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April 15, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:03
1888 The Jeff Tucker Interview Part 2 - From Freedomain Radio

Jeff Tucker and Stefan Molyneux discuss libertarian parenting, economic collapse, rational optimism - and the liberation of technology.

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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is Jeffrey Tucker.
He is the editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, yet another think tank that feels it needs political titles for its executives.
He espouses the Austrian School of Economics, which is economics with Lederhosen and singing in Julie Andrews.
He is the current webmaster for the Institute's website, mises.org, which I highly, highly recommend.
He's also an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and it's an Acton University Faculty member.
That would be Hugh Acton from Atlas Shrugged, if I remember rightly.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
I really don't want anyone to miss the martini glass just behind Jeffrey.
When we first signed on, I did remind him that it was a video, so he took it from upside down off his head and has now placed it in a more civilized.
But it is almost 3 p.m.
in the offices of Mises, so I feel that you're starting late today based upon what I've heard.
So thanks so much for taking the time.
I really appreciate it.
Sure. It's wonderful to be here, Stephan.
It's a real pleasure. Now, we were just talking a little bit before the show.
I've interviewed a number of other prominent libertarian and anarchic thinkers, Steph Kinsella, about the topic of parenting and David Friedman and so on.
Steph Kinsella's unique approach was simply to threaten tort retribution against his children should they be disobedient, which I thought was...
Well, it was unique.
And I think David Friedman simply threatened to keep taking them on Dungeons& Dragons expeditions out to the wilds if they weren't obedient.
But I really think that the idea of the non-initiation of force and, to some degree, property rights, I think has an influence on people's parenting.
And if you could just tell me a little bit about your kids and if you think that it's had any effect on your parenting style.
Yeah, I would say the overall orientation towards favoring liberty as opposed to power has had some influence.
It's taken me a while to think through this, but I look at other parents and a common parenting error is that people imagine that they're creating their children.
Like the child is born and they figure, well, it's just a biological creature.
Now I have to put my stamp on this kid, you know.
And they have always, every parent carries around with them in their head a sense of like, what is my ideal kid?
And they try to turn them into that.
Unfortunately, that means oftentimes fighting against what the kid wants to be.
And so I think that a concern for liberty in general should make parents more deferential to what the child is and is, I would say, is the word created to be.
You know, everybody's an individual.
They have particular aptitudes and interests and talents.
That's not to say that you can't give them anything at all.
You can give them a framework of values and encourage them in what they're good at.
And sometimes if they're not as good at something, you kind of put a lot of pressure on them to show them that they can work hard and become good at something that doesn't come natural to them or whatever.
But nonetheless, always remember That this child is born into the world to be something special and unique.
And that will ultimately be a matter of self-discovery on the child's part.
And it's not anything that the parent can make happen.
You know, when I read about the history of child raising, you can find some very grim stories.
For example, the Puritans in the colonial period.
I mean, we have a lot of documentation on how they raised their children, and it's absolutely grim.
I mean, I don't know how anybody, it must have been a generation of, several generations of nutcases, given their parenting styles.
I mean, they would roll them in balls and kick them around the floor until they complied with their dictates and things like that.
This is very common. Yeah, when you start to dig into the history of childhood and a website I recommend for that is psychohistory.com, you can find some truly chilling examples of the degree to which early childhood experiences have effects on later political thoughts.
I mean, to take an egregious example, There was this practice when Hitler was a child called swaddling or binding, where they didn't have time to deal with their infants.
So they basically would just swaddle them, sometimes for hours or days at a time, hang them on hooks to keep them out of the way, and they would actually get lice and other sorts of vermin in there.
And so when Hitler would rail against the Jews as a form of lice, it would have a visceral and physical reaction among the Germans.
A lot of his metaphors were taken from early childhood experience, the ranting, screaming father and all this sort of stuff.
So this kind of collective insanity is hard to understand.
I know Rand and Picoff in Ominous Parallels tried to explain it from a purely philosophical standpoint, which I think has great value.
But I think the missing piece a lot of time is to look at early childhood experiences and see the degree to which it has a massive effect on people's later political attitudes.
One thing I think parents can learn to do is to remember they're not infallible.
You know, the parental-child relationship is potentially a dangerous one in the sense that you have a great deal of power over another human being.
And that's usually not good for people to actually have that kind of Power over another.
