.
Because they didn't just hate the state, they also hated corporations.
And we had an anarcho-syndicalist revolution in Spain which resulted in the imposition of basically they call the government something else but it was basically a communist government because someone who's more skilled is not going to accept getting paid less than someone who's less skilled.
People basically, what happened in Spain was that once you got rid of the government, which they did, I believe they basically killed everyone in the government.
Not the means I would recommend, but they did it.
And then people basically wanted to have their private property, and the only way to have anarchal syndicalism was to impose it on people.
In other words, they got rid of the anarchal part.
And then in the U.S. you have the individualist anarchists, which would include Tucker and Spooner, Some others whose names escape me at the moment, who were actually the predecessors of Murray Rothbard.
He combined the Austrian school with the individualist anarchists, basically improving upon their flawed economics, because the individualist anarchists were basically socialists in their economics.
They thought that collecting interest was immoral, for example.
But they didn't think that it should be illegal, so on libertarian grounds they were basically right.
That's basically an overview of how rare, you know, and Mern Rothberg was the first, I think, the first modern anarcho-capitalist, or at least one of them.
Right, right. And then from there, you know, it started from his living room and expanded from there, and, you know, we're all here, and, you know, it's a great testament to, I mean, I guess that's kind of your argument, right?
It's a great testament to persuasion because it started out with one man, and the entire anarchist movement had kind of Almost died out.
So it started out with him and then expanded.
But I just don't think that there were enough people who had that conviction that we cannot have a state And that we're our natural allies in the past.
Well, I certainly do agree with that.
And I mean, that's really great, by the way.
You know, it's almost like you've been to the library.
That is really great.
And I do appreciate that.
And it's certainly not my intention to say, you know, Patui, we spit on, say, as an idiot, or, you know, these kinds of things.
I mean, these guys are all geniuses.
And I mean, I certainly wouldn't have two brain cells rub together without the stuff.
That was written before.
But to sort of wrench the perspective from the past to the future, now I'm sort of trying to suggest or propose that we look at trying to encapsulate the lessons of the past, that political involvement by really able and intelligent and often well-funded people who had a lot of influence, certainly far more influence than you and I, Failed completely to achieve their stated ends and their stated goals.
That's why I'm sort of suggesting that if we look forward, and not to blame the people in the past, because you're right, anarcho-capitalism was very rare.
I actually, if it's of any interest, I actually sort of worked on this sort of stuff.
I never even read Murray Rothbard until after I did Free Domain Radio, so it's kind of cool to realize that there are other people out there too.
The sort of approach that I'm saying now is that, yeah, of course, we can't blame everybody in the past for not doing the right thing.
And even if we could, what does it matter, right?
The point of the past is to change the future, learn the past to change the future.
And that's why I argue now for non-involvement in the political process and for, you know, a passionate and repetitive and personal and grindingly repetitive at times denunciation of the evils of the state.
And for enacting, because, I mean, the fundamental is not anarcho-capitalism.
And the fundamental is not economics.
The fundamental is philosophy and the goal is happiness.
And that's why I really focus on becoming this beacon.
You can bring anarcho-capitalism to your life because you can bring philosophy to your life.
And that means not sanctioning the use of force, not supporting the use of force, laboring under the delusion that you're doing anything other than legitimizing the state when you participate in the political process.
You can't be an abolitionist and own a slave and you can't be somebody who passionately argues for freedom and participate and try and wrestle control of the political process.
It's never going to work anyway and all it does is undercut The message that you're trying to say, oh, the state is stone evil, but I'm going to collaborate with it for this practical end.
It's like, well, then there's no principles, right?
I mean, then principles just become a kind of posture.
And I'm not sort of saying that's you.
I'm just sort of saying that's the way I see it.
And so if we look at this way of sort of passionately living, the principles not getting involved in political processes, not getting involved in this subterranean, ghastly, satanic evil of the state, But instead, really just passionately denouncing it with every ounce of,
you know, I sort of feel like I'm standing at a pulpit here, passionately denouncing it with every ounce of our being, repetitively and not giving an inch and not participating in this muck and mire to the degree that, you know, we can live a life and not do it.
Then I think we will have learned something, and I think that's the best way to honor the people in the past, right?
Is to look at the things they did that were right, which were innumerable, and to look at the things they did that were wrong, that did not achieve their stated aim, and try something different, right?
I don't think that anybody would be happy in the past to say, well, they're still doing the same stuff that I was doing 200 years later, 100 years later, or 50 years later, that didn't work for me, right?
