Gil Guillory P.E., PMP, is an engineer and project manager of petrochemical projects, libertarian writer and activist, and entrepreneur. He ran for Congress on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2000 and 2002. He worked in Iraq for 6 months in 2003 after the US invasion assessing damage and repairing chemical plants for KBR. He recently won the O P Alford III Prize in libertarian scholarship for a paper published in Libertarian Papers.
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| Hi everybody, it's DeFenn Mollinger from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I have the highly esteemed Gil Guillory on the line here to talk about This is a second part in a series on libertarian parenting styles. | |
| If that is a valid way of talking about it, I hope and think that it is. | |
| Thank you so much for taking the time to have a chat. | |
| I was wondering if you could just tell the listeners who may not be familiar with you a little bit about yourself and how you rose to this stellar level of prominence within the libertarian community. | |
| I don't know about that. | |
| I ran on the Libertarian Party ticket for US Congress in 2000 and 2002, years ago. | |
| I've written articles for LewRockwell.com and Anti-State.com and StrikeTheRoot.com and Mises.org. | |
| I'm the podcast editor for Libertarian Papers. | |
| And I'm probably best known for the research that I've done in building a real fleshed-out business plan for a Rothbardian home defense company, which this research has taken the form of a series of academic papers that I've written on subjects like the legal landscape for subscription patrol and restitution, what the laws are and how it constrains or... | |
| It allows for certain forms of private defense as well as things like actuarial analysis of crimes, severities, and frequencies, and the types of reserving models that you'd have to put together to successfully ensure against various crime events. | |
| A, I'd love to interview you on that at some point because I've put some thought into that. | |
| Of course, it's one of the questions that voluntarists get is how can we have national defense without the state, which of course is begging the question that we get national defense with the state, which I would completely disagree with, but I would love to interview you on that. | |
| Is there a place that people can get a hold of that stuff online? | |
| There is, I have a little site, it's a Google sites, so it's like sites.google.com slash Gilgillory, or if you just Google Gilgillory, you'll find it. | |
| It's one of the top hits for my name. | |
| I'll put the link in the video and the podcast as well, because people should really familiarize themselves if they're interested in this, and it's a fascinating topic, so... | |
| You get two people if you Google Gil Guillory. | |
| It's me or an MMA promoter. | |
| So it's the libertarian guy, not the MMA promoter. | |
| So just click on the picture without the tattoo. | |
| I think that's assuming that you have none that are invisible. | |
| That's it. So, we were talking just a little bit before we started recording about the approaches that we would like to take or that I'd like to take and we sort of agreed that an interesting approach would be to talk about your experiences as a parent. | |
| You've written, I think, quite a moving and beautiful book. | |
| essay to your daughter, which I think is, I don't know if it's available online. | |
| It's not particularly important, but I thought the themes in it were very beautiful. | |
| I mean, not to sound too softy gooey, but it was quite lovely. | |
| And she's obviously a very lucky girl to have you as a dad. | |
| And I was wondering if you could tell me, did libertarianism come first and then parenting stuff flowed? | |
| Was it sort of simultaneous? Did the parenting stuff come before the libertarian stuff? | |
| How did that develop for you? Yeah, I think I was a libertarian before I was a parent. | |
| I became an anarchist after I was a parent, which to me, all the anarchists I know, it's a moment where you finally let go of the state, and so I remember it well. | |
| I'm sorry, was that a particular moment that you remember? | |
| Because that sounds quite interesting. | |
| It was, it was. In fact, I was reading, this was back in the heady days of, I think the Mises.org website was maybe all of ten pages, you know. | |
| And I happened to be reading The Ethics of Liberty. | |
| And the weight of the argument finally clicked for me. | |
| And, you know, everybody has kind of their last vestige that they were worried about, right? | |
| And some people are worried about state security, you know, or police or national defense or various things. | |
| I was, of course, worried about welfare programs. | |
| So that was my last thing that I was worried about, which is kind of laughable to me today to think about that. | |
| And I couldn't contain myself. | |
| I didn't know what to do. | |
| And I realized that the Ethics of Liberty was published by the Mises Institute, so I figured, well, I'll call them. | |
