All Episodes
Previous Next
July 15, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:03
1953 Vegas Baby! - Jeffrey Tucker on Freedomain Radio, Volume 3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everybody. It's DeFan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I am here with Jeffrey Tucker, who has taken time out of bohemian decadence in Vegas to give a chance for his cells to recharge, for some of the alcohol to leave his body.
And he's going to have a brief chat with us today.
Thanks, Jeff. Right. He left out the showgirls, you know, and the gambling and all that kind of stuff.
Well, I feel that saying that you're cavorting with showgirls is like saying you're wearing a bowtie.
I think the evidence is just assumed.
It's just taken for granted. So, the first thing I wanted to mention was that you have a new book out.
It's a collection of essays called It's a Jetson's World.
And I've been plowing through it with great interest.
And I just wanted to point out that the writing is so elegant.
I really feel it should come with it.
Every book should come with its own bowtie.
And perhaps even a monocle or a parrot, something like that, to help people to understand just what elegant writing is.
So thank you for writing it. I'm really, really enjoying it.
I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about the book, where people can get it from, and so on.
Yes, well, you can get it from Amazon, of course.
You can get it from Misesorg, too.
You can download it for free, if you want to, and just sample it and see what you think.
If you don't like it, then sorry I wasted a few minutes.
If you do like it and you're happy with the digital version, keep it.
If you want a physical version for whatever reason, you're welcome to buy it.
But I like the book.
I think it turned out just fine.
I like it ever more since I've heard your audio recordings of the first couple of chapters.
I'm starting to like it even more.
So thank you for doing that. Oh, it's my pleasure.
I feel that there's a lot of, I mean, my instinct sort of in reading it is that there's a lot of passion a little bit underneath the surface.
I mean, you're talking about a lot of really surface things, which I think are really interesting.
I really, really enjoyed the chapter on there's no such thing as homemade ice cream when thinking of the mammoth amount of apparatus you'd need from smelting factories to electricity plants and so on to produce your ice cream at home.
No refrigeration, nothing like that.
And then there seems, at the end of the chapters, I feel that there's this passion bubbling up, this revolutionary zeal, and then it sort of gets very civilized at the end.
I wonder if you felt that at all when you were writing it.
Yeah, I don't know. It's not a gimmick.
I think it's kind of the way I think, actually.
You know, to understand something about liberty is like a gift, you know, and it's like this thing you carry around with you everywhere you go.
So you look at things normally at first, and then you look again, and you think, this is extraordinary.
And you think, why is it extraordinary?
And the mind starts to turn.
So this happens to me just constantly, really, as I'm just sort of navigating the normal world.
So what happens to me when I begin to write is I'll kind of think about it a little bit more, and then I'll put some more pieces into place.
You know, I'll think, oh, Think of an additional point and imagine how it might be different, how these mundane things might be different if the structure of our society were different.
And then I begin to obsess about it.
And pretty soon I just have to write the darn thing up or else I can't sort of move on in life.
So that's pretty much how all these things kind of come about.
It's a series of obsessions.
So I think if I understand this correctly, writing for you is a therapeutic form of OCD exorcism.
Like, if you can't get it out, it's sort of like beating the Bible of prose against your chest and saying, out, out, demon, out!
Or something like that. The other day I wrote this essay about warehouses.
And it came about because I had visited a warehouse about six months ago and I realized that I couldn't stop thinking about the experience.
I kept thinking about it and imagining it and sort of wishing I was there.
And I had this picture in my mind and it all became more and more coherent to me.
And I began to obsess about it, so I just had to write it.
And I compared the warehouse to a medieval monastic situation, or perhaps with the physical properties of a cathedral with a certain sort of contemplative busyness about it.
And thinking about just the role the warehouse plays, In the world today, which is so extraordinary.
And then I began to ask other people, have you ever been to a warehouse?
And everybody said, no, I've never been to a warehouse.
So I thought, you know, I could actually do a service by writing an essay on what a warehouse is like and how wonderful it is.
So I was so gratified afterwards to get, like, floods of email from people who work in warehouses.
They said, oh, you captured it just exactly right and made me appreciate my job evermore.
So those are really gratifying emails to get.
Well, I think that's right. And I think there's a lot of people in the modern economy who are, I say, mere consumers.
They don't realize that the majority of economic activity is actually business to business.
I mean, I, in my sort of entrepreneurial career, I was fortunate enough to be able to tour factories all throughout the U.S. and in China as part of sort of the software company that I co-founded when I was working with pretty large companies, Nortel, General Mills, IBM. And I saw a huge amount of the economic activity that goes on Out of the sight of people.
You know, it's like the mall behind the mall and the airport behind the mall behind the mall and the mine behind the airport behind the mall.
They don't understand that what you see is such a tip of the iceberg and there's so much that's taken for granted that goes to assemble what you get in your hot little hands.
Yeah. And I don't know if you have the same sense of it that I do, but I find it beautiful to look at production.
To look at the coordination that goes on and just the absence of the central planner.
Yes, there are managers that help things along, but there's no dictator that mandated this warehouse exists or that warehouse exists or that this consumer buy that product or that entrepreneur start that business or anything.
Ultimately, you know, all productivity takes place in an environment that really can be described as anarchistic.
And to observe the kind of order that emerges out of that.
I don't know. I'm constantly enraptured by it.
I can't say that I entirely understand it.
And so part of why I write these things is trying to come to an understanding of how Such beauty can exist in the world, and yet it's so unappreciated.
And the most successful companies are the ones that allow for as much spontaneous market order as they can.
I mean, for instance, at Walmart, if you're an employee, you can decide to order whatever you want and put it on sale.
So, for instance, you may be some manager at a Walmart in a small town, and maybe some small town local actor has a part in In a Hollywood movie, well, you're obviously going to sell many more in that town, so you can order, you know, four times or five times the amount, put them on sale, and nobody questions it.
You can just go in and pump it in, and you're completely open to be an entrepreneur within the Walmart, and the degree to which this stuff is all decentralized is the degree to which you get this amazing productivity and price reductions.
That's interesting. You know, there must be truth in what you say.
I mean, even a company like Google must permit a great deal of sort of internal entrepreneurship.
It would have to. That's very true.
In fact, Google, you can identify any problem you want and apply any resources that you want to solve it.
There's no I don't want to interrupt what you're saying, but it's always sort of struck me that despite what Michelle Bachmann says, I think that evolution is probably the correct way that we came to be.
In other words, there was no central planning for the human body.
So that which...
Sort of flows out of the same mechanisms as that which developed our very brain and communication system itself would seem to be a good plan to go with, which is no plan at all, but allowing the spontaneous order and emergence of things.
I mean, that's why we're here.
So why would we want our economic activity to be some sort of opposite paradigm?
Yes, right. I just heard a lecture this morning actually by a fellow who's written a book in defense of the rat race.
Do you know what I mean by the word, the phrase rat race?
This idea that What I did before I became a podcaster is something like going to work, right?
And trying to get ahead and ambition and so on.
Constant change, constant learning going on and sort of never resting, always taking a risk in life and what you do and avoiding sort of retirement or cushy The welfare check or whatever kind of cushy life that you think you might want.