The whole point is to keep comparing what we can do with what worked and didn't work in the past so that we can achieve a different outcome.
And just political involvement just doesn't work.
Like, just no way, shape, or form.
It just, whether it's causal or not, but as it's employed, it just makes everything worse.
Well, I mean, I would just, again, disagree with, you know, the argument that by voting we're supporting the initiation of force.
I look at it just, you know, I think Spooner did, again, as an act of kind of self-defense.
I know the Spooner quote, and I really do hate to interrupt you, but it doesn't work.
People have been trying to vote self-defense for 150 years and look at the size and power of the state.
It doesn't work. That gets to the heart of the methodological dispute here, which is that how much worse would things have been if not for the influence of the classical liberals On some politicians or whatnot.
You could easily imagine. It could be a lot worse.
You know, Rudolph Giuliani is, at least from everything that I have read, is basically a smarter and more evil version of George Bush Jr., and that's a frightening thought to behold.
So, you know, it's not exactly, you know, you wouldn't get me up from bed to defend You know, if it was between Rudolph Giuliani and, I don't know, Obama on the Democratic side, or, you know, let's say John Kerry, if he were running.
You know, that wouldn't get me up from bed to do that, but this is the case where there's, I'm sorry, my apologies, where there is a notable difference in what we will have if we have someone like Rudolph Giuliani or John McCain or Hillary Clinton and someone like Ron Paul.
I don't think that it's so categorical you can say that it never ever works because I've cited some examples where some things have been done.
And then when you talk about the ultimate goal, the abolitionists had to deal with this.
They were involved in the political process by any means they could to eliminate slavery and they were also involved in it in the personal level.
There was the Underground Railroad and they encouraged Any personal measures to eliminate slavery so that they kind of took a multi-pronged approach and that's what I would argue.
Now because I am anarcho-capitalist and I realized, look, you're always going to have, just because you have a state, this is something Hapa has pointed out, you will always have an incentive for externalizing costs on others.
That's basically what anyone in power has an incentive to do that to the extent that That's an incentive for them, and it's a little bit circular, but for moral people, the power to murder others or to impose the cost of your actions on others is not particularly alluring because they're moral people.
But there is broadly that incentive in the state, and that's why you can get wars, because the politicians don't pay the cost of the war, like Soros Bush doesn't get killed, Soldiers get killed, and Iraqis get killed, and Americans get killed, but not George Bush or anyone in his family, or it's very unlikely anyways.
Do you think that you would have voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, given his commitment to free markets and getting rid of government and lowering taxes and so on?
Well, I mean, I don't know, because I don't know too much about what Ronald Reagan did before 1980.
It's my understanding that he was basically an actor and then he became a politician.
I don't know if he was a congressman before.
I would have to see if he had a record of resisting the temptation to succumb to political interests and whatnot.
I don't think he was a congressman, but you could imagine that If he had a long record of voting on a free market stance and not engaging in law-growing and other things that could benefit him, then maybe. Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, he actually had a record in California of voting and trying to get free market stuff in as much as possible.
And California has some legacy of that, you know, the sort of Proposition 13 where you have to vote to increase taxes and so on.
But, you know, the individuals, I mean, frankly, don't matter.
I mean, the state has a massive thunderous logic all to itself, right?
These externalization of costs and so on.
That you talk about the ability to print money.
It has a logic all of its own.
You can't put someone at the front of this thundering train and think that they're going to push it to one side or another, in my view, right?
And again, that's just working historically, right?
That all the people... And I have no reason to believe that Reagan didn't want to go to Washington to make government smaller, just as he claimed and just as he had...
I think we place this amazing faith On these individuals,
that one guy can do something to change the logic that is based on hundreds of billions of dollars and nuclear weapons and, you know, just an astounding Gordian knot of power and control and violence, that one guy is going to stand in there and clean up that town.
That, to me, is an amazing fantasy because there's just no example of it ever happening.
Yes, there's been little pockets here and there, but, you know, so what?
I mean, guys dying of cancer rally from time to time.
It doesn't mean they're not sick, right?
So... It's just this amazing belief that someone can go in there and clean up the town.
If we look at the huge shadow of the government behind this sort of tiny individual, I just can't imagine, because it's never occurred in the past, how we could believe that it was going to happen in the future.
You know, I don't have any belief that if Ron Paul was a president, the government would shrink back to the size it was.
No, I'm talking about slowing down the growth, not shrinking it.
No one's even slowing down the growth.