| So I called, and I asked to talk to Jeff Tucker, and I said... | |
| Is this Jeff Tucker? | |
| And he said, yes. I said, my name is Gil Guillory, and I've just become an anarchist. | |
| I'm so excited. | |
| And he says, you know, when that happened to me, I went up to Murray Rothbard, and I said, Murray, you know, I've become an anarchist. | |
| And Murray said, congratulations. | |
| And so that's what he told me. | |
| He said, congratulations. Congratulations, right. | |
| So that was my glorious moment. | |
| It was wonderful. Beautiful. | |
| Beautiful. So did these principles, did they flow into your parenting? | |
| Was that sort of a conscious decision? | |
| Did you sort of review? Because very few people who become anarchists were raised in that fashion, so there is a certain amount of... | |
| Oh, let's just say rejigging that needs to go on. | |
| Was that a conscious process for you where you decided to take some of the principles that you accepted from a political standpoint and apply them to parenting? | |
| Was it some more, was it more, how did that develop? | |
| I think, well, you know, and everybody has their own grounding for rights and libertarianism and I'm very taken by virtue ethics and I like Jan Narvison's work, which is contractarian in nature, which is not at all social contract theory. | |
| People get those confused. | |
| But I think in terms of virtue, and I think virtue is kind of a key because when we say things like... | |
| One thing that libertarians do is they say that the state should... | |
| Practice virtue like individuals do. | |
| That is, we shouldn't steal and we shouldn't prevent others from exercising their rights to contract and these sorts of things. | |
| And when you have that mindset that you have a certain rigor to the moral standards that you place on You start asking of yourself, how can I be virtuous and what does that mean? | |
| And when I raise a child and I want my child to be virtuous, how do I get kids to be virtuous and not paper over their moral lapses? | |
| And I think a lot of that has to do with modeling virtue and morally behaving yourself. | |
| Because I think moral suasion only works when the persuader is virtuous. | |
| Right. And you actually need very little then. | |
| At least that's been my experience. | |
| You need very little persuasion if you're modeling because children are such natural mimics. | |
| That's how culture, in a sense, reproduces. | |
| They're such natural mimics that they're going to copy whatever you do. | |
| And so if you already have that foundation that's transmitting itself, I guess, visually and empirically, then you need fewer arguments. | |
| Right. And, you know, I was thinking about this, mentioning Mises.org in the early days. | |
| I felt very lucky because they would post the back issues of the Journal of Libertarian Studies and Left and Right and all of these things almost on a day-by-day basis. | |
| And so, you know, a volume of the JLS would go up. | |
| And even though it had been published years before, and I hadn't read it at the time, As they were posting them to the internet, I'd print it all out at work and I'd read it on the bus and I was all excited. | |
| And it occurred to me there's an article that was reprinted in Left and Right on the moral instruction of children by Herbert Spencer. | |
| And I was reminded of it because in the previous episode that you had with Stephan Kinsella, you were talking about how do we teach our children right Herbert Spencer's answer, which I think is quite simple, and Lysander Spooner talks about this as well in his works, is that you expose the child to the consequences of their actions. | |
| And of course, I don't want to sound mean when I say things like this, and context is very important, but we might pick an example of... | |
| If you don't get ready in time to go to the movie, then you don't go because there's a certain time at which the movie starts. | |
| And if you're late, then the curtain is up and that's it. | |
| Or if toys have been sprawled around the house and someone steps on it and breaks a toy, well, now you have a broken toy. | |
| And we don't just replace toys because... | |
| It got broken. So these sorts of things, trying to expose children to the consequences of their actions and not to punish bad behavior, but to show them the consequences of the bad behavior so that they understand rationally why these laws or these virtues exist and why we don't do these things. | |
| Right. I think what you're talking about is the great challenge of moral instruction, which is to not be the finger-wagging external authority figure that the child or the student or the citizen just conforms to because of the power disparity, but rather to attempt to Have the child internalize moral rules so that... | |
| Because that, of course, you're not going to be around forever whacking your finger at your child. | |
| So you have to, at some point, start to get them to develop that kind of internalization of these rules so that it's not just obedience to an external authority figure, but something that they understand the value of internally. | |