But he argued, I think very persuasively, that we're not structured that way, that our brains actually want change and we want new.
We want to know what's next and we want to always kind of constantly strive for things.
He didn't say this, but as I thought about it, the state It seems to be trying to make us more like itself, you know, kind of static and boring, just rule followers, bureaucrats like them.
I mean, you wonder, the state wants us to be all kind of like itself so that it can better control us.
And it goes crazy.
The state is troubled by the innovations and the constant creativity and the constant change of the world.
And they're always trying to slow it down.
And stop it to rob us of our, essentially rob us of our humanity, you know?
Well, I think that's true, but I think that the state reflects, I mean, there's this duality of human nature in that we want both risk and we want security.
And those are sort of poles that are in every human being to one degree or another.
And so if you think like the post office gets privatized tomorrow, hallelujah, the post office gets privatized tomorrow, you know, there's some percentage of the people who are like, ah, thank heavens, now all the idiots are going to get fired and I can actually do something to make this job better and more efficient.
But then all the idiots are like, oh no, I'm doomed.
I'm going to get fired and my job's going to be cut and I'm going to have to go out and compete.
And they're afraid of that kind of voluntarism because maybe they haven't improved their skills or their negotiation skills or their social skills or their human capital.
So there are these sort of two poles in society and those who want, in a sense, something for nothing, which, you know, it's kind of, I mean, the desire to have something for nothing to me is the root of both the Industrial Revolution and the state.
It's like the good and the evil side of wanting something for nothing.
Yeah. Because we all want cars with as little labor as possible, but those in the government want rewards without actually having to negotiate and earn them voluntarily.
And so I think these two poles, like people who want security and people who want risk, I think we have to sort of understand that there is no security in the long run except risk.
Because if you look at a risk-averse society like the Middle Ages, that to me was a real rat race, like a hamster wheel every day like the last.
No growth, no change. Right.
Yeah, and these societies die.
And they can't support their populations anymore.
And then what's the point? You know, I don't want to live in that kind of world.
You know, it's fascinating that you mentioned people being fired.
I've known lots of people who have been fired from a job.
Actually, I was fired from a job once when I was young.
I'd love to tell that story sometime.
But sometimes it turns out to be the best thing that can ever happen to you because it opens up kind of new opportunities and helps inspire creativity and helps you think about yourself and your world in a different way.
And the change that it inspires within us makes us better people.
We're more interested in ourselves, you know, if we can kind of rethink our lives from time to time.
So that change, sometimes we don't welcome it, but sometimes it's the best thing that could ever happen to us, I believe.
Well, I agree with that. I was just reading a book on parenting, and it talks about frustration.
My daughter's going through this frustration phase, like she wants to learn how to play ping pong, but she's Still kind of awkward with the paddle.
And the book was saying, well, you know, frustration is essential because it tells you to stop doing something and try another strategy.
And being fired, I'm trying to think if I've...
I think I've quit like eight minutes before I was fired at one or two jobs in my life.
And yeah, if you're never at risk in your career, it means you're just doing the same damn thing over and over.
Like if you're a waiter for 30 years, you're not going to get fired At 30 years in one day, it just means that you're trying new things and trying out new approaches.
I think that's really important.
I think it's okay to skate near the edge of the cliff sometimes, because as you say, when you fall, sometimes you fly.
You know, that's really true.
I was fired for...
I was working in a shop and I had promised out some alterations out too soon in exchange for the big sale, you know.
I wanted the big sale, so I made a promise that the tailors couldn't keep, you know.
The boss threw seven suits at me and said, who's going to alter these things?
And I said, well, I will.
And I stayed after and bent over the machines and I'll alter all the clothing myself.
And I came out and I thought he was going to say, well, that worked out well, didn't it?
No, he did not, because of the insubordination.
It offended him so greatly.
That he said, well, thanks for doing that, and I don't need you anymore.
And I was out the door. But it was the beginning of a wonderful thing.
I was glad it happened to me, because I did learn a little something about the problem of insubordination with no boss.
I really appreciate it. But I needed you to leave that place, and I needed to move on.
I've carried the lesson of that event with me throughout my whole life.
It's really regrettable the way the state has actually made it so difficult for us to change jobs.
This is one of the problems with freezing labor markets like this.
It prevents us from reinventing ourselves or changing ourselves or adapting, really.
And then when we miss enough of those turn-offs to adapt, we then become very scared of adapting.
You know, some 50-year-old postal worker who hasn't taken any significant training courses ever, when he thinks about vaulting into the free market without the support and protection of the state, it becomes because we've kind of pushed him off into an isolated end-of-the-road current where he can't sort of rejoin the mainstream very easily.
So it does become more of a self-fulfilling prophecy to protect people from change.
They then become more and more frightened of change.
And do you think that instills a kind of personality change in people also when they get in these kind of frozen jobs?
Like their social circle, they want to be around not entrepreneurs, not interesting people, not artists, but they want to be around other people who are just as bored of life as they are.
I think one's economic activity I mean, it's a shame in a sense to me that economics is considered to be dollars and goods by so many people.
To me, economics is life itself.
Everything we do is negotiation.
There's win-lose, there's hopefully win-win negotiation.
So I think that everything that happens in what's traditionally called our economic life has enormous formative effects upon our personality, our politics, our perspectives.
I mean, there's not...
A huge amount of likelihood that your average public sector worker is going to be a die-to-the-wool Ron Paul supporter.
So in a sense, what you choose as your occupation and the degree to which you're willing to take risks in your occupation changes your personality over the long run, and that's why I think it's so hard to change.
Yeah, I think it does. Yeah, I was once a good friend with one of the most creative people I ever knew.
He had a disease that was almost guaranteed he was going to die at the age of 35, actually.
I think these people with the same disease now live much longer, but back in those days, it was almost certain that he was going to die at 35, so he knew how long he was going to live.
And, well, he was just a wonderful person, a great writer, and a good friend, and charming and funny, and I just adored him.
Then he went to work for the Navy.
It wasn't like the Navy, like doing Navy things.
It was like a paper pusher, you know?
And I watched progressively as his personality just died.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
It's very dangerous. Yeah, it's very dangerous to get involved in those kinds of organizations because there's the temptation.
And then, of course, they have this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which is what the Wisconsin fight is to some degree around the public sector at the moment, that, you know, they feel like, well, I put up with crappy work conditions for 10 or 15 or 20 years.
I better get that pension.
And if that pension is threatened, then my whole life has been a mistake.
And then you get this sense of entitlement and rage that comes out of those kinds of people.
Yeah. Hey, and you know, there's another aspect to this, too, I was just thinking about.
What if we treat everybody in the first, say, 20 years of their lives as if there's no risk at all?
There's no room for creativity.
There's no entrepreneurship. Your job is essentially just to stand still, obey, and do what you're told.
Until you're 20 or 25.
I wonder what kind of people that would create.
I think all we have to do is look around and we can see.
Oh yeah, I mean, if you try, this is something I'm writing in a book at the moment, if you try to apply the standards we apply to children and teenagers to adults, there'd be a revolution in about eight minutes.