Well, I mean, you know, I think that Lou Rockwell has talked about the past hundred years, and I think he mentioned Jimmy Carter as being, oddly enough, probably the best president we've had over the past hundred years in terms of the levels of spending not having risen really that much relative to other presidencies and his administration and keeping us out of wars and that kind of thing, although he wasn't re-elected.
But, I mean, look, you know, it's -- can Rand Paul slow down the growth of government overall?
I don't know. Probably not.
Let's just say if he was elected president.
But he does have veto power.
He does have the power Or he would have the power to, in many instances, stop some initiations of aggression from happening, which are drafted in Congress and a whole bunch of things get put together.
If he was president after 9-11, this is assuming that he holds the same values that he's held to in his congressional career, which has been quite lengthy.
If he was president after 9-11, we probably would not have had a Patriot Act.
Well, you know, because he wouldn't have encouraged that.
Oh, they would have got the two-thirds after 9-11, for sure.
I mean, there's lots of which we can guess about, but for sure, given the mood of the country, they would have overridden him, for sure.
Well, yeah, okay, the issue is that I believe the Patriot Act was...
You know, largely introduced by George Bush and members of his administration.
So, you know, the president kind of directs many times what Congress does in terms of, you know, getting something rolling.
You know, so, I mean, you know, Ron Paul would not have suggested that kind of a thing.
I wouldn't put it down. I mean, you don't know, but I wouldn't put it down to George Bush as having come up with the Patriot Act.
I don't think he's quite that bright. I think it was in the works for some time.
No, no, certainly, yeah. It was not George Bush who wrote this, but it was certainly approved by him, and then those in his administration, I think, did a lot of work on it.
And I believe, if I remember right, one of the reasons Ron Paul voted against it was because he couldn't read it, and neither could anyone else except for, I think, the head of the Senate and the Congress.
There was a few people who could read this thing, and no one else had actually read it or had the ability to read it.
But I think that in that kind of a way, yes, he could have prevented some kind of initiation of aggression.
And also, if the other thing you could say is the president is the commander in chief and we probably would not have responded to 9-11 by going over in Iraq and just destroying the country and destroying Afghanistan.
That would not have been, I don't think, his response.
Again, this is projecting from what he's done in the Congress.
Now, look, you mentioned the Ronald Reagan example where he had a history as well, and it seemed to be pretty decent.
But one thing I would argue is that I don't think that Ronald Reagan was actually familiar with the Austrian School of Economics.
He may have read some Hayek and maybe Friedman, and these are the The guys who are, I don't know how to put it, quasi-libertarians.
When most people think of libertarian, they think of Milton Friedman.
That's the unfortunate reality that we're facing is that they think of Milton Friedman, not Maria Rothbard.
And Milton Friedman has some good things that he's written, but his most prominent influence has been to get The withholding tax instituted.
That's the most significant thing he's done I think.
And then actually also the other thing that he did was he argued against the gold standard and for fiat money and the government managing the level of inflation to make sure that there's even price level and that kind of thing.
He thought that you could have a paper money and then as it turns out He criticized the Austrians for the support of the gold standard.
Basically what Friedman said, I think in Walter Block quotes him, he has a bunch of great quotes on gold and how it restraints the government and how inflation is dangerous.
But then he said that it costs money to store gold, so we should try to use paper money because that's costless.
The way Walter Block interpreted that is that Freedom has a cost, so tell of freedom.
That was Milton Friedman's position.
They want the additional security of gold rather than the cost of inflation.
Yeah. Actually, before he died, Friedman recanted.
He said that, looking back, it probably would have been better if we had a gold standard.
At least he changed his mind on that issue, which is somewhat commendable.
Right. Now, the only thing that I would sort of say, and this maybe could be the last point because I'm going to keep you up on my mind, but the sort of last thing that I would say is that if everybody who gets into political office ends up expanding the power of the state, then only one of two things can be occurring.
Either A, people who want to make the state smaller Find that they can't make the state smaller and don't want to give up their political power when they get into office, right?
So Reagan, maybe he genuinely wanted to make the state smaller, but when he got into office, he realized that he couldn't, right?
And Schwarzenegger, I think, in California was, you know, vowing to take on the public unions and tackle the deficit, and now he's just turned into another naughty green poster boy for environmental activism because that's a non-controversial thing to do that's not going to get him in trouble with people.
Maybe they want to get in and they really want to make the government smaller, but then when they get in, they realize that they just can't do it.
There's just no conceivable way.
It's like if you want to cancel the B-52 program in the United States, parts of it are made in each one of the 50 states, right?
So, I mean, it's just impossible.
Everyone's going to be jumping down your neck.