| Right. And I would also say that unlike many other political theories, you know, libertarians embrace irrational ethics. | |
| And so if we truly believe that ethics are grounded by reason, then we should be able to demonstrate through reason to our children what ethical principles they should adhere to. | |
| Yeah, that is something that I think is tragically missing and I fault philosophers no small amount for not providing parents with a rational proof of secular ethics because Without that, if you don't have a good reason for why the child should do X, Y, and Z, you are almost invariably going to fall back on the imposition of authority or the withdrawal of affection or physical punishment or something. | |
| If you don't have a good reason, you inevitably have to exaggerate your authoritarianism just to get the child to obey to something that doesn't make sense. | |
| Whereas if you have ethics, philosophical ethics that make sense, that you don't sort of have to say, well, because I said so, or because that's just the way things are, or that's how we do things here, Then you can actually give the child good reasons and that, of course, means that you don't have to rely on authority because you've got good arguments. | |
| You know, I'm reminded of, you know, you were asking me, you know, what came first, the libertarianism or the parenting and maybe what came first was a kind of scholarly approach to these things. | |
| I'm reminded that when I became a parent, I was searching quite vigorously Right. | |
| Right. So you don't want to get caught up in the current fad and write, write. Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean, there are exceptions to these things, but generally speaking. | |
| So I found this book on this obscure little website. | |
| It was a home economics website. | |
| And there was this book from 1912 or 1916, sometime in that time frame, called The Moral Instruction of Children by this guy by the name of Felix Adler. | |
| And... I thought, well, how quaint is that? | |
| You know, nowadays no one would say, oh, moral instruction is an important part of raising a child. | |
| But back then they thought, oh, this is something that's very important. | |
| And I picked up the book and I dug into it and I read it, and I was quite happily surprised. | |
| Because I think with a title like The Moral Instruction of Children, you would expect it to be Moralizing, you know, how to preach to children. | |
| That's how you serve the best young man. | |
| Yes, exactly. | |
| But that's not what it was at all. | |
| It was quite interesting. It was about how do we learn things? | |
| How do we learn morals? | |
| And his answer, generally speaking, was we learn it through examples. | |
| And he said the principal examples that we have are literature. | |
| And so he had an age-based discussion, and this was aimed at public school teachers, actually, about how to instruct morals in children. | |
| By talking about Aesop's fables at a certain age. | |
| And at a certain age, things like Bible stories are useful. | |
| Bible stories are harder than Aesop's fables because usually in an Aesop's fable, you have one moral. | |
| Whereas in a Bible story, there might be two or three things going on. | |
| And so you have... There are different things to talk about in a Bible story. | |
| And then you have classical literature, like the Odyssey or the Iliad. | |
| And each one of those episodes, it allows for discussion and reflection on fairness and on ethics and on virtue itself. | |
| Was it a magnanimous thing to do X, Y, or Z? And so I was really quite impressed with that book, and I later picked up another book called The Moral of the Story, and it's just a book filled with stories specifically designed to challenge your moral thinking. | |
| Yeah, well, certainly children seem to learn best through narrative followed by discussion rather than syllogism followed by cross-examination, which is sometimes a shame for us more philosophically inclined people, but it is something that seems to work much better. | |
| Well, and it's all the way back to Socrates, because, you know, he got in trouble going around asking people, well, what is justice? | |
| And how do you know that? | |
| And what is the good? | |
| And, oh, how do you know that? | |
| He's just asking and penetrating questions. | |
| It's always sort of struck me that any philosopher who's not being accused of corrupting people is probably not doing his job, and that seems to be basically in the job description. | |
| Now, what kind of conflicts and conflict resolution has this brought about in your relationship with your daughter? | |
| Let's see. What's the question again? | |
| What sort of conflicts have arisen? | |
| There's conflicts in every personal relationship, of course, parent, child, husband, wife, and so on. | |
| So what sort of conflicts have come up, and how has this approach helped you resolve these sorts of conflicts? | |
| Yeah, and of course, the types of conflicts change as the child ages. | |