It's tragic, of course, that we expect people to participate in a quasi-free market democracy while subjecting them to essentially totalitarianism in the school system for the first decade or two of their life.
It's quite the contradiction that we've got communist schools and a quasi-capitalist free market that you're supposed to somehow adapt to afterwards.
One day the next.
One day you've got the cap and gown on, and then the next day you're expected to go out there and make it on your own and do wonderful things.
How's that going to work? People have to be socialized to live in a world of change.
And we do live in a world of change.
Maybe 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago, it wasn't.
You could kind of get one job and keep it the rest of your life.
You learn only up to a certain age, and then you stop learning, and then you just kind of do the same thing over and over again.
Maybe that's the way it was after the Second World War, up until 10 years ago.
But that world is just completely gone now.
We're learning things about the world that we didn't know.
For example, the Mises Academy, when we first opened up the doors, we expected most of the students to be college students, right?
Because that's the age in which people are officially supposed to learn.
Well, it turns out they're all ages and the demographics are really global.
And some of the people who are most hungry for learning new things are, for example, Americans who are working abroad in foreign We have to rethink our understanding of what it means to learn.
It really is a lifelong process.
I'm not sure that we always knew that, though.
Yeah, and I think that was because, as you say, we'd come out of school and we'd just do that thing of whatever it was doing.
With some variations, but it would be mostly the same.
But now, I mean, the statistics are something like you may have three to five, not just different jobs, but almost different occupations throughout the course of your life, and you may have dozens of jobs.
And so, yeah, you constantly need to be learning and growing.
I mean, obviously in the technology field, the medical field, and the legal field, and the accounting field, there's constantly new things.
But I think in just about everybody's life, if you look at it, there's just massive amounts of change as we're constantly trying to adapt to these two poles of increasing regulation and increasing freedom.
We talked about this before on the show and you have an example, of course, in the book.
You know, you needed something done at the Mises Academy website and, you know, bingo, bango, bongo, you get some guy in Africa to do it.
And so there's this incredible freedom to outsource, to work with people around the world.
And I don't think I've ever worked with anyone in my show that's in the same country.
I think it's always... Around the world.
And so there's that aspect. And at the same time, there are these incredibly extrapolating and mounting regulations.
And so veering between the scylla and charyptis of freedom and compulsion has caused us to adapt, I think, even more so than we would if we were just in a state of freedom.
Isn't it interesting that most of these regulations are applied on the national level?
And yet, more and more, all of us live in a kind of global sense.
I mean, in the whole world, we're citizens with people from all over the world.
And not just in a kind of an abstract way, but really.
I mean, we're all doing business now.
We're selling things and buying things from people.
As individuals from all over the world, so we have an identity now.
We have a consciousness of the oneness of humanity and the artificiality of the nation state.
And yet, the QE1, QE2, you know, all the central plans that are out of Washington, they apply only to this little artificial stupid thing we call the nation, this anachronism, really.
I wonder how long this can last, really.
I mean, a central planet isn't really viable on a global level.
Probably not. Let's hope not.
Yeah, I do see sort of this ancient anachronistic sandcastle of the state trying valiantly to shore itself up as the increasing waves of globalization crash against it and render it that much.
You know, in the moment that you were doing business with the fellow in Africa, you had far more in common with him than you did with anybody, say, on your street or certainly your politicians.
I mean, that's where your human connection and relationship was.
Yes, and so our consciousness is changing, really.
I mean, we used to have a consciousness of ourselves as Americans.
Less and less so.
And the more the global digital world, the more the digital economy expands, the more our sense of being Global citizens is going to grow, and the change of consciousness there is going to change everything about politics, because what we think in our head eventually becomes the reality that we experience.
So I wonder how much longer it can really last.
Let me ask you about something, Stephan.
I was going to try out tomorrow, I think, in my speech.
You know, more and more, the state has set itself against technology.
Trying to drive things back and back and back while we want to go forward and forward and forward, making things work less well when we want to make them work better.
And so we've got this clash at work.
And I began to think about the history of clashes over technology.
And guess who the losers are in every case, right?
It's those who resist the change.
They eventually get buried.
Well, we've got a kind of nation state now that's resisting change.
What do you think about that? When you say technology, you mean household appliances as well as obviously obvious computer technology and so on.
All kinds of technology, all forms of progress.
I look back at the sweep of history and again and again, We see those who resist change and resist improvements and resist new technologies are buried, essentially, by trends.
Now, the state used to be more or less in favor of progress, in favor of electrification a century ago and trying to push our material world further down the line.
They never actually accomplished it.
They did it in uneconomic ways, but that was the ethos of the state, say, 100 years ago.
Now we've got this kind of weird government that's just dedicated to lowering our standards of living all the time, and that seems to be what it's all about, and resisting the new thing and resenting the new thing and trying to stop progress all the time.
So it's put itself in a kind of a reactionary position, very much like those who resisted the printing press, you know.
Yeah, I think there's, I mean, one of the oldest mythologies of mankind is that you become enamored of some new and easier way of doing things, and that turns out disastrous, right?
So you want robots to clean your house, and they take over your life, and Mickey Mouse wants to use the sorcerer's wand to make the water carrying easier and he creates a huge mess.
Even the technology of Aeschylus flying too close to the sun with his wings, he falls and of course Ayn Rand talks about this quite a lot with Atlas and so on.
And I think there's something very true about that, not for the average citizen but for the state.
The state at the moment is completely addicted to technology.
You could not have The modern leviathan without computerization.
You couldn't have deductions at source.
You couldn't have the complexity of the tax rules.
You couldn't have all these controls.
You certainly couldn't have fiat currency in the way that it runs now without computerization.
So the state has become completely dependent upon electronics but it is those very same electronics that is building a web that is independent of and fundamentally opposed to through ignoring the state.
I mean you doing business as someone in Africa is not an act of revolution but it is an act of bypassing and that sort of agorist approach whether it's official or just unofficial is just a way of saying well this great technology exists and the state has taken it over both for military and taxation and control and regulation and all of this kind of stuff And at the same time, this technology is in a race against those who are using it to control us to flee that sense of control.
To me, there's absolutely no doubt that the fleeing the control is going to win in the long run.
I mean, we hope it's not too ugly a passage, but the state has grown so addicted to technology, but it is that same technology that is going to allow us to escape its grip in the long run.
So, about two days ago, I carried on a conversation with somebody on Facebook in Galician, which is a kind of Portuguese.
It's kind of like high Spanish.
Obviously, I know nothing about this language, right?
So I was able to use Google Translate to go back and forth to this person.
We had a charming little conversation.
I mean, to me, this was just amazing.
I mean, I can't...
If somebody told me five years ago, you're going to carry on a digital conversation with somebody in Galician, you know, I thought, phew, boy, I don't...
Is that something like Klingon?
Is that like a Star Trek language?
I don't even know what that is, right?
I would have dreaded all the classes I would have had to take to do it, but it's not necessary anymore.
So these are wonderful things and help...
Help unify and globalize the world of individuals instead of just nation states.
Yeah, so I think the technological argument is very strong.