So we have to think of it as a sense of responsibility.
I never have any problem apologizing to my children when I've lost my temper or made a bad decision or given bad advice or ignored them or whatever.
You just say, look, I'm really very sorry that was wrong.
I'm fallible and I shouldn't have done that.
You know, there's nothing at all wrong with apologizing and admitting your problems.
The other thing is, as soon as possible, I do think it's important to treat your children not so much like children but almost like colleagues in a sense.
You have to respect their sense of personhood and talk to them as if they're mature people in order to make them mature properly.
Having children sort of be part of an adult world and not, you know, one of the terrible things about public school, I mean, public school is like a prison-like situation where you have these, you have the wardens and their only colleagues are people of their own age, so they never get examples of people who are a little bit older and a little bit younger, so they don't learn compassion for children.
For young people, and they don't learn maturity from older people.
And they think of adults as just being a bunch of dictators.
I mean, this is what happens in the public school setting.
So you get them out of that setting and get them mixing more with older kids, younger kids, people of all ages, adults of all ages.
And sure enough, you know, if you do that, the child can both preserve onto the beautiful aspects of childhood longer and then also interact with adults in a more responsible way.
Public schools have been, I think, a disaster for children's socialization generally.
Well, I think that's very true.
I agree with you.
Yeah, I certainly agree with you that treating your children as responsible and mature as soon as...
It really struck me.
My daughter is 20, 27 months, so she's still a knee-high to a grasshopper.
But even as early as 18 or 19 months, she began to make decisions for herself that I didn't agree with, but she was right about.
So, for instance, could she jump from the couch to the carpet?
Well, of course, I'm so used as a parent, and I'm a full-time parent for the most part, I'm so used as a parent to keeping her safe that that was very much like, hey, you want to jump out of an airplane?
Good luck with that parachute.
I just didn't, I really had a tough time letting her do it, but I really had to trust her judgment, and she's been right.
She's been right. So, deferring to your child's judgment, Can occur as early as a year and a half or a little bit older.
And that stuff is really interesting, the degree to which it's more of a dance and less of a dictate.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
More of a dance and less of a dictatorship.
And also you can preserve this relationship with your children longer as they get older.
As children reach the teenage, they start to pull away from the parents and that's normal and that's natural and we have to expect that and anticipate that.
But you can keep your ties there longer if they can look back at a childhood in which they were respected even at the earliest ages.
If they were treated As a person of dignity, with a volition that should be respected and deferred to as often as possible.
That's not to say they should be spoiled.
I mean, there's an opposite error here, I think.
But nonetheless, if you can think of them as a person just like you, that's not always easy for some reason.
Difficult with this. I do think the core error is that parents are under the impression that they are creating a child in the same way that a central planner believes that he or she is creating an economy.
You can't mold people like that.
I mean, any more than you can design a centrally planted economy, which is an enormously complex thing.
The individual person is enormously complex.
Parents sometimes forget that it's not only about what the child does.
There's a lot going on in a child that you never see, and it's all up here.
And you can't see that. It's invisible.
And the child always exercises total control over what goes on in the You can control maybe what their hands and their feet do or where they're walking and even to some extent what they're saying but the real activity of a child's life is all invisible to you and it's all up here.
We have to remember that and defer to that and remember that we can't control that nor should we try.
And you certainly can't get access to another person's soul through authority, through any sort of top-down hierarchy.
You can get access to their physical compliance or whatever, but you can't get access to who another human being is, except through curiosity and persistence and respect.
And that's another thing. I mean, we very much, as parents, want our children to do certain things sometimes.
And remembering that, as you say, we're not always right.
That they actually may have better ideas than we do in the moment is a humbling experience.
I think that people who've come from an entrepreneurial background who recognize that the child is just another kind of customer and you wouldn't order your customers around in business and you wouldn't order your children around in the family, I think those two things work really well.
I try to think of them as co-workers.
I have colleagues here at the Mises Institute, and I would never go into another person's office and bite their head off or denounce them or try to humiliate them or threaten them with some sort of severe punishment or anything like that.
I mean, you don't want to do that.
You will pay the price later.
I mean, the person will still be suffering from that.
Yeah, and it's not like your work colleagues are going to be holding your hand on your deathbed or anything.