| So my daughter is now almost 12 years old. | |
| So nowadays, you know, there's the question of conflict and then there's true conflict. | |
| And I have to say, at this age, she really doesn't present conflict. | |
| Any substantial conflicts. | |
| It's a nice confluence of... | |
| I think she's learned quite well to respect other people. | |
| And she also has a very courteous and giving demeanor personality. | |
| So I don't really have that many problems with my daughter. | |
| Most of the time it centers on things like procrastination of homework, as an example. | |
| I thought it was interesting you guys brought up homework in the previous podcast you did on this topic. | |
| And it's not that... | |
| This is one of these fine lines where, you know, my role as a parent, I think, is to shepherd my child into adulthood. | |
| And I don't... | |
| There's a fine line between saying, you know, you really need to do this and just kind of letting things happen and letting the consequences work themselves out. | |
| You know, when she has, say, I'm thinking back to last term, she had three big projects that she had to get done, and they were all due the same week. | |
| And so I counseled her on many occasions that she should really do one of the projects a few weeks early and then do another project the following weekend and that way in the crunch weekend before these all three are due she only has one project to do. | |
| That didn't quite work out and she ended up staying up some late nights and my hope is that through these experiences she's learning more and more how to How to apportion her time to the tasks that she has committed herself to do. | |
| Well, Jan, I think it's also important. | |
| I don't know about your particular work habits. | |
| I think mine are fairly good, but there have certainly been times in my life where I have definitely been backed into a corner like that when it comes to getting things done. | |
| So I think there is also... | |
| I've always tried to avoid my dealings with children and also with my listeners, which is not to equate the two, but... | |
| To remind them that I have an issue with it too. | |
| I think every human being has an issue with procrastination because we're naturally energy conserving beings. | |
| And so to remember that everybody has a problem with it and not to be, I'm perfect and you need to improve. | |
| That sort of stuff was around a lot when I was a kid and has never been particularly motivating. | |
| Oh yeah, yeah. And I agree. | |
| And the art there is to You know, give advice and encourage adherence to good habits without nagging. | |
| And then maybe when something goes wrong, to talk about it later, but not in an accusing manner and not at the right time and not at the wrong time. | |
| I told you this was going to happen, and if you don't, let me be the fourth pile of stress, right? | |
| No, I think that's right. | |
| And I think it really underestimates children's intelligence. | |
| They're already saying to themselves, I told you so, because they know. | |
| I mean, whenever you say to someone, I told you so, they're already telling themselves louder than you ever could. | |
| Right. And it's interesting, you know, I have two daughters, one who's seven and one who's 11. | |
| And my older daughter, another thing we struggle with is, you know, I try to teach her that she needs to be easier on her younger sister because she's at a different stage of moral development. | |
| She interrupts people who are talking more often. | |
| She is, you know, maybe a little reckless with other people's property. | |
| You mean the younger daughter? | |
| The younger daughter, right. | |
| And so it's very interesting, and I think this ties into some of the insights of the Montessori system or just the non-age segregated notion of even homeschooling or unschooling, which is that you have different people of different abilities that are out and about, and you have to understand the limitations that certain people have. | |
| And accept them for their flaws, because none of us are exactly perfect. | |
| Well, I think that's true. | |
| I'm sorry, go ahead. | |
| Well, I was going to say, I was reminded of an experience I had. | |
| Here in Houston, we have a non-profit called Leisure Learning, and it's just a non-profit where they offer all sorts of Courses on things like ceramics and knitting and language learning and all sorts of things you might do on your spare time. | |
| And I was going to offer a course at one point at this place. | |
| And to offer a course you have to take a little orientation course. | |
| And so I was at the orientation course and the guy who founded it and who runs it was giving the orientation. | |
| And he noted that on the forms That, before enrolling in the courses, that they offer a substantial discount to seniors and the handicapped. | |
| And he asked around, he said by a show of hands, or to ask people that are in the orientation, why was it that he made this offer? | |
| And a lot of people thought, oh, maybe it was legislated or maybe he had a soft heart for the seniors or for handicapped and that he wanted these people to have access to his courses at a discount. | |