We are being shaped.
You know, I used to sort of think we sort of come into the world as adults with our personality, and the personality is sort of like a battleship.
Maybe stormy seas, but the battleship doesn't change.
But as I've sort of noticed, particularly over the past few years since I've been working on Free Domain Radio full time, My brain, my approach, my habits, my way of thinking about the world has all changed.
And my daughter, I mean, who likes watching videos, she's currently into culverts for reasons that won't even bother to explain.
Culverts, you know, the little tubes that go under the road to transport the water.
She loves looking for them and all that.
And so she loves looking at culverts.
So we've been looking at culverts all over the world, and it struck me that she has now seen, through YouTube and movies, she's seen a wide variety of different countries But I've never taught her the word Canada yet or United States or any of those things.
So she knows the world as the world.
But she has no idea there is such a thing as countries yet.
She's interested in flags, but she doesn't know just, you know, pretty blankets in the sky.
She doesn't know what they are. And so her whole way of thinking about things is thinking about things as the world rather than as countries.
And that is kind of a result of technology.
You know, so much of what you do on Freedom Main Radio is...
Freedom Radio is what the old Marxists would describe as consciousness raising.
We could probably learn something from them.
You know, the old Marxists believed that the way to change the world was to raise the consciousness, you know, to enlighten people as to the plight, you know.
And then once the mind changes, then the world around you begins to look a completely different way.
Now, the flaw in the Marxist view of this was that they had a completely wrong model.
But we could probably adopt some of that dedication to consciousness raising ourselves, don't you think?
Oh, yeah, I just read something the other day that the United Nations has released a report that is finally admitting that it is free markets that is helping the world's poor, not foreign aid.
And this was, you know, you could see them almost pulling out their own molars with a kite string to come up with this.
And, you know, in a sense, all grudging admiration to them for following the data rather than the ideology.
But that to me is an amazing thing, that the global socialist monster is actually saying, well, free markets have done a lot more for the poor in India and China, just to name two, where 50,000 people a month are rising out of poverty, and that has nothing to do, in fact, it's quite in opposition to any kind of central planning or the redistribution of wealth.
Now, it's buried in the report, and you have to kind of look for it, but it really is fascinating that that is even...
Open to discussion and promulgation within the United Nations, which is the super anachronism of the overarching state.
And that, to me, is an amazing explosion of consciousness.
Right. And my friends in China and Taiwan tell me that Practically, nobody believes in the state at all, except for the state itself.
Everybody understands that freedom and entrepreneurship and trade and cooperation with their neighbors and with everybody around the world is going to be the thing that saves us.
That's the thing that permits us to create the closest thing we can have in this world to utopia.
And that the state is a drag on this And this whole system.
So we have, yeah, we have a kind of rising global consciousness.
And we think in the West that we're somehow the holders of the Enlightenment keys to small government, but I was talking to Doug Casey recently, who bases himself in Argentina, and he was saying, well, you know, I've lived in like dozens of countries, I like Argentina the most, because everyone in South America just realizes that the government is just a bunch of banditos that you have to pay off and bypass, and they're just a bunch of criminals, and it's viewed that way in China, at least when I was Able to get some pretty private conversations with people in China when I was there.
People in China are just like a bunch of criminals and you just have to pay them off and get your way.
The same thing is true in India.
I mean, the corruption is laughable.
And you look at any novels or books coming out of India, they always have some scene wherein there's just, you know, some scumbaggery of a local bureaucrat that you have to press with rupees to get anything done.
And so the skepticism about the state, which used to be the core of Western philosophy, and we'd look around the world and say, well, these people are so primitive, they're still addicted to the nation state.
I think that the true, in a sense, green shoots of freedom are coming out of countries that do not have the same ideological history as the West does, but have much more direct empirical evidence of the destruction of the state.
That's right. I think that you're onto something there.
I really believe this. I was just talking to some guys from Australia, and I don't know if you've noticed this, anytime you talk to somebody from some foreign country, they always come to you and say, well, our government is terrible.
You know, it's just filled with a bunch of idiots and they're doing stupid things.
I mean, believe me, it's way worse in my country than it is in your country.
And then you respond, well, actually, it's pretty rotten here, too.
You know, you have these kind of discussions with people.
People always figure their own government is worse than your government.
But these guys from Australia told me, he said, no, you've got some advantages here because you have this long history of of freedom.
And that's our roots, you know, this idea, you know, the whole founding myth, if you want to call that, or maybe it's reality.
I mean, there's an element certainly in American culture that celebrates freedom and everything.
But I don't really know if that's our saving grace.
I don't really know how much good that does to us if people don't really understand what it was all about and what it all means and what it applies.
I'm not sure that it really has any bearing And I think you're onto something.
People who have more immediately experienced, you know, the most extreme aspects of the state to see that the grip loosened and to see what happens to the society, see it flourishing.
It may be a more ripe venue for understanding of freedom than we have right here.
I was just at Newport looking at all the mansions that were built by the robber barons, you know?
And observing their lives.
Of course, I love all these guys.
I love the Gilded Age and what it all means.
I went to mansion after mansion.
Most of the tourists that were there were Asians, actually.
And they were taking a ton of pictures, and they were reading all about the lives of the Vanderbilts.
But there weren't too many Americans that were actually touring.
So at least from my experience, I thought, well, who are the people who are admiring this generation of great capitalist entrepreneurs?
They're not the Americans, they're the Asians.
Right, and I think one thing that's really happened to certainly European culture To a large degree British, and I would argue certainly American, is that a third of Americans get all or a significant portion of their income from the state.
And what I think people forget is they think, okay, so they think of it like it's, you know, those pie charts that are ubiquitous within PowerPoint where, you know, you get this one third.
And the one third is sort of cut off and separated like a piece of a pie that's taken out of the pie and put on a plate.
But that's not the way that society works.
Relationships are incredibly intertwined.
We are all like trees in a forest that grow together.
So those three, sort of one-third of Americans who get most or all of their income from the state, they're mixed in like water.
When you put food coloring into water, it all mixes in together.
You can't separate it anymore.
And that means in any family...
Where there's six people, two or more are getting most of their income from the state.
And so if there's some crazy libertarian or anarchist in that family around the dinner table, you're getting two people whose backs are immediately going to go up because you're threatening their income.
And unfortunately, because we don't work from first principles in the West anymore, ideology follows self-interest.
You have some self-interest, then you just make up some ideology to make that virtuous.
And so it's the dinner table conversations that, to me, are the main barrier of freedom.
Whereas in the In developing countries and in South America and so on, it's well known that if you're just some bureaucrat then you're on the take and people can joke about it and laugh about it and even criticize you for it and there's not that same level of tension.
Whereas if you go to an American Thanksgiving and some libertarians talking about privatizing and you've got two school teachers at the table who will liken their summers off, it gets really tense and personal very quick and that to me is the kill switch for progress in the West.
Yeah, that's a very interesting point, and it's true in every single family.
You know, Wendy McElroy had an article on Misesorg the other day making this very point and saying, trying to explain to those people who are living, you know, basically had dependence on the state that, look, it's not personal.
You know, it's not about you as an individual.