I mean, we should treat our children with even greater respect as our spouses and our friends even than work colleagues because, you know, work colleagues to some degree come and go and there's It's a sort of calculation of mutual utility, although there can be friendship as well.
But the real relationships in our lives are the ones where we should lay the most gold down, I think.
And I think sometimes people forget that.
You often see people treating strangers or waiters, waiters of all people.
You see people treating waiters better than those who are close to them, which I just find a complete reversal of values.
I like what you said about how you want to aspire to have your children respect you, not just fear you.
I remember there's a scene in Godfather, I think it's Godfather 3.
So that's your next template for my parenting life, his parenting ideals to Godfather 3.
Well, you know, I think Michael's over the grave at the cask of his father and he's crying and he says something like, how come you were so respected and I'm merely feared, you know?
I don't know, that was a poignant moment for me because I thought, yeah, we should aspire to be respected and not just feared.
Fear is grim.
Fear and power are somehow related aren't they?
Well, sure. And what fear and power do is they will get you an immediate effect, but at the cost of your long-term happiness.
I mean, it's as simple as if I want a car, I can either sort of work to buy it over months or years, or I can just go and steal it.
So breaking the moral code will get you the immediate results that you want.
And like people who are, you know, you socialize the healthcare system and the people who don't have insurance who are sick are going to get a lot of benefits in that moment.
But it's at the cost, of course.
of the long-term happiness and keeping your eye on the long-term is the real trick, I think, of trying to live a virtuous life because it's balanced to some degree.
You know, Stephan, another thing, this is just a quirk of mine, but I always try to surprise my children and kind of go contrary to their expectations of the way parents should be.
So I've been encouraging, for example, I have a daughter who's now 16 and who actually happens to be in college at Auburn University, but I've been encouraging her for years to start smoking.
And she just doesn't want to smoke.
And it's kind of been this ongoing thing, you know.
I used to be, and I'm a strong believer that if you're going to smoke, you need to do it when you're young because there's going to come a time when you can't smoke anymore because I can't smoke indoors here at the office.
It's hard on the lungs. As you get older, you can't handle it as much.
But when you're young, your lungs are fresh.
You're full of energy. You're outdoors a lot.
You've got cool things to do.
It's the time to smoke. It's the time to drink.
So I'm always encouraging her to do these things, and she kind of resists me.
So I'm always buying her gifts like cigarette holders.
Hopefully it's those long ironed ones that go out about a foot and a half or whatever, right?
So I'll buy her a cigarette holder.
She laughs at it and shows it to her friends.
And people ask me, how can you encourage your daughter to smoke?
What do you think is so good about smoking out?
My answer is simple. It's cool.
That's it. It's just very cool.
I'm not a conventional parent, I guess you could say.
My father smoked a pipe for some years, and then he ended up with this complete long ass, like Hobbit pipe, you know, that just went out like three feet.
And my mom asked him why he had a pipe that was so long.
And he said, well, my doctor asked me to stay away from tobacco.
So, of course, that's his solution.
That's very funny. So, how many kids do you have?
I have four. You have four kids?
Wow. And this was before the Catholic conversion.
Of course, right? It must be. Because afterwards, I think they attempt to get you to recharge the ranks.
That's my understanding as a layperson.
And what are their age ranges?
Well, the oldest one is 16, and the other one just turned 9.
I guess now she just turned 8.
Yeah. So they all play piano.
They all play violin. I encourage computer use.
I encourage them to learn how to type.
Creativity as much as possible.
And as I say, pursuing whatever it is that interests you and doing an excellent job in whatever you do.
I'd say that's my general parenting principles.
It's not complicated. And try to keep peace and happiness in the home as much as possible.
That's the goal.
And what happens after this?
I don't know, Stephanie. You said you have a little girl, right?
And she's two years old?
Just over, yeah. Yeah, and at some point, you know, she's going to become something very different from what you might have anticipated.
And I think, you know, I'm preparing myself for that.
I think every parent does.
We just have to recognize that our children are going to make their own choices, you know?
It could be a different religious choice.
It could be different musical choices, aesthetic choices, choices of who their friends are, who they believe they are, where they came from.
You know, that's the way people are made.
They're all made as individuals.
And I think it's a wonderful thing to bring children into the world and then we have to let them go again.
Now, when it came to educating your children about conclusions that you've come to that are somewhat out of the mainstream around economics in the state, how did you approach that when they sort of come home and say, "Daddy, it's very, very important for you to go and vote because we need to maintain our freedoms"?