And so you just say, okay, well, I'll be a ribbon cutter and a speech maker, and I'll still make the speeches about, you know, I'd like to reduce government, but I'll find ways of accounting tricks or whatever.
They just go for the show rather than the actuality.
Or people who genuinely want, like deep down in their core, genuinely want to make government smaller simply can't get into government.
Either it becomes impossible and they just stay in for show, or they can actually do it, in which case they're never allowed into government.
but either way there's no possibility of success for what we want in the political system.
That does tend to be a pattern and I think that Lou Rockwell wrote, I'm not quoting these people because I want to suggest they're infallible, but I just want to cite people when I take from their ideas.
He wrote that a lot of times what happens, and this is why he doesn't advise being a politician for young anarcho-capitalists, is that people go into the political process wanting to change it, Or in the politics wanting to change the government but in reality what actually happens is that they get changed themselves and that's what you described.
Just from my point of view I don't think that Ron Paul would be another Ronald Reagan if he were elected because he's had that and he's been in Congress for a while and he must have realized that He is not actually rolling back statism by his one vote against statism every time he gets outnumbered 500 to 1,
although sometimes there's more people with him depending on the issue or whatnot.
He hasn't changed and become just another cog in the wheel, so I would argue that.
But I see what you're saying, and even among people like myself who do support Ron Paul, If you've been watching this for a while and you see what happens to people like Alan Greenspan and you see Alan Schwarzenegger and whatnot, you realize that Ron Paul is the exception and not the rule, and perhaps a very rare exception.
Another one I would mention would be Howard Buffett, the father of Warren Buffett.
Unfortunately, he's hardly known at all, and the only time I've ever read an article about him online is titled, Warren Buffett's Daddy, which was kind of insulting, I thought.
But there are a few of these men in the Senate or the Congress who come along every once in a while who are truly principled.
I do think that if Ron Paul were president, he would at least prevent some status measures from being implemented.
That doesn't sound too inspiring.
You never know what might happen because of that.
And from the Non-Aggression Act to any reduction in the initiation of aggression is a good thing.
And just also because of what we're facing right now, which is basically a series of fascist presidents who could be elected.
What's on the menu is one fascist versus another in terms of Hillary Right, so if Ron Paul could change something, then he'll never get elected.
That's the pattern of the past 220 years.
Either you go in and get corrupted, or if you're not going to get corrupted, you never get to go in.
The system is very self-protecting.
And that's simply because if Ron Paul were to cut a whole bunch of government spending, Everybody who was elected, their constituents would just throw them out because they're there to get the money back that they have to pay to the federal government and more if they can.
You know the cycle.
People donate to a politician, so the pharmaceutical companies will donate $10 million to the political parties in return for a billion dollars of profits from the prescription drug program.
So that's the investment and the return that occurs in the political process.
There's no possible way that Ron Paul will be able to cut spending because the whole point, the whole reason that people are there and get the funding is so that they can get the spending.
The system will never even let him close to the reins of power if that's his intention.
They will just switch their funding to other people, provide a media blitz, dig up debt on him, provide negative ads, or whatever.
The system is very self-protective.
That's the problem with violence.
When it becomes institutionalized, you can't get in.
You can't get in.
in, if you put your stated objections forward and you're going to harm the economic interests of tens of billions of dollars of hundreds of different companies and agencies, they'll just throw all their resources in up to half the money that they would conceivably lose and just swamp you, right?
I mean, the system is very self-protective that way.
And that's why I say, like, there's just no point getting involved.
You have to attack it at its core, at its moral justification, at its root.
And you can't do that if you're participating.
I certainly agree with that.
The system is very self-protective, so to speak, but that doesn't mean it's completely impenetrable.
There have been some I mean, by the long view, the government has just continued to grow and grow.
Again, I wanted to avoid the blips because you can always find the blips, right?
I mean, if I'm falling out of a tree and I bounce a few times on the way down, it doesn't mean I can fly, right?
So that's still a dangerous and bad thing.
So you can always find the blips.
I'm talking about the long view, though, which we both can clearly admit has been a complete disaster.
Yes, certainly, but I'm just saying that I think it's a subjective matter of picking a time to get involved in something or when something seems worthwhile.
I think that right now the U.S. is somewhat ripe for someone like Ron Paul, maybe if not getting elected, at least some of the points he brings up resonate with people, and that in itself is valuable.
You can look on Bill Maher's show who is a quote-unquote, he said he called himself libertarian, but he's really more like a socialist.
People there will just ravingly applaud him for his anti-war views.