We want you to have rights just like we want to have rights.
It's an institutional problem.
It's not really a personal problem, but that's very difficult to get across to people, I think.
Yeah, I was just at a playground a while back and there were a bunch of women who were standing around and all of them were like, oh, thank God, it's Friday, we're done for the summer, we can relax, we can get away from these kids, we can kick back and all that.
And I don't know, I just generally think that people who educate children, it would be somewhat preferable if they liked the children.
You know, call me crazy, but I think that would be a plus.
And how are you going to go up to these people and say, look, studies show that year-round schooling is much better for the kids because you take some eight-year-old and give him two months off in the summer.
You might as well start from scratch next year.
And how are they going to give up their summers?
Well, you can do it.
I mean, people go to war.
People volunteer and sign up for war if they feel that the cause is good enough.
But I just don't think we've made the case at a moral enough and passionate enough level that we can get people to give up the sugar and frosting that they get.
And make sacrifices for the good of society.
We just haven't. Now, unfortunately, I think our political enemies are going to start making that case.
You start to hear these people talk about sacrifice because they know that the budget cuts are coming.
They know that the US debt is going to be downgraded.
They know that more of the money is going to have to be poured into servicing the debt and the interest because of the downgrade.
of US bonds and security.
So they know that they're gonna have to start making calls for sacrifice.
I don't think libertarians have made that case strongly enough that the people are gonna have to accept short-term sacrifices for the sake of a long-term good.
And we all do that. I mean, we floss, we diet, we eat Brussels sprouts when we'd rather have a butter tart.
So we can all do that at an individual level, but I just think that we haven't made the case.
We talk about the utopia over the hill.
We don't talk about the sweat of climbing it, I think.
Yeah, by the sacrifice you mean that people's benefits are going to be cut, the programs are not going to turn out to offer all the blessings that people had expected.
That's what you mean by the sacrifice, right?
Well, I mean, it's going to be pretty short and sharp and ugly, right?
I mean, because you can, I mean, they call this austerity.
That to me is quite astounding, the Greek austerity.
It's like, you're retiring at 50 and you're calling it austerity if it becomes 53.
I mean, that to me is like saying, well, you used to have 10,000 calories a day.
We're going to cut you down to 9,500 and we call that starvation rations.
I mean, that to me, austerity is just a crazy word.
Yeah. But yeah, I mean, people got $3 to $4 in services for every dollar they paid in taxes.
And the result, of course, has been the national debt.
And so not only are people going to have to accept one-to-one, but probably less than one-to-one in terms of services versus taxes.
Or the debt's going to have to be repudiated, in which case everybody's stock portfolio savings or real estate value get largely wiped out.
So there's going to have to be some...
Ugly, grisly passage of repudiation and selling off of government assets, I think, because I don't think there's going to be anything other than repudiation.
There's just no way the debt can mathematically be paid off when it's 70% of GDP. And so, look, it's going to be hard, but people accepted that during the Second World War, right?
And that was the last war that people were asked to accept sacrifice in that kind of way, where, you know, things were heavily restricted, standard of living dropped considerably, but because it was a fight against Disaster, evil, Nazism, fascism, and immorality, people were willing to shoulder up and take those burdens, but I don't think we've had somebody making the case that says, look, we're going to have to take this band-aid off, and it's going to feel like half your arm is coming with it, but it's absolutely necessary to do.
That is true. And the description of what comes afterwards has been completely absent from this debate.
You know, I mean, the fact is that if you're cutting government spending, you're in effect putting more resources back into the private sector.
And that leads to a greater growth and more investment.
Well, but sorry, Jeff, my argument would be, well, I mean, nobody addresses how you can cut.
I mean, let's say that you cut the military-industrial complex, as Ron Paul wants to do.
Well, so all these people come home.
You've still got pensions. You've got decommissioning costs, and you have, of course, if they can't find work, they just go on unemployment insurance, so it's not like you're saving a lot of money.
There is no particular way to cut government spending in the short run, because you fire government workers, they just go on unemployment insurance.
Have you really saved that much?
Plus, you have to pay them massive severances, which puts you even more in the hole.
The system has been set up so that there really is no way for a soft landing.
It's like aloft, aloft, aloft, plummet!
That seems to be how it's sort of been set up.
Yeah, well, I mean, I almost feel like your scenario there would be a wonderful thing.
I mean, I love this idea of repudiating the debt and falling apart of all these government systems, I think, would be the best thing that ever happened to us.
I mean, I would start to get optimistic about the near term if this were actually happening.
But I can't really believe it will happen.
Most of the people who talk about sacrifice Washington are essentially asking us to pay more in taxes, which is just preposterous.
That's a job killer and a business killer at a time when, you know, we've got at least 10% unemployment.
It's among some demographics as high as 50% unemployment.
And you're competing with...
Sorry, but you're competing with...
Russia and China and some of the Middle East countries and India, where there is effectively no income tax, there's very little sales tax, and there's much less, if not no, national debt.
And so this is something that, I mean, you're competing against economies that don't have these kinds of burdens.
And so it's the example that you gave in the book that you shackle the runners.
And it's like, yeah, okay, they can still complete the race, though it's pretty ugly and grisly, and they get shaved beyond all recognition.
But the reality is that there are some people who've got jetpacks and some people who've got shackles.
We, unfortunately, happen to be the culture with the shackles.
Putting more shackles on, even if it could help with our economy, it's not going to help in competing against economies that can, as soon as they develop a little bit more, not more than five or seven years, in my opinion, China and Russia and India, they can just bypass us and sell to each other because they'll be that advanced.
And the reason for this, I wonder if how much of this has to do with technology, because, you know, it took hundreds of years, well, really, essentially thousands of years for us to build our current standard of living.
But with technology now, people can get there much faster than they used to.
And so it's not going to be like China's going to need 200 years or something like that.
Yeah, it's like when you develop a drug, right?
The first pill costs you a billion dollars, the second pill costs you half a penny.
Well, we've already done the first pill for the world.
There's none of that reinvention that's necessary, so everybody can picketail off everything we've done and just completely rocket past us.
Yeah, no, that's right. With private cell phone networks, you know, at any country, you can immediately be as developed as anybody, you know, essentially.
If you've got the internet, you've got a computer, you've got a cell phone.
You're living pretty well, and you're able to bypass all the intervening stages.
So yeah, I think this is coming.
You're interesting, your estimate of five to seven years.
I've heard 15 and 20 before, but five to seven, that's very interesting.
Yeah, it could come to that, and it's a wonderful thing, and it'll be a humbling experience.
You know, particularly Americans are just obsessed with this idea of being number one.
I don't really know what that means, you know.
We're just going to have to get used to a different reality.
And the first one is that This ridiculous competition between nation states and who's going to be number one is the most destructive kind of theory you can ever have about the world.
It doesn't gain anybody.
It's preposterous. The other thing is the point we made earlier, that we have a greater stake in the prosperity of Thailand, Somalia, and Madagascar than we do in the well-being of Washington bureaucrats, frankly. Yeah, that's certainly very true.
I'm going on TV later today to talk about this.