| And he said, no, none of that is true. | |
| He said, part of learning is experiencing life with a broad array of people around you. | |
| And understanding what life is like for them. | |
| And I thought that was an incredibly perceptive method by which to instruct people. | |
| I remember after that experience, about a year later, I became good friends with a man who was 85 years old. | |
| And I would go over to his house and talk to him and everything. | |
| I got a real appreciation for the physical limitations of what it means to be 85 years old. | |
| It's a little different. | |
| So anyway, that's a divergence, but I think that in raising kids, we should expose them to this broad array of different types of people that have Different abilities, especially, you know, my kids get into the gifted and talented program, right? | |
| And so they're in these classes where all the kids read very well and they all have very good families and they live well. | |
| You know, I'm not a rich guy or anything, but I'm certainly not hurting for money and And there are people at her school for which that's true. | |
| And having exposure to the types of challenges that other people face is... | |
| I think it's an important thing to understand in getting on in the world. | |
| I think that's right. | |
| And I think modeling that kind of empathy is so important. | |
| And I have to remind myself... | |
| I'm fairly patient with my daughter, but I do have to remind myself... | |
| That when she gets frustrated, because she's at this age, 18 months, she can run, she can jump, she can all of that, but half the things that she wants to do, she can't do for herself. | |
| She likes playing in the sink, so I'm not always able to sit with her for half an hour while she plays with the bubbles in the sink. | |
| She likes taking baths, but she can't run the bath herself. | |
| She likes going swimming, but she can't initiate these things. | |
| And I try to remember, I try to say to myself, how would my mood be if at least half the things I really wanted to do during the day or really needed during the day were locked away and other people who were very distracted had the keys? | |
| Like I would slowly go insane. | |
| After a while, oh, I need my iPod. | |
| Oh, it's locked away. I've got to go ask for these keys. | |
| Oh, I need my computer. | |
| Oh, the power cord is locked away and I have to go and ask these people for keys. | |
| Like, I would just go insane. | |
| I mean, if I can't find my glasses for five minutes, I get grumpy, right? | |
| And so it's not so much that she gets frustrated. | |
| What's amazing to me is how little she gets frustrated given all of these constraints in what she wants to do versus what she's capable of doing. | |
| Right. Right. | |
| I agree. I'm a chemical engineer by day, and for a while I worked with a control systems engineer who was handicapped, and, you know, it was an ordeal for him just to go to a meeting, | |
| you know, leaving his desk and putting everything that he needed for the meeting in his little knapsack that went on the behind of the wheelchair, and then Getting over to the meeting and everything and just like you said, you're raising a child and they have these limitations that are so foreign to us as adults now. | |
| But getting into the other side of this is that there are certain constraints that are... | |
| That are artificial in a way. | |
| As an example, my daughter is more or less conditioned to ask me for permission to do various things. | |
| And I think you and Stephan Kinsella talked about this, which is the right frame of mind to cultivate is to try to say yes to everything. | |
| And to really try to say, you know... | |
| Am I saying no because it's just inconvenient for me or is there a real legitimate reason to say no to this request? | |
| But also to cultivate in our children a kind of reaching toward deciding when and whether they should ask permission for certain types of things. | |
| As a child I mean, it was a very big deal in our household when we made the decision that we could let our kid go outside and play by herself. | |
| How old was she when you made that decision? | |
| Four years old. Now, we live on a dead-end street, so traffic is less of a concern. | |
| And... She's not the type to run off. | |
| So, you know, a lot of these are individual considerations. | |
| But I think that it was a very freeing element for her to know that she could go in the front yard and skip rope or ride her big wheel around or something like that. | |
| And, you know, she was kind of on her own. | |
| Right. So I think that's a worthwhile goal. | |
| I mean, again, I think it's back to what's the goal of parenting. | |
| And in my view, the goal of parenting is to shepherd someone into adulthood. | |
| And we shouldn't be afraid of getting them there as As fast as they arrive. | |
| And, you know, it's fits and starts. | |
| And sometimes it's, wow, suddenly she's doing this. | |