I do think that even if he doesn't get elected, which quite frankly there's a better chance of that happening now than ever in the past for him, it has some beneficial effect.
If I might add a suggestion, I think someone IM'd me asking if it's possible to ask questions, so I don't know if we could Have a brief time for people to ask questions of either one of us on our position.
Sure, I think that would be great.
Let me just try and find the old Skype-y thing.
Alright, so if you have questions, we can take a couple of questions for either myself or we'll call her Jenny.
Jenny J. So just click on the Ask for Mic and we'll be happy to take questions.
I hear a little break, which means that...
People seem very interested.
Pardon me? People seem very interested.
Oh, yeah, no, this has definitely been an interesting debate.
Hang on one sec. Mikes are open.
Type that in the chat window.
We can see then...
There is...
Ah, okay, yeah, we have somebody who wants to come in.
And I'm sure he has a question for you.
Oh, I can't see him on the list.
If you're listening... Is he going to ask the question in voice or type it in?
I think voice.
I think voice. Ah, here he is.
Okay. I'm just going to put him in.
Oh, I think you know who this is.
He is the thorn in our side.
The gadfly. Greg, you're on.
Hey, what's up?
Hi, Greg. How you doing? Not too bad.
Okay, now. What was my question?
When can I ask you a question?
I think that was your question. Oh, um...
Actually, that was way, way back at the beginning.
Before you got David on.
It kind of had nothing to do with what David was saying, but...
Maybe if you could limit it to what David was saying, because I think I've had enough jazz.
We can talk about that one more.
Well, I just don't understand, on principle, how anyone could support Ron Paul and be an anarcho-capitalist.
How anyone, for that matter, could support any candidate and be an anarcho-capitalist, on principle.
Can you just mention the principle that you're referring to?
Which is the Well, I mean, I'm glad you asked that question.
That's a great question.
That's actually, I think, what we spent most of our time on the board debating.
I just think that from the non-aggression principle, it seems obvious to me that less aggression is, you know, not as bad as more aggression.
I don't want to say better.
Because it's not good that you're only being beaten up instead of murdered, but it's not as bad that you're only being beaten up instead of murdered.
That's where I come at it from.
Any reduction of initiation of aggression is good.
But not as bad is not good?
No, but certainly some of the things round forward would be to do It would be good because it would be repealing the initiation of aggression, so to speak, in terms of, for example, pulling out of Iraq.
That's something you could say is good.
Maybe you couldn't say overall that the U.S. government is good.
You could not say, obviously, overall the U.S. government is good after you pull out of Iraq because it's still initiating aggression, but you can say of a particular action, the succession of aggression in that respect, that's a good thing.
If someone is stealing from you and beating you up and torturing you and raping you and killing your sister and whatnot, if they stop killing your siblings, that's not the right way to look at it.
That was the right decision.
That's good to stop murdering someone if you were doing that.
Even if you're still engaging in a bunch of other crimes against them, the reality isn't just one super criminal.
It's a whole bunch of people. That's why I think I can say that some of the things Ron Paul would do would be you could say from the non-aggression principle are good.
Pulling out of Iraq is a good thing.
I don't see how you could deny it.
It's only good if the reason he's pulling out of Iraq is because He's disbanding the army, and he's outlawing the entire presidency.
It's not good if he's doing it just because he doesn't like to use the army.
Because then, underlying that, he's still tacitly approving of the fact that one man has control over all these soldiers.
Well, I think you're making more of an ethical argument there in terms of evaluating Ron Paul instead of the actual action.
You can say, look, if someone stops or refuses to beat you up, whatever the reason is, it's a good thing they didn't beat you up.
That's just from my point of view.
It doesn't matter what the reason is.
Now, when talking about them ethically as a person, then you can get into that.
For example, why don't The vast majority of people don't steal.
Or maybe people who have been convicted of a crime and been to jail, they don't steal again.
And if you ask them, why don't you steal, they say, well, because I don't want to go to jail again.
It has nothing to do with what they did was wrong, but just they don't want to go to jail again.
You wouldn't say they're a good person because they're not stealing because they don't want to get caught and punished.
But it's still a good thing that they're not stealing.
I'm not speaking ethically in terms of people.
I'm speaking ethically in terms of moral philosophy, in terms of principle.
Either the use of aggression is wrong or it's not.
Either the use of force is wrong or it's not.
And simply retracting troops from Iraq I mean, that's not a clear enough statement to me for him that he is against the use of force.
All it says is that he's against the use of force in Iraq, but that's not a principled stance.