This Bohemian Grove meeting has started out in California where sort of 2,400 of the world's most powerful men know women, apparently.
They sort of meet. And yeah, I mean, they meet and they have interests in common.
In the way that that we don't know that the interest in common that we have is vertical is horizontal rather it's economically horizontal It is not politically vertical the interests of Obama It's completely opposed to the interests of most Americans whereas Somebody who they can work with in in Africa or Malaysia their interests are in common and yeah, you're right the number one thing I mean The only thing that countries ever become number one in is stuff that's bad for the average citizen, right?
So it's like America's number one in two things, healthcare costs and arms sales and arms production.
And neither of those things are any good to the average person.
And in just about everything else, it's really ranked pretty low.
And so yeah, anytime you sort of say we want to be number one, I mean our government should be number one and that's directly against my self-interest.
So it is a way of voting yourself off the totem pole to a pretty big chasm below.
And you know, there's some people who claim that nationalism is somehow built into the human psyche that we all want to be part of a nation state.
I don't believe this at all.
I've read plenty of Of memoirs and stories and biographies of the age before the nation state, which you could say was invented, I don't know, it's an arbitrary number, but say it was invented in the 15th, 16th century, as we understand it now.
Before then, people would think of themselves as Europeans, you know, not so much Or Christians.
Or, of course, in the aristocracy, they would think of themselves as a particular family.
There was many, many layers of identity.
And, oh, you've triggered, I'm afraid, a rant tripwire on me, but I'll try and keep it brief because I get very, very annoyed, not that you're making it, but at the human nature argument.
To me, it is an ultimate cop-out because it's people just saying, well, your ideas frighten me.
I can't think of a way to disagree with them or to argue against them.
The evidence and reason is on your side, so I'm going to pull out this Wild card smokescreen called human nature and ascribe everything to that.
It's nonsense. People would say prior to the 18th or 19th century, well, it's human nature to own slaves.
It's human nature to have slaves.
It's human nature to subjugate your women and not give them any rights.
You can't show me a society where that hasn't occurred.
And it's like, oh man, the human nature argument is just, the human nature is adaptable.
Was it human nature to work with computers before 1960?
No, there was no such thing.
And now we can't, you know, they become intertwined with our lives in a very, to our DNA almost.
Was it human nature to believe that demons possessed epileptic victims?
Well, yeah, but saying it's human nature is nonsense.
The fundamental aspect of human nature is that it is incredibly adaptable to circumstances.
We are one of the only species who, through both memes and epigenetics, can actually adapt to our environment on the fly.
Human beings adapt to their environment before they're even born.
There are physiological changes in the fetus if the woman has too little nutrition.
It changes the way the body handles.
It's one of the reasons why people may end up getting overweight later in life is that their fundamental physiology changes even before they're born.
They're adapting to their local environment.
If the mother is under significant degrees of stress, then children are born more aggressive because their bodies say, oh, wow, if there's lots of stress, we must be in a win-lose, highly competitive, scarce resource environment, so let's be an asshole.
Because that's how we're going to get ahead.
Whereas if you have a peaceful, happy, sunlit pregnancy, you come out more willing to negotiate and less aggressive because that's the environment.
So there's no...
A human nature, to me, all we are is adaptable.
It's like saying that a water poured into a jug has jug-ness to it.
No, it's just whatever it happens to be poured into, that's the shape it takes.
And there's no such thing as human nature except adaptability.
Anyway, that's my... I think it's very interesting.
As you're talking, I'm thinking about...
One of my favorite subjects I love to read about are Renaissance composers.
Mostly 16th century guys who had a hard time getting a steady work.
One of the things they would do is just move around from place to place.
You know, composing for whomever would take their music and pay them to do it.
So some of these guys had, you know, five different names or even 10 names.
Or Orlando Delasso, I think he had like 15 different names, you know.
Every time he'd go to a different language group, he would change his name to adapt to that particular culture.
Well, he was an enormous success.
And he was a great success because he was able to adapt to his environment and recreate himself for commercial reasons, you know.
And we're going to have to develop those kind of skills, I think, in the future if we're going to live in a global society.
And it'll be easy and it'll be exciting.
It'll be fun. Change is fun, you know?
Yeah, and I think the adaptability of human nature is innate.
I mean, we adapt from not being able to walk to being able to walk when we're babies, from not being able to speak to being able to speak.
Adaptability has to be interfered with and ossified through hierarchical control, right?
It's like you put kids in those desks, you know, they sit there in these dusty classrooms while somebody drones and scratches on the chalkboard.
I mean, that puts rigidity and dullness into human nature, so to speak, because then you're adapting to a medieval situation of no change and no initiative and no Capacity to choose your own subjects.
So you really have to box the natural electric flightiness and adaptability of human nature.
You have to box it in and squish it and put it out, so to speak.
And that's what's so tragic about the way that the people come out of these public school systems no longer is easily able to adapt.
And of course, the entrepreneurial classes who've made it Who are rich and wealthy, they don't want a lot of poor kids with entrepreneurial skills because they'll underbid them because their costs are lower.
So I think it's a lot about keeping competition out of the sort of mercantilist class that drives the support.
You know, Bill Gates is going into education.
I mean, it's just gruesome to watch somebody who's quite a master of free market ideology and practice going into this educational system.
You can see the hair slowly getting plucked out from his head as he tries to deal with this.
And of course, he's not going to get anywhere because a system that's based on compulsion cannot be reformed to goodness.
And of course, he doesn't really understand that as yet.
And I know it sounds ridiculous for me in my little room to be lecturing Bill Gates.
But, you know, it's real.
Some of the great entrepreneurs don't really understand the system that gives rise to what they do.
I mean, this has always been true.
Looking back at the... The Gilded Age entrepreneurs, one of the ambitions that they all had was for their daughters to marry some defunct or soon-to-be defunct European aristocrat, you know, Lord so-and-so or the Duke of whatever, right? We have to be elevated from trade, or what is trade for?
I know. I mean, you talk about a class of people that are completely different from the American entrepreneurs, totally different.
I mean, why would they want to fob their daughters off on these guys?
I mean, it's just the weirdest thing.
There's some fear of social status or seeking validation by embracing, you know, dying monarchs or something.
It's all very bizarre.
And look at Mark Zuckerberg.
You made the point about Bill Gates.
Isn't Zuckerberg a big benefactor of public school systems?
I mean, isn't that one of the things he's done with his money?
Right, right. And that is a failure of imagination.
And, I mean, how could people, in a sense, understand universals without being trained?
I mean, it is really hard to say, well, the environments that allowed me to be successful should at least be explored in other areas.
We just have this dividing line in our brain.
It's like we have a whole separate personality for dealing with the state, where we just assume a completely different character and personality, where everything which we value in our personal lives, this is a point I make in the book Everyday Anarchy, You know, if you took away people's freedom of choice in who to marry or what to do for their career or where to get educated in college and so on, you'd get this incredible revolution.
We love having no central control as adults, but you try extending that to children and suddenly we flip over to like medieval brain where that would be a catastrophe.
So it's a catastrophe for us not to have anarchy in vast areas of our lives, but then it's a complete catastrophe to have anarchy in other areas of our lives.