| And then sometimes it's, gee, you know, why can't I ever go to the mall by myself? | |
| Okay, well, you know, you're not quite old enough yet. | |
| It's a difficult... | |
| Difficult set of decisions to make. | |
| It is, because you want your children to experience risk, but not dangerous risk, right? | |
| I mean, you want them to skin their knee, not, you know, lose an arm. | |
| So, I certainly understand that. | |
| I was just talking about this with my wife the other day, how, I mean, when I was a kid, I have a distinct and clear memory of being five or six years old and just biking all over the neighborhood and going off with my friends and And now, I mean, there's the cliché of the helicopter parent, which I can completely understand, even though the world is a lot safer now for kids in many ways than it ever was when we were kids. | |
| I mean, the toys are safer. | |
| I live on a street that does no through traffic, so it's very little traveled. | |
| So like you, whereas I grew up in an apartment with cars all over the place and And so it has been a really huge change in just a generation from this sort of, in a sense, laissez-faire to this kind of socialist paradise of parental over-involvement that I think is a real challenge. | |
| And I think it's great that you let her do it at four. | |
| I was surprised, but when I didn't compare that to my daughter who's 18 months old in my mind, but I thought, well, when was I doing that kind of stuff? | |
| It's like, yeah, that's sort of about right. | |
| That seems about right. | |
| And I think that kind of encouragement to go and explore and that trust in the judgment of your children is so important. | |
| And the other thing, I don't want to sort of hijack what you're saying, I want to get your feedback on this, but another thing that I was thinking about the other day is the degree to which conflict in a relationship diminishes Proportional to the degree that both people in that relationship really, really like each other. | |
| I think, you know, when you think about crabby couples, you know, the Bickertons or whatever, it's always people who, you know, they just don't like each other very much. | |
| And because they don't like each other very much, they end up getting into all of these conflicts and trying to be one-upping and trying to prove the other person wrong and dominate and so on. | |
| And that sort of feeds the cycle. | |
| And I've really tried as a dad, and I wanted to know what your thoughts are on this. | |
| I've really tried as a dad Not in a fake way, but to be somebody that my daughter really enjoys spending time with, because that way, conflicts seem to be much less. | |
| I mean, because my wife and I love each other so much, we have very little conflict in our marriage, because it's sort of like, what's the point? | |
| We like each other, so why would we fight? | |
| And to try and be somebody who brings a great deal of pleasure and happiness and security and fun and giggles to my daughter means that As you said, your daughter doesn't want to wander off because she really likes spending time with you and your wife and her sister. | |
| In the same way, I just don't find that I get into a lot of conflict with my daughter because she really enjoys my company, she really enjoys my wife's company, and so there just doesn't seem to be that level of conflict. | |
| I think if you take that authoritarian finger-wagging thing I think you lose some of that, I mean, I don't want to say love, because love is kind of assumed, but liking, just really liking someone as an individual, I don't think can really coexist with that finger-wacking authoritarian thing. | |
| What are your thoughts on that? | |
| Yeah, I agree. I think there are a couple of thoughts I have swimming around on that issue. | |
| One is, I'm going to get the quote wrong, so I won't even try it, but there's a quote by Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein, where he talks about courtesy and Courtesy especially towards one's wife. | |
| And it struck me, and one of the things I strive to do in my relationship with my wife, is there's never a time that I should raise my voice at her. | |
| Because, you know, she's in a relationship with me. | |
| I mean, really, we're one team. | |
| And when there's a miscommunication, when somebody lets somebody else down, it's never productive to yell at them. | |
| And so treating people within my family with... | |
| If I were to grade how courteous I am to people in general... | |
| I am the most courteous to the people within my family. | |
| Doesn't that make the most sense? | |
| It's one of the great mysteries in life. | |
| While people who would never yell at a waiter or at their boss will yell at family members, as if the waiter or your boss has anything fundamental and substantial to do with your life happiness compared to the people in your family. | |
| If the people in your family are the bedrock of your life's happiness, the waiter that you yell at is not going to be there holding your hand when you're going into the great beyond at the end of your life. | |