Yeah.
You get a facial tick and just start drinking again?
No, it's funny.
I've never, ever set out to turn my children into libertarians.
I've never wanted to do that.
I've heard stories about people reading Human Action when they're nine or whatever.
I just find that whole thing just a little bit ridiculous.
I actually set out to more or less hide my political views from my children because I really believe that they should Think for themselves.
But it turns out to be impossible.
My oldest is very glib and smart.
She teases me about it.
She says, yeah, Dad, you were really good at hiding your politics from me.
She was a devoted anarchist by the time she was 11.
It's very funny.
But they asked me what my politics are, what my views on politics are.
I would tell them what I tell everybody else.
My view is that you shouldn't kill And you shouldn't steal.
And I don't think anybody should do that, including these people who call themselves the state.
So that's the summary of it.
I don't see what's so objectionable about that or even radical, really.
Oh, people always agree in principle.
It's the application of that principle that they have trouble with, right?
I mean, yes, I agree I should lose 10 pounds on principle, but putting down the Snickers bar is a whole other thing.
But, you know, my children have also absorbed my political views.
I should say they know what they are because, first of all, my middle girl, Margot, has read Bourbon for Breakfast cover to cover, which is just funny to me.
Sorry, for those who don't know, that's your book that you've come out.
It's out as an e-book as well as a print book.
Sure, sure, sure.
Yeah, e-book and print and I haven't done audio yet.
And I've got There's another one coming out soon.
It's called It's a Jetson's World.
I'm very excited about this, but I think it's an even better book.
But a lot of the stories in Bourbon for Breakfast actually take place in the home because I was busy discovering all the ways in which the state has sort of ruined everything around the household.
Like, why aren't the toilets working?
How come I vaguely recall very hot water?
What happened to the hot water in my house?
How come my showers aren't getting as much water coming down out of these things as they used to?
So I would do things like experiments and I would take buckets and hold them under the shower and turn on the shower head and test to see how many gallons per minute I was getting, comparing that to EPA regulations and then drilling out the shower head and seeing how that affected things and comparing it to the old standards and write stories about Government regulations are running our households in ways we don't entirely understand.
I take them on experiments with me.
I remember being very curious about Whether or not it was okay to steal from an olive bar at the grocery store.
Now, you're in the grocery store.
They've got olives sitting out there.
They look so delicious.
It's so easy to just walk up and put one in your mouth, and yet is that theft?
And so I began to get curious about this.
Before I asked the management about this, I had my children...
Stake out the olive bar in the store, and we hid behind the bread counter, the donut counter, one was over here behind the wine, and we watched from all four directions, all making careful notes to see how many people were stealing from the olive bar.
And we did this empirical test like this, and so we came up with numbers and ran them and all this kind of thing.
And after we did that, it took a good afternoon.
It was lots of fun. Lots of fun.
I went to the management and asked the store management, is it okay?
Here's what we found, the number of people that are taking olives out of the olive bar.
What do you think about this?
And I got four different answers.
I mean, like the head of the bakery said, oh, listen, that's just outright theft.
Anybody that would do that is just criminal.
The manager of the wine department said, I think it's fantastic.
When people take from the olive bar, that means they're going to buy more, you know.
So different people had different attitudes, and most of the people were just laughing about it.
I mean, it seemed to be a vague tolerance, actually, towards free samples, basically, is what it came to.
Not stealing, really, it turns out, but more like free samples.
But anyway, I take my children on little experiments like that, and it's fun.
And it's fun. I think the image struck me, if you've ever seen the film The Matrix, that when you were talking about this sort of web of regulations that we live in that interfere between us and sort of basic tangible reality, like how much water can we have coming out of our shower?
A gross example is I think here in Canada they reduced the amount of water that you could flush in your toilet, which as far as I understand it simply means everything becomes a double flush, which I think is actually wasting more water.
But it just sort of struck me that this web of regulations that surround us, it's like...
It's like the hairnetting around some guy who's making your fast food.
It changes the shape of his hair in a way that you wouldn't know what it looks like otherwise.
It is fascinating to imagine what the world would look like without this just tight, almost invisible, faint mesh of regulations that controls and regulates everything about our existence.
That's what the book is focused on.