Not even just to do with children, but like Charity or helping the poor or helping the sick or the old or whoever.
That needs all compulsion but you apply those same rules of compulsion to the marriage market or the career market and suddenly it's an intolerable intrusion into freedom.
It's bizarre how many personalities we have to adapt to or create in a sense to survive in these various environments we have to swim through.
I think that's an excellent point.
I was thinking about this being here at Freedom Fest.
There's about 2,500 people here.
I would say that the anarchists are the minority here, but the subject that everybody's addressing is the subject of freedom, right?
So every talk is about freedom, and as I was listening to this lecture earlier today, I'm quite certain that this guy is not anarchist.
I mean, I would say very few of the people here are thorough, although there's more anarchists here than there would have been, say, 10 years ago.
But nonetheless, Anytime you talk about freedom, you're essentially talking about anarchy.
You're talking about the exercise of human volition and a world created by human hands.
And that is a world of anarchy.
And the state contributes nothing to the well-being of freedom, nothing to making our lives better.
It's our choices that make our lives better off.
So there's a way in which everybody who's attending Freedom Fest is an implicit anarchist.
They just need to be They need to be taught to be consistent in their outlook.
Yeah, I mean, an anarchist is just a libertarian who's thought things through to their logical conclusions.
I don't think that's right. You can't say, well, it's a universal principle except for here, here, here, and here, you know, except for police and military and law courts, you know, that sort of Randian approach.
And I mean, I was that way for many years and tried to square the circle of having a state without compulsion, which is like, you know, trying to have a circle that is a square at the same time.
And you just have to let that go and say, look, it's not my preferences, it's not my habits, it is reason alone that is going to inform my perspective.
And unfortunately, if the non-aggression principle is valid, then it stretches horizontally across all sectors of society.
It stretches, and this is a challenge for people too, which I argue a lot in my shows, it stretches vertically from newborns, or even before they're born, All the way through to the elderly.
That the non-aggression principle applies to children, first and foremost.
And if it doesn't apply to children, it's never going to apply anywhere else because people will just be traumatized from being hit or excluded or whatever.
And so, yeah, you have to extend it.
You know, scientists don't get the option to say, the theory of relativity applies everywhere except in my backyard.
I mean, if you say that, you're not a scientist.
You're just a crank, right?
The scientific principle is, well, yeah, 2 plus 2 is 4 over here and over here and up this mountain and down this valley and on this airplane.
It just is all over.
And the non-aggression principle, since it is our North Star, it has to be valid everywhere.
And, you know, to try and create exceptions is simply to abandon the principle and then what's the point of starting?
That's right. And it's not as if once you embrace the principle, you're done.
I mean, I'm constantly learning new applications of the idea of human liberty.
It never stops. The other day I read for the first time, I'm embarrassed to say it was for the first time, a book by Clarence Darrow called Resist Not Evil.
And it's an application of the ideas that you're referring to to the criminal justice system.
And what he explains is that the flaws that appear in the criminal justice system, the injustice of the jails and the beatings by the police or the stupid decision by the judge or the absurdity of the jury or whatever kind of problem you want to draw your attention the injustice of the jails and the beatings by the police or the stupid decision by the judge or the absurdity of the jury or whatever kind of problem you want to draw your attention to, that these are not, or the tendency of the state to sort of
It's embedded in the structure of this very notion that the state can give us justice.
So Clarence Darrow, this great criminal defense attorney, says that in the same way that the state cannot really create a socialist utopia, it cannot really give us justice.
It has no means to do so.
As a matter of fact, it has every incentive to create more criminals, to feed the system and make the system grow at our expense.
So he makes this argument in a very passionate way.
In a way that I felt after reading it, I felt kind of like physically different.
I mean, it was that powerful a book because I'm not sure that I had entirely understood the points he was making here.
And really, it's just an application of non-aggression principle to this idea of justice.
So, in other words, the reason I tell that story is to say that, you know, we never stop applying this principle.
We never stop learning.
There are always new things to discover about human liberty.
Yeah, to me the non-aggression principle is like mathematics.
You're never done with mathematics.
Right. You know, it's not, because it is an equation, not a conclusion.
Or it is a system of consistency in human relationships.
So, to me it's like, well, are you ever done with science?
No, you're never done with science. There's always something new and something.
Are you ever done with medicine? No, no, of course not.
And you're never done with the non-aggression principle because...
Finding ways in which it can be applied even to existing systems is fantastically involved.
You spend your whole life doing it and only scratch the surface.
And yet thinking about ways in which it can be applied to future situations and systems as well is also something that you can really get absorbed in.
And it doesn't end. That's what I love about it so much.
It's true of philosophy as a whole and economics.
And this book by Clarence Terrell was written in 1902.
And he's describing the outrageous investices of our courts, our prisons, and the police.
1902? I mean, my vision of 1902 is practically, you know, virtually no government at all.
Yeah, you've got no income tax.
You've got no national debt.
You've got no passports.
You have almost no restrictions to trade.
There's no environmental regulations, no health and safety regulations.
Of course, people hearing this say, okay, so basically they were feeding workers into blenders.
And of course, it had nothing to do with the truth.
Yeah, I mean, the size of the government, I would imagine, would be probably 1 20th what it is today, not even counting the national debt.
And of course, he's talking about, look at these injustices.
Oh, it's a good thing he couldn't see forward in time.
I mean, he believed it was a kind of a police state, and he describes in great detail why it's impossible for this police state to work.
You know what was great about this book?
Help me understand something I don't think I've really figured out before.
There are these minarchists who think that we should just get rid of the welfare state, maybe the welfare state, all these government regulations, reduce taxes, whatever, maybe eliminate taxes, except for our semi-excise tax.
But we have to retain this small layer of coercion.
And we can call it the Night Watchman.
We'll put the Night Watchman up on the thing, you know, with a gun, just to make sure that nothing goes wrong.
So the Darrow book points out that the problem is the Night Watchman.
And if you're going to eliminate everything but the Night Watchman, you've really done essentially nothing.
It'll always grow. And he says that the most important thing to eliminate in the state is the presumption that it can give us justice.
We have to get rid of this apparatus, and that is a priority.
So it kind of turns everything upside down.
Do you see what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I was a sort of Randian minarchist.
I sort of was into voluntary taxation because I really like oxymorons.
So the answer to me is that Everybody accepts that there should be the government running police, law courts, maybe prisons, and some basic national defense.
That's sort of the starting point of Western political thought.
And then people say, well, how far should it be extended, and so on.
You jump out of the entire Western tradition when you talk about no state.
Because if you say, I mean if you said in the 16th or 17th century, slaves should not be beaten.
Well, I think most people would say, well, yeah, slaves should not be beaten.
That would be ideal. Unless, you know, they really are bad.
But yeah, in general, we'd prefer to have slavery where slaves were not beaten.
And so you weren't outside the discourse of people's general presumptions, or you could say prejudices.
But if you start talking about the non-aggression principle, then what you're doing, it's sort of like being a physicist.