| And so it's always astounded me that people can be incredibly polite. | |
| And good-natured to strangers and then can turn around and treat the people who really matter with such poor standards. | |
| So I'm with you on that. | |
| I mean, I can't treat anyone better than your family. | |
| And so I feel the same way about my kids. | |
| I never yell at my kids. | |
| I try my best to reason with my kids. | |
| Now, of course, there's this The thing is that kids' rationality and reason and time preference is always developing as they age. | |
| And as a result, sometimes you think you might be making a knockdown argument, and it's not really a knockdown argument for them. | |
| So it's a fun little struggle. | |
| I was recently talking to my seven-year-old about the notion of time preference. | |
| And, you know, we could just kind of summarize it in the sense of, would you prefer one lollipop today or two lollipops tomorrow? | |
| Well, sometimes it's one lollipop right now. | |
| Tomorrow never comes, right? | |
| Yeah, it's... | |
| You know, another thing that I wanted to mention that we haven't really talked about, like I said, I like this virtue approach. | |
| And one of the important elements of virtue in an adult is thrift. | |
| And there's actually a somewhat little-known libertarian by the name of Samuel Smiles that wrote a number of very important books One of which is called Self-Help, and in fact it more or less launched the self-help genre. | |
| It was written in the 1850s, and it was really... | |
| I mean, you could argue that it's a blend between history and inspirational literature. | |
| It's a whole bunch of very short vignettes of about a page, Of the story of the man who invented this machine or the man who founded this factory or the man who made his fortune in this trade and followed them from humble beginnings and talked about their thrift and about them saving and persevering and making it. | |
| He published several volumes over time One is called Thrift. | |
| One is, I think, titled Perseverance. | |
| And what's interesting is there's a link there that many libertarians maybe tacitly recognize, but maybe this is one of those thin versus thick libertarianism type things, | |
| but the notion that responsibility is And personal responsibility, in particular, ties into specific virtues such as thrift. | |
| And I recently kind of went through a revolution in personal thrift with my wife a few years ago, and we really got our finances in much better order than I ever thought they would be. | |
| And in terms of Having essentially no debt and having a budget every month and really planning on how we were going to spend our money and where it goes and having a conscious plan. | |
| And once I'm able to do that, then I can teach my kids how to do that. | |
| And so I've done that. | |
| And we have a lot of... | |
| I'm very proud of my younger daughter. | |
| My younger daughter, when she was six, decided she would get a cell phone. | |
| And so I said, do you want to get a cell phone? | |
| She said, yes, I've saved money. | |
| Because she gets a small allowance for doing various chores. | |
| And we teach them that, you know, of their allowance, some of it has to go into the charity money. | |
| You know, they have a little giving... | |
| They have a three-sectioned... | |
| Piggy bank. And so one section is for giving and one section is for saving and one section is for spending. | |
| So saving is, you know, you kind of think about what you're going to buy and kind of make a plan to get there. | |
| Whereas spending is you just pick it up and go get something from the ice cream man. | |
| And she had saved her money and she bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone and a card with minutes. | |
| I said, you know, if you can buy it, then you can have it. | |
| And she had lots of fun calling people and texting people, and then it ran out of minutes, and she didn't have any money left. | |
| So it was a very interesting lesson for her to learn. | |
| That is fascinating. But I was very glad that she went through that, and of course she still has her phone, and every once in a while she'll buy a few minutes, and now she's a little bit more careful with the minutes she uses and so forth. | |
| I just wanted to ask another question. | |
| As one of those crazy, black-suited, bomb-throwing anarchists, Have you had any challenges with playdates and political conversations or other kinds of philosophical conversations that other parents may enter into? | |
| Because my daughter is just starting to do playdates and stuff like that. | |
| I mean, nothing's come up as yet because I can do small talk like with the best of them. | |
| But have you had any situations or how did you handle situations with other parents where significant differences in ideologies come up? | |
| Because obviously you're not exactly mainstream in your belief system. | |
| Yeah, I guess to say that that never really came up as an issue. | |
| Good, so it may be a minefield that's more in my head than in my future, but I just was curious what it would like a little further down the road. | |