Is that right? Yeah, that's the focus on issue after issue.
I mean, things like, why don't our dishwashers work as well?
Why do our clothes washers not work as well?
Why is our water in our houses not as hot as it used to be?
And I found, you know, a government regulation on every one of these things.
I mean, slowly, by piecemeal, little by little, they're degrading the quality of life and unraveling all the things we identify with civilization.
Just this morning, I was researching about a subject of the phosphorus in dishwasher detergents.
And I don't know if you know about this subject.
It's remarkable. I mean, phosphorus was the first chemical compound discovered since the ancient world and was discovered in the 17th century.
And one of the things it's used for is to get dishes unbelievably clean.
And it's always been in dishwasher detergent.
Within the last 12 months, it's been phased out of dishwasher detergent.
And over the last six months, the Consumer Reports has just a flood of complaints about how the dishwashers aren't working anymore.
Well, it's not the dishwashers.
It's a stupid detergent.
Totally a result of government regulations.
Creeping a little bit of time starts with the lobbying organizations implemented in one state, falls, goes to another.
There's a kind of a rush of regulations.
17 states did it.
Then the federal government gets interested in the subject.
And even before the regulation takes place, Detergent manufacturers eliminated the phosphorus from the soaps and now our dishes are full of grit and grime.
But who knows this? You know, I mean, you're at home, you run your dishwasher through one time and you pick up the thing and you go, God, I just bought this dishwasher.
This glass looks like hell, you know, and you blame the company.
And then you run it twice or you wash it by hand, thus causing probably a lot more pollution than was designed to be eliminated, right?
But that's hidden. Whereas the phosphorus is visible.
And that's, of course, the huge problem with the state is that it completely reverses the great challenge of economics, of course, is always to see what is invisible rather than what is obvious, right?
So, you know, minimum wage laws, as we talked about in the last show, minimum wage laws, some people are going to be happy because they get more money.
And they'll be like, yay, good for us.
But all the people who don't get a job or who lose their job will not be aware of it or will only be vaguely aware of it.
And therefore, you always get this concentrated group of Who are always baying for the expansion of state power because the people who are losing out, they're dispersed, they're not aware of what's going on, and this is one of the ways in which...
So this, you know, people just wash it twice, but that's not noticeable because that doesn't show up, whereas, you know, phosphorus, you can measure it in the water table or whatever, so that's more visible.
And that's the great tragedy, is how much of this invisible stuff we don't see, and all of these regulations and their unintended consequences mostly just vanish in people's minds.
That's right, and I'm very curious about these subjects, and I think we all should be.
If you find something that doesn't really work very well in your home, look up the Federal Register and find out if there's a government regulation that's actually controlling this, and chances are there are.
When I was younger, I used to get, when I first started arguing free markets and so on, I used to constantly get, you know, market failure.
It's always you hear market failure.
And I used to go and look this stuff up and always you'd find that there'd be some law, some rule, some regulation, some statute, some whatever, some union or something that prevented it from working or prevented the market from satisfying whatever need there was.
Or somebody who had, you know, like one guy living in a tiny town wants a multiplex theater and he calls it market failure when, you know, when the movie makers or the movie guys don't want to come and build a big multiplex in his town.
And so now I just say market failure, regulation or lack of demand.
I don't even bother going to look it up anymore because once you've looked up the same story a hundred times, it's the same story.
You don't need to, right? Yeah, no, that's right.
I'm going to move the screen just a little bit if you don't mind.
Let me just pull this over.
There we go. That way I can look at you and look at the camera at the same time.
Okay. No, I mean, this whole myth of market failure, I mean, what it really comes down to is economists wanting some result is not being achieved, you know, because people don't want that result or regulation.
I mean, that's an excellent summary of what's going on.
A friend of mine who would argue this with me, we were in a bar, a disco one night when I was in my teens, and he went to go and ask a woman to To go out with him or to go dance with him or whatever.
And he came back crestfallen because she had rejected him.
And I said, of course, oh dear, market failure.
We need a law.
We need a regulation to even this out a little bit.
Anyway, sorry. Yeah, no, that's right.
Everybody looks to the state to make all dreams come true, but of course it only brings about terrible nightmares.
And the tragedy of modern regulations, you know, it's at least in the Soviet system, they announced, we will make the perfect society, you know?
But in the United States, we just get these little piecemeal dictates that are kind of wrecking our lives in ways we don't entirely understand.