Because, like being a physicist in the late Middle Ages, or a physicist in the late Middle Ages could say, yes, we have a heliocentric model of the solar system, but God still set it in motion, and God still created it, and God still guides the planets through the heavens, and so on.
But then there's a point at which physics departs from religion and you know in that famous statement I can't remember which astronomer where the Pope he was showing a model of the solar system And he said well where is God and he said well God is actually not necessary to the mathematics of the system It runs on its own.
It's not not required and there is a point of departure From an existing belief system that is really uncomfortable for people.
Yeah You know, which is where you get the, well, how would roads be built and who would do the national defense and all that.
As if these questions even require answering.
I mean, it's like saying if you want to get rid of slavery, well, who's going to hire all the grandchildren of the slaves?
It's like, well, I don't have those names because that's not the point.
The point isn't who will hire them.
The point is, is it morally right to own human beings?
It doesn't matter what happens afterwards.
You do right, though, the sky falls.
And so there is this...
Fear that people have of departing the main narrative.
You can tweak it. But if you step off that, people feel there's an opposing oncoming train that's just going to wipe you out.
Or you see that big round O in people's faces.
Like, what? What?
What? No, no, no, no, no.
We can slow this train down.
We can speed it up.
We can slow it down. But we simply cannot get off the train.
And the train is, what size should the state be?
The question of whether there should be a state or not is largely incomprehensible to people in a very alarming way.
So people just... Yeah, I think that's probably right.
And I'm very interested to see where all this stuff takes us in terms of the application of...
Morality and economic theory to this idea of the small state or menarche.
I really agree that it's a completely unviable concept.
I'm more convinced of that than ever.
I was talking to Sheldon Richman, who's the editor of The Freeman, about this.
He said, well, I think that's a very interesting point.
He said, maybe we should be more tolerant of menarchists who, for example, want to preserve The socialists, but we should demand of them, if you're going to preserve one thing, make sure it's not the system of justice, because that's the worst aspect of the state.
Very interesting. Yeah, I'm of the conclusion, Jeff, that there is no strategy in morality.
Morality is...
Just the right and wrongness of things.
And there's no strategy in morality.
If you want to end slavery, there's no strategy in ending slavery other than the continuous thundering or whispering or skywriting or tattooing or however you can communicate it in a way that sinks into people's head.
Slavery is immoral. Initiation of force is immoral.
Violence is immoral. And there is no strategy behind that other than a grim grit-your-teeth repetition until it sinks into people's heads.
Once it does, then the system will be solved and dismantled and will end of its own accord.
But there's no strategy ahead of time other than Pounding the table and screaming or whispering that violence is immoral and will always produce escalating disasters.
But I don't like the idea of let's figure out how we can temper the message as part of a strategy of freeing the world.
Because morality is not strategic.
Morality is axiomatic and fundamental.
And people are either going to get it or they're not.
But they're not going to get it in gradations.
Yeah, that was certainly Murray Rothbard's position.
You sounded exactly like that passage that he wrote in For New Liberty about the elimination of slavery, about the importance of making the fundamental points again and again and again, until it becomes very obvious to people that they were living in a deeply immoral system.
And that's got to be stopped.
It's got to be ended. Yeah, and then it ends with a bang and a whimper and a sort of snuffing out.
But yeah, and that's why people say, well, violence.
No, violence isn't going to work. Violence is the tool of the immoral.
You can't impose violence with violence, except in an extremity of self-defense that none of us are ever going to have to deal with in our lives.
It's a completely theoretical thing.
I mean, somebody wants my watch in a dark alley.
It's like, here, you can have my underpants, too.
If you want them, just let me go with my kidneys.
So, yeah, I think the idea of how should we strategize to be is just not important.
You've just got to keep making the moral case.
And if you can't make it to the old, make it to the young.
If you can't make it to the young, make it to the middle-aged.
You just keep going. And that's, to me, the only way that it's going to work.
And if we can also understand the kind of beauty that emerges from a free society, a setting of freedom, and appreciate it both morally and aesthetically, I think that will help us as well.
And I'm not entirely convinced that the advocates of capitalism, the advocates of human liberty, have been so good about describing the beautiful world that emerges in a state of human liberty.
That's part of what I hope to do a little bit in some of my writings.
This is why I write About the warehouse as if it's a prayerful environment.
I make these religious style metaphors.
I don't shy away from that kind of stuff.
No, all freedom is a cathedral.
It doesn't matter what form it takes.
All freedom is a thing of beauty.
It doesn't matter whether it's a smokestack or a painting.
It is all a thing of beauty.
A smokestack is simply evidence that something is being converted to something that is beautiful to someone or necessary to someone.
And it is all beautiful.
I actually just did a complete come to Jesus, raise the rafters, ramble-rousing speech at the Porcupine Freedom Festival called We Are Still Here, which is an attempt to help people to understand how much thanks will flow down through the stairs of time to us from the future that we're building.
In the same way that you and I are grateful for all the pioneers who pushed forward science and economics and human liberty.
We are incredibly grateful for the trials they went through.
People in the future will be equally, if not more, grateful for us for the principles we're sticking to and the work that we're doing.
And I think it's easy to forget that.
Just what a beautiful world that brick by brick we're attempting to build.
Is that speech on YouTube?
Is it available? No, it's not yet.
I'm still waiting for the video, but I'll send you the audio link.
I wanted to do a barn burner of speech for a while, and that certainly was the right environment, so I'll send it to you.
Did you have fun at that event?
Oh, I loved it.
It was just a blast.
I actually got roasted for about two and a half hours with everybody making every joke at my expense, you could imagine, which was just hilarious and a great deal of fun.
It's really great. It's a highly recommended event.
Porkfest is fun. I'll be in New York on September the 10th as well at Liberty Fest 2 and at Libertopia in San Diego October 23rd, I think.
I actually am emceeing Libertopia this year, which should be a lot of fun, so...
So yeah, that's sort of where I'm coming up for speaking.
These gatherings are just fantastic, aren't they?
Give a chance to socialize, get to know people, be inspired by other people's enthusiasm, learn from others.
Yeah, I can't recommend the conferences enough.
I mean, if you have to hitchhike and eat your own toenails to get there, I would strongly recommend that people get to any Liberty conferences you can.
It is such a re-energizing thing to do.
Next week we have at the Mises Institute, the Mises University, so 250 kids coming from all around the world.
I'm really looking forward to that one as well.
Fantastic. Well, listen, I should probably let you get back to Vegas because you appear to have sobered up at least somewhat.
Your bow tie has stopped spinning and I haven't seen the shadow of a lady's leg cross your forehead in at least 20 minutes.
So, listen, thanks.
It was a great chat. And I will post a link to your book on the video and in the notes for the podcast because I highly recommend it.
If you want to wait for my reading, I'm currently reading it and trying on a wide variety of idiotic voices.
I think it's a really enjoyable read.
And I think it's going to be an enjoyable consumption in audiobook form, though, if you want the prose in the dry, normal way.
I guess you could do it that way, too.
But I really recommend it.
It's a great book called It's a Jetson's World by Jeffrey Tucker.
Thank you so much, Stefan, for having me today and for all that you do.
▲
Export Selection