You could say that, yeah, but from my point of view, if he takes the troops out of Iraq, Then there's going to be less people who are going to be murdered, and that in and of itself is a good thing.
Now, if you start talking about the statement of principles, I think what his statement of principle is is that we should not be interfering in the affairs of the rest of the world and imposing a military dominance on the rest of the world.
That to me does seem like a fairly strong statement.
It's not quite anarcho-capitalist.
Because, you know, yes, look, from deviations, there's a debate among libertarians about the immigration thing, you know, what do we do in the meantime?
And Ron Paul is one of the people siding against open borders.
And evicting the people who are here.
Hello? I'm sorry.
I was just saying that I'm sorry,
a lot of I thought... A lot of that got cut out, but I got the gist of it, which was evicting 10 million immigrants.
Right. He is not, in principle, against the use of force.
He's only against the use of force in certain circumstances because he's more than willing to support the erection of a fence along the Mexican border and the hiring of additional border patrol and police to patrol that fence.
And the use of taxpayer money to pay for that.
So he is not in principle against the use of force.
I see what you're saying there, though.
I think one of you guys referred to him as being a supporter of the non-aggression principle, but obviously inconsistently.
I would just say there that Anthony Gregory has said this, and I admire him a lot.
If the money is going to be spent, it's better, for example, that it be spent on welfare than warfare.
There's a hierarchy of preferences emanating from the non-aggression principle, I think.
Any taxpayer money that's spent had to have been stolen first, and that's initiation of aggression.
But in my mind, it's just not murdering people You know, a pretty strong reason, you know, to say that that's commendable.
But, now the issue with immigration thing, I would just say...
Not murdering certain people.
He's against murdering certain people, but not others.
Well, you know, if you're referring to an immigration example, I mean, even, you know, deporting immigrants is not, you know, the murder of them.
But the issue here is, I would just say that, you know, Ron Paul is obviously against the open border stance, but this is an open and shut libertarian, I mean at least within the libertarian community, and I'm talking here anarcho-capitalist, just so we're clear. I'm not including classical liberals.
I'm talking anarcho-capitalist.
There is a lot of debate about the immigration position because the way that people like Ron Paul see it is that They see immigrants, a lot of immigrants, not all of them, as being kind of like intruders and using taxpayer services without having paid for them or using things paid for by the taxpayers when the taxpayers don't want them to.
And they see it as kind of like, in a sense, an invasion.
That's the way they look at it.
And they see border control Basically, yes, it's a bad thing.
The government controls territorial borders as opposed to that being decided by individuals on their own property, but they look at it as, given that we have the government, what do we do now?
This is at the center, I think, of where Ron Paul's contradiction lies, where his contradictions lie, because the implicit reason for the support of the fence, as you've just admitted, is the defense of the welfare state.
But Ron Paul also claims to be against the welfare state.
So, what is the point of supporting the erection of a fence along the border if one of your planks is to eliminate the welfare state?
I'm terribly sorry, but a lot of that got cut out.
Why don't you try again, Greg, because it was an important question.
Let me restate that.
Maybe you could type it as well.
There seems to be some problems with the connection here.
Let me just make sure all my things are plugged in.
I don't know if anyone else... I'll turn my microphone off just in case, too.
So go ahead, Greg. Okay.
Can you hear me now?
Yes. Okay.
So I'm coming clear now? Actually, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. You just got cut out again for a second.
Let me try...
Can you hear me at all?
Is it any different coming from my microphone?
Well, I can hear you, but it's getting chopped up and then there's moments of static.
I'm thinking it's some kind of a problem on my side.
Someone on the board said it gets choppy at times.
Oh, interesting. I'll just try sort of testing, testing here, and we'll see if that comes through all right or not.
Can you hear that okay?
Yep. Hopefully that keeps going.
I will just try paraphrasing Greg's question.
If you're going to have a border shutdown because you are concerned about people abusing the welfare state, but one of your other platforms is to get rid of the welfare state, then why do you need the wall?
Okay, I see the question.
I guess the issue there is just the what do you do until then question.
What do you do until you get to a situation where you've eliminated the welfare state?
Given that you have it, you approach it from two different levels.
One, you want to eliminate it, but two, given that you have it, What then?
And that's the question that he's looking at in terms of immigration issue.
I mean, in this theoretical world, he's the president.
So why doesn't he just draft legislation to end the welfare state instead of drafting legislation to approve a giant feds?
Sorry, another way of putting it could be that if he has as a platform the deporting of 10 million people, that's going to take quite a while, right, to find them and to deport them.