I mean, it's grim and it's brutal and it's truly unraveling.
Things like hot water at home.
I'm going to change this back the way it was.
I think it worked better. I don't know if that's making it look any different for you.
But things like hot water in our homes.
This is absolutely essential to getting our bodies clean, our clothes clean.
This is just a triumph of civilization that we have hot water running our houses.
And now, thanks to government regulations, these hot water heaters are shipped with a default temperature of like 110, which isn't nearly high enough to get things clean.
I mean, that's high enough to breed terrible bacteria and germs, but it's not high enough to clean things.
Or really run a household well.
So you have to go into the hot water heater and change the setting if you're going to make any progress at your home.
But how many people know that?
I mean, very few. If you've read my book, you know it.
But I mean, not many people know how to do this.
And their lives are being degraded by the day.
And they blame the market, right?
Because they say, oh, the dishwashers or the soap manufacturers or there's, you know, always you end up with this middleman called the market that's the whipping boy for everybody's dissatisfactions.
Though when you trace it back, it's always to some initiation of force on the state side.
Yeah, yeah, almost in every single case, that's true.
We need to somehow publicize this a little bit more.
We talked, last time you and I visited, and by the way, I've really enjoyed our conversations.
I mean, it's funny, you're kind of a star in my mind.
I've been watching your videos for, I don't know how, you know, a couple of years.
So you know the room, right?
Well, the room is great, but you have this talent that I don't have.
There's a German word for it, the ability to speak in paragraphs.
It comes with an extreme high level of intelligence.
I mean, that's very impressive you've got that.
I enjoy watching you, and I like your language.
You're such a careful thinker and a rigorous thinker.
Thank you. And I like the universe that you've put together for your message just single-handedly.
I mean, there's no institutional support or anything.
It's magnificent. And in any case, what I wanted to say was the last time we visited, we talked about the digital universe as being a kind of frontier of freedom for now.
I mean, for the most part.
And you can observe how much sort of better the digital world works than the real world, than the physical world.
And the main reason, I think, the difference between the two is that one is, by and large, the absence of government regulations, and the other is just overwhelmed with this, as you call this, netting, or this web of government regulations that's controlling everything.
And we have this state, I think you made one wonderful video about it, I mean, the state is still operating today as if it's the 1930s.
You know? It's like nothing's really changed for these people.
It's just this... You know, they regulate, they push us around like some old-time feudal order or something like that.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world, insofar as we're free to do so, has moved on to create, in effect, a completely separate universe that lives in the cloud.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I had another thought after we talked yesterday about how...
A state, to me, fundamentally, it's a state of mind.
I mean, the state is first, it's a mental construct, which then has manifestations in the real world.
And it comes out of education and it comes out of parenting and other kinds of things.
But the one thing that is required really for a country to maintain itself is a common mythology.
And one thing that the internet does, and it has struck me as very similar to...
You know, what the Gutenberg Press did in the 15th and 16th centuries when Martin Luther was able to translate the Bible into the vernacular from the ancient Greek and Latin and then spread it around Christendom.
Of course, there was quite a lot of convulsions in religious warfare as people wrestled for control over Scripture.
And of course, because Scripture was so bound into the nature of the state, anybody who got hold of the state got to impress their version of religion on everyone else.
So there was a lot of war around that, which is, I think, why they eventually had to pry these two apart because together they're You can have them together if there's a uniformity, but once there's individuality, once there's individual conscience with regards to philosophy or religion, then you can't have a unified nation-state because there's too much individuality.
And one of the things that is, I think, occurring, people are talking a lot about the growing lack of civility and the growing extremity or extremities within US politics, and it's not just US politics, it's also occurring in Europe.
And I think the internet has a huge amount to do with that.
I mean, when you had, when I was growing up, there were three, but functionally two television stations, which were all licensed by the state.
So you got the same message over and over, reinforced, reinforced.
And things did change, but it was so slow and so on.
Like it would take... Eight years of disasters in Vietnam for Walter Cronkite to go, hmm, you know, maybe this isn't so good.
Whereas now, I mean, even before the war starts, you have protests against it and many divergent.
Where on earth could you have found in the Second World War, pictures of German civilian casualties?
Whereas, of course, you can go to Al Jazeera, you can go to any website that deals with this sort of stuff and see all of that stuff now.