| Yeah, you know, I think part of that is that, you know, I'm the primary breadwinner at the house, and When there were play dates for my kids when they were younger, it was usually my wife that would go. | |
| Yeah, it'll be me, because I'm the stay-at-home, so, yeah. | |
| Yeah. Well, now, and then there's the other thing, is that my wife is, of course, also an anarchist, I think. | |
| She's such an anarchist that you can't even put that label on her. | |
| That's how staked she really is. | |
| I don't know what she put on her Facebook. | |
| I know that it doesn't say libertarian or anarchist. | |
| It says something, though. | |
| She's sufficiently libertarian that it's really of no consequence. | |
| We share stories with one another, but they don't usually happen in the context of kids. | |
| Good. That's not so much to worry about then. | |
| Good. Now, if you have any other, I want to be mindful of your time, do you have any other final tips, I guess, for me, selfishly, and also for other people? | |
| I mean, you have daughters who are considerably older than my daughter. | |
| if you had to give me a couple of tips for things to watch out for in the future, is there anything that floats your mind as good road signs to follow? | |
| I certainly don't consider myself an expert on parenting, but... | |
| Certainly more of an expert on parenting daughters than I am at the moment, so I'm willing to... | |
| Oh, okay. Well, yeah. A couple of years on you, right? | |
| Yeah. I'd say... | |
| I think I would kind of redouble my suggestions on reading and discussing with kids the... | |
| Stories of things like Aesop's Fables and Bible stories. | |
| I'm not a man of Christian faith, but I think the Bible stories in particular are very useful to discuss, not just for the moral content, but also it's a trove of Of stories that are often alluded to in other literature. | |
| So it forms a foundation of... | |
| It's a cultural touchstone, for sure. | |
| Exactly. So I've gotten a lot of traction from that. | |
| I have a set of... | |
| I have The Odyssey and I have Beowulf that I've read to my seven-year-old. | |
| There's an adaptation that they have out by, it's the same people who do the, it's the Kingfisher people who do like the Kingfisher encyclopedias and such, and they have the Odyssey and the Iliad and Beowulf and Robin Hood, Arthur, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. | |
| These sorts of stories that It's nice that they have these versions because they're long enough that they can be read over many, many nights of going to bed, but they're not dumbed down to the cartoon level. | |
| They're real literature, but they're accessible to the young. | |
| So I remember reading on the classical method of education, and they recommend... | |
| The Trivium method is to take kids through three cycles of history. | |
| That is, they cover the entire sweep of history from, I don't know, from Homer Erectus to modern days. | |
| And you do that over a four-year cycle. | |
| You do it for four years and then you do it again. | |
| And each time you do it, They gain more knowledge about history and you do the same sorts of things with key pieces of literature like the Odyssey or the Iliad where you expose them at a young age to an adapted form and then when they get to be a teenager they will have already seen it and so when they read the Odyssey In modern translation, | |
| then they know what they're expecting to see. | |
| And they can focus more on the literature than on the mechanics of the story. | |
| And they'll pick up nuances because then they'll start seeing foreshadowing and so forth because they know the basic outline of the story. | |
| And then that prepares them for college when they read it in Greek, of course. | |
| That's right. No, I think that's a good idea. | |
| I certainly found that my daughter is having trouble concentrating on some of the more esoteric passages of John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugs. | |
| Yes, it's strange, yeah. | |
| What I find is if I just feed her enough baby lattes, she does sort of gain the ability to focus on something or just stare fixedly at the book. | |
| But maybe I'll get the abridged version for that. | |
| Well, listen, I wanted to give you the chance as well, because I know that you have a web presence to let my listeners know about places where your works can be found and enjoyed. | |
| You have articles, I think you said, on Lew Rockwell, on Strike the Root, on Anti-War as well? | |
| No, anti-state.com. | |
| Anti-state.com, that's right. | |
| Yeah, and Mises.org and my little piddly Google Sites website. | |
| Well, I'll dig up those links and I'll put them down. | |
| I think that you're somebody well worth reading, and I certainly would recommend your writings to my listeners. | |
| And I really, really wanted to thank you for taking the time for this. | |
| I'm really, really interested in talking to libertarian parents. | |
| I mean, it's useful to me, but I also find that I'm getting a lot of positive feedback. | |
| My pleasure. Thank you. |