And that's his platform.
I can't imagine that finding and deporting 10 million people and the resulting murders that are going to occur from that, right?
There's just no way that you can deport 10 million people without some of them shooting back.
That deporting 10 million people is going to be faster than getting rid of the welfare state.
Doesn't that just mean that there's no possibility that he knows there's no possibility of getting rid of the welfare state?
Yeah, I guess, you know, yes, certainly deporting 10 million people is, you know, it's not something, I just, I don't think you could do it in a libertarian way, given that we have the state.
You know, the solution to this kind of thing is to have, just allow for private discrimination in terms of who people associate with in a community covenants.
That's why I tend to, you know, I don't think it'd be a great thing, for example, if the U.S. was flooded by, you know, immigrants from all over the world in terms of, you know, every different culture and whatnot and, you know, these extremists and all that.
But, you know, this is a Mosesian argument.
You know, we have problems.
That doesn't mean the state is, you know, You know, can deal with them just because there's a calculation problem.
They can't efficiently allocate resources.
My position used to be actually a closed border position.
Not closed border, but against open border position.
And it was partly because I saw it as an issue of property rights.
And that's the way Hans Urban Hoppe sees it.
They see it as an issue of property rights where people who don't have a right to use property are using it.
I do think that it would be, in some sense, easier to deal with immigration issues for the welfare issues.
I don't think you're going to get something, I just don't think you're going to get enough support to be able to deport 10 million immigrants, but you might be able to get something where you can have some more control on the borders.
Better yet would be to allow for privateers, that is people who won't land in Texas.
Clearly then ending the welfare state would be much easier.
I don't know if that would be much easier than taking these measures to allow people to deal with immigration.
I don't support Ron Paul's position on immigration, just to be clear.
I think that's wrong.
But if you vote for him, you are, right?
Because he's not... Well, no, I mean...
He's not going to know what you voted for or against, right?
You just get to do a checkmark, right?
It's a package deal. He won't know that you support his position on immigration.
He's going to view your vote as a support on the deportation of 10 million people.
Um... See, I don't think that, you know, politicians necessarily view a vote as a mandate for everything in their platform.
But you won't know, right?
You'll have no way of knowing what you approve of or don't.
No. No, no.
But I'm just saying that, you know, I do not think that that is, you know, the...
I don't think that it's...
It's a muddy issue because we have a state and because, you know, the issue is with, you know, people, you know, they're being forced to association where they otherwise wouldn't be.
And there also being the lack of the ability to exclude because of the state.
But I just don't think that the kind of immigration controls he proposes can deal with that, nor would it be, I don't think, the ethical way to deal with it.
The ethical way to deal with it would be to eliminate public property.
Oh, yeah, of course. Of course I support that, but who knows when and if ever, quite frankly, that's going to happen.
That's a separate issue.
So in the meantime, we support an expansion of the state because we can't get a contraction of the state?
I'm not exactly sure what I think we should do about that.
I think the best thing to do is to take some...that would be feasible.
That is, we're talking about things that are feasible The semi-immediate term would be to allow people more discretion in terms of who they allow on their own property or who they hire, and then also to prevent illegal immigrants from being able to claim public services.
Isn't the most feasible option to just let everyone do whatever they want?
Yeah, sure, but that's just not going to happen.
I'm being realistic here in the sense that I don't see when that's going to happen.
I think the best hope for that kind of thing happening, quite frankly, would be to To build an island in the middle of the ocean out of floating quotation devices.
I mean, that sounds... Well, David, sorry to interrupt, but wouldn't you agree, though, that if nobody voted for the state, if everybody spoiled their ballot, that that would be quite a change, right?
Yeah, that would certainly, if everyone spoiled their ballot, I'm not really sure what that would do.
Yeah, it would certainly be quite a change.
It would have an influence.
But on the other hand, you know, there have been dictators, you know, who, I mean, no one ever voted for them except that, you know, the point of a gun, you know, is that.
And, you know, the fact that there was really no voluntary support for them at all, even in the sense that people, you know, today go to the ballots and vote.
Yeah, but we're not in that dictatorship at the moment, right?
So my concern is that when I hear people talking about what to do in a realistic or pragmatic way, What they mean is that my moral decisions are based on the moral decisions of other people, right?
Because if everyone spoiled their ballots or everyone openly just said, well, the state is just nonsense.
I'm not going to participate in this bloody charade, right?
If everyone said that, then clearly you'd be on board with that, right?
Like you wouldn't be the last person saying, no, let's get Ron Paul in.