I think there's been such an explosion of multifaceted approaches to information that the very concept of a mythological unified country, I think, is breaking up.
Now, I think we hopefully want to make sure that it breaks up in a way that is more towards individuality and less towards sort of warring tribes of Mohawk guys on motorcycles.
But I think that that also is an effect that technology has.
But Stephanie, you know, the more contact we have with other people, the more we get along with them.
I mean, essentially, I think human conflict is enhanced by a lack of contact with people.
I mean, the more we know about people, the more...
I mean, I can tell you stories here in Auburn, you know, there are schools in town that say no Catholics allowed.
And, you know, I'll go in there and say, gosh, you know, I'd really like maybe to consider your school, but I'm Catholic.
And they'll say, oh, well, we've really liberalized that position.
Well, if you ask, okay.
If you're scared up by the sign, okay.
But if you ask, you're in, right?
So, I mean, just the fact that you can go to them and say, look, I'm a Catholic and a human being, they back down, you know?
And I think it's true.
I mean, that model is expanded all over the world.
The more contact we're having with more different kinds of people, the more we're tolerant.
I mean, it's a matter of trade.
I mean, trade breeds a kind of social piece.
And the opportunities for working together with people all over the world now are just exploding.
I mean, like they've never happened anywhere else in all of human history.
We have a Mises Academy, which is a kind of online university, and one of the modules was broken.
And nowadays, as you know, tech work is so specialized.
I mean, there's no such thing as, oh, I'm a computer guy.
There's no such thing. I mean, you have specializations.
I needed to get this darn thing fixed.
I didn't know who was going to fix it, so I blogged about it, put it up on our Facebook.
I said, you know, we've got this certain module in our Moodle platform that's running on a Linux server that needs to be fixed, and nobody can seem to fix it.
Anybody can help. And I got an email from a guy whose name I can't remember.
It's something like Maui Tui, but I can't even pronounce the name.
And he said, I can fix it.
I said, great. Well, I had to leave the office at that time, so I was going home.
I gave him my Skype number.
He called me on my Skype.
I pulled over to the side of the road, and I was looking at this man whose complexion was as dark as anything I'd ever seen in my life, with the strangest accent I'd ever seen in my life.
And I said, hello, it's great to see you.
And he said, where are you?
I said, well, I'm in my car. And he said, well, I'm in my apartment.
He showed me around his apartment with his Skype thing, you know, and it looked like a hut somewhere.
I said, where are you?
He said, well, I'm in Australia.
I said, in Sydney. He goes, oh, I'm nowhere near a big city.
I'm out here in the far country.
I thought, I can't believe this is happening.
Well, I said, look, you think you can fix that plug-in?
You go for it. And I gave him some log-ins.
Well, next morning I got up, I had a message that it's all been fixed.
That's amazing. Stephen, this all happened in a matter of hours.
I never knew this guy.
How would I have known?
And yet he can work for me.
And we can cooperate. And I tell you, I call him from time to time, check in, see how he's doing.
We're friends now. You know, we're like digital friends, you know?
And my webmaster's in Shanghai.
We've got the head of the Mises Academy in Thailand.
I mean, it's great.
For human cooperation and just a global sense of peace that people are coming together this way.
And I don't know what the nation state has to do with this.
I mean, absolutely nothing. I mean, the nation state is an absurdity.
As you say, it's an anachronism that predates the technological revolution.
I don't see how it can survive like this.
I mean, I feel a much stronger community with the global readers of Mises work than I do, you know, with some people who live in my own subdivision.
I mean, this is the world we're entering into and the kind of world that your daughter is being raised in.
What kind of attachment are these people going to have to the nation state?
And when some bonehead politician gets up there waving the flag and talking about our wonderful wars or whatever and how America has to stand up for our country, you just kind of look at it.
You're an idiot. I mean, that's sort of the response you have.
And I think I just wanted to share with people the, I think that the moral behind Jeff's story there is offer to fix something on Mises and you get complete backdoor access.
And I think that's, you know, so if you're a hacker, no, I'm kidding.
That's the handout password.
It works.
It works.
I've had a history in my life of being more confrontational than I certainly feel at the And I think part of that has to do with just mellowing out when you sort of get older.
But I also think that since I've consistently put forward the idea that true progress from them, particularly from a moral standpoint, which is really what we're talking about, basically, it's not the efficiency of the free market, it's the virtue of property and the non-aggression principle that fundamentally, I think, motivates most libertarians.
If it is a multi-generational process to really change this, then, you know, upfront in your face confrontation is, I think, less productive than I may have thought of in the past.
So I just want to share that something I'm sort of mulling over.
It's an interesting thing.
You might be right.
A lot of it has to do with personal style.
In my own book, some people have said that they really like my book because it doesn't do this confrontation.
It's not this kind of in-your-face taxation is theft again and again.
But rather it's more anecdotal and it's funny, I'm told.
I don't know. People have different rhetorical talents and skills.
I wrote an article in that book about Mises had a different style from Hayek, who had a different style from Rothbard, who had a different style from Rand, so maybe it takes all different kinds.
But let me tell you something else interesting that happened recently.
I had the occasion to interview at great length an Islamic scholar, a Muslim.
Who is a real expert on the history of Islamic attitudes towards trade.
And I was very intrigued by this interview because, you know, Americans seem to have problems nowadays with Muslims.
And the new communists, you know, this new Cold War, you know, is going on.
And I enjoyed talking to him at great length because, you know, he's obviously against fundamentalism and he's for a kind of Islamic liberalism, as you and I might call it.
And we talked at length about this period between the year 740 and about 1540 in Spain when Jews and Christians and Muslims and even Buddhists lived all side by side.
And they shared cultures with each other.
The Jews brought a sense of devotion to scholarship and merchant craft.
And Islam brought then the greatest technology in the world.
And also all the writings of the ancient philosophers, all of which the Christians had somehow mysteriously misplaced.
And the Christians brought a kind of moral discipline, you know.
And these kind of forces all came together to build what was, in the 12th century, in the 13th century, the most prosperous cities in the whole world.
Just for one second, because this is a thesis I have consistently, which is that the And of course, they had the recent experience of the Roman Empire, which meant that's not centralized power at all, right?
So they wanted to keep away from that.
And so you get this incredible liberalization, this division of labor, which is to some degree cultural and religious.
So you get this amazing explosion of productivity.
And what is that used to fuel?
Just as it was used to fuel in England, and just as it was used to fuel in the United States, It's used to fuel empire.
This is the great tragedy of having a growing free market while you still have a government, as the government will just feast on those goodies and use it to control more and more people usually overseas.
Okay, end of thesis, so please go on with your story.
The first person who brought that point up to me was Hans Hoppe, and it's a terrifying one.
Yeah, the more prosperous society is, the more prosperous the government gets, and the more it fuels the empire.
It's terrible. But anyway, I enjoy talking to you about this because it helps you imagine what our future could be like.
You know, different peoples borrowing from each other, learning from each other, and cooperating and sharing and creating great trading relationships that build beautiful civilizations.
But the important thing is the human contact, or just I should say the contact, the opportunity to gain from association with each other.
The more we can create opportunities for this all around the world, the greater the chances of peace and prosperity really are.
Well, hating abstractions is depressingly easy, but hating actual human beings is, except for very few, very disturbed people, is very hard.
So the more we can do face-to-face contact, I think the harder it will be to maintain all these ancient fears and hatreds and superstitions about the other.
So I think that what you're doing is...
And it's true, even in a religious sense, because...
Ron Paul's new book, actually, has a very interesting chapter on religious tolerance.
And he marches through all the moral systems of all the main world religions and points out that they're almost identical.
And it's just basically the natural law.
and that the religious wars come about mostly because of the state but also because of tiny points of doctrine that somehow have an exaggerated place in people's minds that don't actually matter.
But that the moral systems of all the world religions are more or less the same.
I mean, it comes down to the things we talked about.
Don't steal, don't kill, have respect for others.
And the more people can associate with each other, the more they can learn from each other and begin to appreciate all the ways in which we really share so much in common.
Well, listen, I've taken up an enormous chunk of your afternoon, and I, of course, fully understand that you really need to keep pounding back some more martinis before the drive home and hand out some more passwords to strangers in Australia.
But thank you so much for your time.
It's a real pleasure. I'm glad we had a chance to do it again.
The audio quality is, of course, much, much better here.
And have yourself a wonderful weekend.
Stefan, thank you so much, and thank you for all that you do.
And I hope that we get a chance to do this again.
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
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