No, absolutely not.
You know, I thought that everyone or even...
If a great many people would swallow their ballots and express disapproval for the state, I wouldn't be the one sitting there saying, no, we ought to have Ron Paul because he's going to try to reduce that term.
But on the other hand, what you're talking about is an enormous grassroots movement.
And if there was that kind of a broad ideology, then things would be a lot better.
But you can't determine what is right or wrong depending on your actions.
You can't determine what is right or wrong in your actions based on what the majority does, right?
I mean, what's right and wrong is relative to reality.
It's not relative to the collective decisions of other people.
Oh, well, I mean, I don't see the voting as being necessarily something that's right or wrong.
It's just a matter of...
I'm sorry to interrupt again, but you just said that you wouldn't do it if you were the only...
I wouldn't do it because in that situation it would send an enormous message.
My doing or not doing in that kind of situation wouldn't do anything.
99% of the people Even if we go from the logistical standpoint, it costs nobody anything to stop participating.
There are no resources involved in not going to the ballot box.
There are no resources involved in not using guns to force people to do things.
So there's no...
There's nothing stopping it other than people's mental resistance to it.
That's it. Yes, absolutely, but in this situation right now, if we had a situation where 99% of the people or everyone just decided to avoid their ballot, That would require an enormous ideological support for the free market.
And so because there's not that kind of support, we shouldn't start advocating for it now?
80% or 60% or whatever?
But it's not going to stop. It doesn't happen somewhere else.
The change in the world doesn't happen somewhere else and then we catch the wave.
It happens with the decisions that we as individuals make and stick to.
So what I'm concerned about, David, is that you say it's the right thing to spoil your ballot or to resist the political process if a lot of other people are doing it too.
But that's basing your moral decisions or your decisions about the actions that you're going to take based on what everyone else is doing.
I think that we can try and be more leadership-oriented, in a sense, and a little bit less sort of follow-ship-oriented, if that sort of makes sense, and say, well, if it's the right thing to do, if everyone else is doing it, then it's the right thing to do.
It doesn't matter whether 99% or 98% or 2% or nobody else is doing it.
If it's the right thing to do to not participate in the political process, then it's the right thing to do.
And that's what I mean by standing up and not...
Going with the flow and just saying, well, this is the movement that I'm going to start.
The big grassroots movement starts with the decisions that I make and communicate to those around me.
Ethically, I would agree with you if you're talking about beating someone's head in and 99% of people are doing that and I say, okay, because everyone else is going to want to beat someone else's head in as well.
Do you think it's going to happen when he tries to deport 10 million people, David?
Do you think a few heads are going to get beaten in?
Yeah, but what I'm saying is that voting is not the equivalent of beating someone's head in it.
Say that you want him to do that.
That's what the vote means.
That you approve of him using force to do what he wants.
And you hope that it's going to be what you want.
But you have no guarantee of it.
And for sure it's not going to be what the 10 million people who fled tyranny and who are working shitty jobs in America.
They don't want him to come and deport them.
So you're imposing your will on them.
You're supporting the imposition of his will on them through force.
And that's just one of many examples.
So there is head bashing that's going on.
That's what the vote leads to.
But it's not my fault that the head bashing is going on.
All I'm presented with is that in this situation, maybe my vote has some influence on who gets elected and maybe the guy that's going to do less head bashing gets elected.
No, he's going to do more headbashing, right?
I mean, I don't know of anyone else who's talking about deporting 10 million people, but it doesn't matter.
Because what if you just started, took a stand and said, I don't support any headbashing.
I oppose headbashing on principle.
I don't think that slavery can be reformed.
Slavery has to be eliminated.
Exactly. Well, I mean, I have said, you know, that...
In my view, if we were elected, I would think it would be just my opinion.
It's going to be less initiation of aggression than if McCain or some of these other candidates were elected.
My position is that no headbashing is acceptable, but whether or not I vote or not vote is simply not going to...
If I don't vote, that's not going to send anyone a message.
Maybe it's a waste of my time.
I've exhausted my arsenal of arguments.
Greg, did you have anything else to add?
No, that was essentially my focus.
I'm more into the principle of the argument than into the practicality of it.
Well, listen, I certainly do appreciate the debate.
It's very interesting and enjoyable.
And thanks so much for coming by and spending quite a while with us.
I certainly do appreciate it, and I hope that we can at least have understood each other's position enough that, well, I guess we won't need too much board time with it, but at least we can certainly know where the basic assumptions are that we're working with so that we can be as effective as we can in future debates.
Certainly. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much.
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